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Summary ✩ Little things you do that drive your man absolutely wild
Warnings ✩ Smut, oral sex, kind of blasphemy if you squint, this is filthy and I really enjoyed writing it. Happy (late) Valentine’s Day!
──── ✧*･ﾟ*✭˚･ﾟ✧ ────
Valarr Targaryen
You didn’t even notice. Didn’t even think twice about what you did, really, when you reached out to wipe away some crumbs from his mouth like the good wife you were
You had only been trying to help clean him up, giggling that he couldn’t go to training with his face covered in icing. Valarr had been indulging in lemon cakes all morning even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to, and since your husband was quite the messy eater, he had gotten it all over his face
You didn’t think twice to use your fingers to wipe it away and considered it a sweet, innocent gesture. But something in Valarr’s eyes darkened as he watched you bring your fingers to your mouth, sucking them clean before removing them with a pop!
He stared at your glistening digits and his cock immediately began to stir in his breeches. In an instant, Valarr found himself unbelievably hard at the sight, his training forgotten as he pulled you into his arms
Sweet lips met yours, tasting of lemons and sugar and a dark desire to consume you. Valarr kissed you with a passion you had not tasted yet, a bruising thing that you eagerly accepted. You had no idea what brought this upon your husband or why but you liked it, kissing him back with equal desperation
In no time, you found yourself naked, moaning as Valarr slid into you with one stroke. His thick cock stretched you out deliciously, and you wrapped your legs around his back to encourage him to move inside of you
As he did, rocking into you at a steady pace, you moaned and suddenly found his fingers in your mouth
“Suck them,” your husband commanded, pupils blown as he stared down at you. It seemed that you had finally found the reason for his sudden desire and your eyes widened but you were quick to obey
You wrapped your lips around his digits and sucked, enjoying the filthy moan that left him as you did so. The sight of you, innocently sucking his fingers while taking his cock did unexplainable things to him. Valarr felt himself nearly black out with pleasure as he moved faster, angling his hips to pound deeper inside of you
He whimpered and groaned as you clenched around him, coming around his cock with a force that had your back arching off of the bed. You squeezed him so goddamn tight that no sooner did that happen did his own peak come, nearly blinding Valarr with the pleasure it brung
Afterwards, when Valarr had cleaned you up and blushed at how unruly he had become, you thought about how something so…small had completely unmade your husband. A small smile crossed your face as you thought about it, and you made note that if he ever needing cleaning again, you’d be sure to use your fingers to do it
Maekar Targaryen
Marrying an older man was quite often the fear of many ladies in the realm. Growing up, it had always been your friends and even your fear in your youth to be forced off to an old, balding drunk that smelled like sweat and cheese. But when you married Maekar Targaryen and became his second wife, you began to see that being married to an older man wasn’t so bad after all
The ultimate perk was being with a man that knew exactly what he was he was doing. Knowing exactly how to please you in ways only a man of his age and experience would
Maekar knew the right spots to lick, to suck, and to pleasure your body to bring you to your peak. You never knew such a greatness even existed until you married Maekar, and despite what people thought of him, your husband was extremely generous
You whined as he situated himself in between your legs, his skilled tongue and fingers making good use of his experience. You had already come—twice now—but it seemed that wasn’t enough for your husband. He wanted more, demanded more despite your cries and pleas of being overstimulated
“Quiet woman. I’ll have none of that,” he waved you off, and the sensation of his pleasure was so strong that you couldn’t help yourself
You reached down and in a desperate attempt to ground yourself, you accidentally grabbed Maekar’s hair and pulled—hard
The silver strands were firmly in your grasp, your fingers curled in them as it was the only thing that you could do to anchor yourself through another orgasm
Honestly, you didn’t even notice that you were tugging on them until Maekar suddenly growled, his movements stopping as he propped himself up
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He panted, breathless as his violet eyes grew dark. He looked like a true dragon above you. Full of fire and ready to devour you
“I…” you swallowed thickly, your throat suddenly dry. You didn’t know what to say to your husband about your impulsive actions, and you didn’t mean to upset him. “I-I’m sorry, my prince. I did not mean to. I merely got carried away.”
Your breath hitched, sure that that he’d be mad and curse you for doing such a thing. Your fingers pulled back, ready to grip the sheets if need be but Maekar caught your hands and stopped you in an instant
“Nonsense. Do that again,” he demanded, his voice full of lust
You were shocked and rightfully taken off guard by his request. You never thought that Maekar of all people would like his hair to be pulled but the way he growled again as you complied with his wishes told you that he more than liked it. He loved it
“Gods woman. You’ll be the death of me one day,” Maeker groaned, and that’s how you learned that the feeling of your fingers tugging on his silver hair spurred him on like no other
Aerion Targaryen
You discovered your husband’s weakness for being worshiped at quite literally at the worst possible time
It was in the sept, while you were praying during mass and asking the gods for good fortune, a healthy baby, and a long life
Aerion had never been keen for such a thing, nor he did actually believe in the Andal gods but he entertained it for the sake of appearance and let you be, if that’s what you wished
He had never given the sept or you much attention while you were doing your prayers, preferring to sit in the corner and brood but one day you kneeled in front of him and he was gone
He watched, half shocked and half aroused as you bent over to his feet, repeating:
“And may the father protect my husband, may the warrior make him strong, and may the mother guide his soul as she does with all her children.”
He had been caught so off guard that he could barely speak, and when you rose to your feet and looked at him he was harder than he’d ever been before
“Are you ready to leave now, my prince?” You had asked innocently, but little did you know that the thoughts running through your husbands mind were anything but
Aerion couldn’t get that image of you out of his head. Of you kneeling before him, submitting to him like you were worshiping him. Praying to him like he was your god and—fuck. He needed to see that again, now
You’d scarcely made it back to your chnambers before Aerion descended upon you, kissing you with a wild glint in his eyes and pushing you on the bed
His hands were frantic as he tried to strip you of all the clothing you had on, cursing your bloody maids for making everything so tight. It took him longer than he wanted to get you naked, to get you bare and spread out for him
He marveled in the sight, like he always did, but when you tried to lay back and open yourself for him, he did something unusual
“Kneel,” he said, no, demanded as he looked at you with glazed over violet eyes. They were so dark that they almost looked black. Wild and crazed at the idea of watching his thoughts come to life. Of watching his sweet pretty wife show him her devotion. “Make me your god,” he continued, “kneel before me and worship me as a dragon should be.”
He was in utter delight as he watched your body obey; confused, but obedient nevertheless. You got off the bed and did as your husband said, sinking to your knees and blinking up as he stood above you
Already, Aerion had freed himself from his breeches, his cock springing out to brush against your lips. When you reached out and darted your tongue across the tip he moaned, gripping the back of your head and pulling you closer
“Well, go on then. Worship my cock like you do your gods and we’ll see which one shows you the heavens first.”
Spoiler alert: it was him. After you finished praising him and milking him with your mouth, Aerion placed you on the bed face down and brought you to your pleasure
He took you from behind and fucked you like you deserved, making you see stars as he pounded into you
He was consuming you, chest pressed firmly against your back and whispering in your ear. He spoke softly, encouraging you to say a prayer for your release and you did
You screamed his name, chanting it over and over again until it was the only the word you had left. You babbled and mumbled as your husband’s cock took your higher than the heavens, and afterwards you took his seed as a reward for your devotion
Aerion knew, no, he swore that by the time he was done with you, you would have no need for gods
After all, everyone knew that Targaryens were the closest thing among men. And luckily for you, you were married one—a dragon coated in flesh
Baelor Targaryen
You’re not sure when the habit started really
Mayhaps in some meeting or another, one that your duty required you to attend but didn’t permit you to enjoy. You’d probably sat beside Baelor as he endured the same torture with you, hiding behind polite smiles and chivalrous words while on the inside you were nearly bored to tears
There wasn’t much entertainment while you were listening to complaints and grievances from various different Lords, so you supposed picking up on the habit of holding Baelor’s hand and fiddling with the rings on the them was natural
It gave you something to do to occupy your mind while you sat and listened to men whine like women. A small thing that you could enjoy, and you were sure that Baelor didn’t mind either because he never complained. In fact, he often encouraged you, slipping his hand under the table for you to grab and sometimes giving you a light squeeze
It was such a small thing that you did, really, that no one could blame you for missing how it drove your husband absolutely insane
Baelor had always been good at keeping his composure; after all, it had been expected of him since he was a child. He didn’t break easily or falter when something got to him, but it seemed that one day something about you finally caused him to break
Alas, it was after one of your meetings that Baelor finally grabbed you with a sudden urgency
You had been in the middle of complaining about something, slumped in your chair and completely unaware of the hunger on his face, when all of a sudden your husband pulled you to his chest and kissed you
Your complaints were silenced at once, your jaw going slack at Baelor’s sudden advances
Now, your husband wasn’t exactly a square when it came to your marriage activities, but he was mindful and normally only took you in the confinement of your chambers. Never before had he been so open, so eager to devour you in public and it took you for a shock almost as much as it excited you
Quickly, you returned his affections and moaned as his tongue slipped into your mouth, your back hitting the stone that his desk was carved out of
One hand came to slip underneath your dress, hitching your leg up, and you moaned as Baelor’s fingers brushed against your sex
“Here?” You asked breathlessly, pulling away to look at him with wide eyes
Baelor nodded, “Here,” he said, and you gasped as his fingers slipped into your small clothes. Your core was already aching and slick with arousal. You took your husband’s fingers well, clenching around them as pleasure traveled through your lower half
This new side of him was absolutely maddening. Baelor had never been this desperate before, this willing to be risky and it drove you wild
Anyone could have walked through the doors of his solar and saw him pleasuring you. Saw their prince, their future king with his fingers stuffed in his wife’s cunt. The risk made it all the more exciting, and it had your heart pounding with anticipation
You could feel your peak rising as Baelor’s skilled fingers worked their magic, but you didn’t get there. Instead you whined as Baelor pulled them out, scrunching your face up in disappointment
“Keep going, I was almost there,” you begged him, but Baelor shook his head
“Not yet,” your husband panted, and in the next moment he loosened his breeches and turned you away from him. You took this to mean that he would take you from behind, right up against his desk. Your mouth drooled as his cock dragged along your slick folds, mouth falling open as he pushed inside of you
“Fuck,” the vulgar curses that fell from his lips made you even wetter, your cunt easily spreading apart for his cock
From behind you, Baelor set out at a steady rhythm, fucking into you while your chest hugged the stone. The sound of wet skin slapping filled the room, along with curses that would have made a Septon blush
This new position proved to be overwhelming for the both of you and you could tell that neither of you would last long. Your core clenched with every drag of his cock, your peak threatening to rise again
“My love,” you gasped out, fingers clawing at stone, trying to find something to ground you as that familiar wave of pleasure hit. “I’m…I’m going to…”
You never even got the words out. Instead they were replaced by a loud whine, your mouth dropping open and your rolling back
You came shamelessly around your husband’s back and he followed suit, cursing and groaning as he did. He held onto your hips to steady himself and that’s when you felt it—the cool metal of his rings pressing against your hot skin
When the two of you had settled down, cleaning yourselves up and rearranging your husband’s desk to make it look like you hadn’t just been fucked there, you asked him about it with a shy grin on your face
“Is this what has spurred you on, husband? All this time—playing with your rings has riled you up? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Baelor, with a grin on a face and a twinkle in his eye, only chuckled. “I feared you’d stop, wife, if you knew the terrible effect it had on me. I didn’t want that. After all, I had to have something to get me through such dreary meetings.”
Ser Duncan the Tall
Traveling together on the open road meant that you and Dunk spent a lot of time together, and in that time you had each picked up on the mannerisms and habits of the other
You knew Dunk practically like the back of your hand, and there wasn’t much that he could do or hide from you, which was why you started to notice immediately his lingering stare whenever you braided your hair
Weaving the threads together had become second nature while you were on the road, as it was way to keep your hair from getting filthy and out of your face. Nothing special about recreating a hairstyle you had been doing since your youth but Dunk, for some reason, loved it
He loved sitting beside you as you worked, tattling off about something or the other. You suspected that he didn’t actually pay attention, too focused on your hair and the way that your fingers moved to digest your stories
At first, you simply thought that it was just fascination, with Dunk being curious about the ways of a woman
It seemed innocent enough, but slowly you began to notice the way he changed
Once he was able to sit beside you while you twisted your hair, watching intently but never bothered. Now though, Dunk seemed visibly uncomfortable by something every time you touched your hair around him and you couldn’t quite figure out why
It made no sense why he seemed unable to focus, always shifting beside you like a jitterbug. More often that not, he would excuse himself afterwards and then come back a few minutes later, looking more relieved than before he’d left
He never explained or said why, and he always seemed to stutter out some half excuse that you didn’t believe. As you said, you knew Dunk which was why you knew that he was hiding something
You didn’t figure out what until one day you decided to spy on him
It had been a spur of the moment decision, deciding to pause your braiding to sneak away after him and see what his problem was. You were merely curious, that’s all, so imagine your shock when you stumbled upon Dunk, cock in hand and moaning as he pleasured himself
He had his eyes closed, so he didn’t see you as watched flabbergasted. Never in a million years did you guess that this was what he was up to, but you weren’t entirely upset about it
In fact, you felt something stirring inside of your core as you heard him calling out your name, shamelessly pleasing himself to the sound of it
It was obvious that he was thinking about you, but why? What had brought this on, you wondered?
If Dunk was as thick as a castle wall then your head was as hollow as the moat surrounding it. Filled with water instead of sense, your Nan used to say, as when you stepped forward, your curiosity and desire compelling you to do so, you still did not realize that it had been your hair that spurred him on
Instead you called out his name, “Dunk?” With a shy smile, hoping that you could get to the bottom of this and possibly help him
Dunk’s eyes flew open and the look on his face looked like a rabbit that had been caught in a snare. He instantly panicked, stammering and sputtering out. You thought that he might have been trying to say words but they failed him, and now he was as red as a tomato as you sauntered towards him
“What are you doing?” You asked him, though your head wasn’t that hollow. You knew the answer but rather you were asking why? You weren’t angry. That was apparent by the smirk adorning your face, but it was an embarrassment to Dunk all the same
He tried unsuccessfully to pull his pants up, but his hands were shaking too much and he ended up not being able to get them past his ankles. In a desperate attempt to conceal himself and save his honor, he tried to force them but the act left him unbalanced and he stumbled
Had you not steadied him, your body pressed firmly against his, he might have fallen and broken something
“M-M’Lady, I was just…I was not,” ever the chilverous knight, you both knew that you were no lady but he still referred to you as such. He was trembling underneath your touch, his eyes closed and his head shaking as if he was disappointed in himself. “I-I didn’t…I didn’t mean…”
He was cut off by the touch of your hand as you softly cupped his cock, the action causing a sharp gasp to leave his lips. His eyes flew open and his lips formed an ‘O’ shape, in disbelief that you were stroking him
“Y-Y/N, what…?”
“Shh,” you grinned deviously as you sank to your knees, an idea forming in your head that could not be resisted. You meant to help your traveling companion with his problem, excited by the idea of him being hard for you
Dunk was sure that you were trying to kill him when your tongue darted out to taste his cock. He closed his eyes and let out a moan, not knowing what he had done for the gods to allow this but thanking them anyways
Your hot mouth felt like heaven wrapped around him, so tight and wet and warm. Your head bobbed and you looked up at him with such innocent eyes that he almost collapsed
Quickly, the pleasure threatened to consume him. Dunk had only ever used his hand before and this new sensation was driving him insane. He was seeing stars already, his release fast approaching
From below him, you felt the way he shook and decided to tease him, swirling your tongue around his slit before taking him deep again, hollowing your cheeks while you sucked. You took his balls into your hands and gently massaged them, feeling satisfied when Dunk lost it
He let out a groan that he was sure all of the Seven Kingdoms would be able to hear, and without thinking he reached down and tangled his fingers in your braid to steady himself. His grip was tight, a little confusing to you until it clicked and suddenly you realized what had spurred this all on
Dunk had always seemed to disappear after you’d finished braiding. Oh gods, you hadn’t noticed before, but it was your hair! Playing with your hair had been what riled him up
You reckoned that all those times he’d been watching, eyes dark and unable to focus, what he really was thinking about was this moment. Gripping your hair whilst you sucked him off and you felt ashamed of yourself that you hadn’t realized sooner
“Head as hollow as a moat. Filled with more water than sense,” your Nan’s voice rang
Well, at least Dunk didn’t seem to mind, you thought. And a hollow head makes for a better grip, you supposed
I was wondering if you maybe could write something about the targ men eloping with targaryen!reader in a traditional Valyrian wedding because she's supposed to marry another but they love each other? Thank you! 🙏♥️
warnings — blood, targaryen! reader, tenses are a mess (not proofread)
baelor breakspear
— baelor always prided himself on being the dutiful son, the perfect heir who never put his own desires above the realm.
— he never expected to be the type of man to steal away a bride, but seeing you dressed for a match meant to secure a political alliance he engineered himself broke something inside him. the duty that always defined him suddenly felt like a cage, and the thought of another man holding you was the one thing his noble heart couldn't endure.
— the planning was meticulous, handled with the same precision he used on the battlefield. he didn't trust anyone else with the logistics, mapping out a quiet, midnight escape from the red keep through old tunnels that even the master of whisperers had overlooked.
— when he met you at the hidden postern gate, he didn't say a word at first; he just wrapped his heavy traveler's cloak around your shoulders to hide your bridal silk and pressed a firm, reassuring kiss to your forehead, his hands trembling just a fraction.
— he chose a ruined, secluded hill overlooking blackwater bay for the ceremony, a place where the wind howled through ancient stones. there were no lords or septons, just the two of you under a dark sky, exactly as he wanted it.
— baelor was incredibly solemn during the valyrian rites, his voice deep and steady as he spoke the ancient high valyrian words. he looked at you not as a prince looking at a subject, but as a man giving up his carefully built reputation for the only woman he ever truly desired.
— as he cut you to bind your blood with his, his touch was incredibly tender, his thumb instantly wiping away a stray tear. he whispered soft, soothing words in your ear, promising that the pain would be the last he ever caused you.
— when he pressed his bleeding mouth to yours, the taste of copper and the warmth of his breath sealed the vow so fiercely it left you breathless.
— wrapping the traditional dragonglass-clasped mantle around your shoulders felt more sacred to him than any crown he would ever inherit; he swore a silent oath to the old gods of valyria that he would shield you from the wrath of the king and your jilted betrothed.
— the morning after the wedding, he didn't look back toward king's landing with regret. instead, he held you tightly against his chest in a small room at an inn, watching the sunrise and softly telling you that he would face a hundred trials at court just to keep you by his side.
— he kept the piece of blood-stained silk from your wedding garment hidden in his breastplate, right over his heart, carrying the physical proof of your secret union into every tourney and council meeting he attended afterward.
— whenever the lord you were supposed to marry was mentioned at court, baelor’s usual polite smile would turn dangerously sharp, a silent warning that he had claimed you completely and would cut down anyone who questioned it.
— he loved the absolute privacy of your life; away from the weight of the iron throne, he became just baelor—a man who would happily brush your hair by candlelight and whisper that choosing love over duty was the best command he ever gave.
maekar targaryen
— maekar spent weeks watching your betrothal feast with a dark, suffocating fury building in his chest. he was always the brother left in the shadows, but he refused to let the woman who actually understood his bitter heart be handed over to some soft, arrogant lord.
— his approach to eloping was abrupt and demanding; he cornered you in the godswood the night before the wedding, gripped your wrists with desperate strength, and told you plainly that if you didn't leave with him right then, he would kill your betrothed in single combat.
— the ride to dragonstone was fast, with you riding pillion behind him on his warhorse, pulling you so close against his armor that you could feel the frantic, terrified thumping of his heart.
— he insisted on a traditional valyrian wedding because he despised the faith of the seven that his brother championed. he wanted something raw, old, and undeniably yours, a bond that no fat septon or political decree could ever dismantle or declare void.
— during the blood exchange, he didn't flinch when his his own flesh was cut. his eyes were locked on yours, fierce and burning with a possessive intensity that made it clear he was laying claim to your soul just as much as your body.
— when it came time to cut your skin, his rough hands became surprisingly gentle, his breathing hitching as he pressed the dragonbone blade against your skin, whispering a harsh, raw apology in high valyrian before making the mark.
— the moment your blood mingled with his, a dark, triumphant smile broke through his usual scowl. he kissed you with a desperate, hungry passion, tasting the iron on your lips and cementing the fact that you were finally his, completely beyond anyone else's reach.
— after the vows were spoken, he wrapped you in a heavy mantle of black and red, holding you so tightly against his chest that you could feel the frantic, heavy thud of his heart finally slowing down into relief.
— maekar knew his brother baelor and his father would be furious, but he faced the eventual confrontation with a grim, defiant pride, standing before the iron throne with his arm clamped around your waist.
— he took a dark pleasure in the scandal, relishing the look of utter defeat on your former betrothed's face when maekar bluntly announced that the blood rite had already been consumed and could never be broken by any mortal law.
— in your shared bedchamber at summerhall, he becomes a different man, pouring all his unspoken devotion into quiet, intense embraces, constantly reminding you that he chose you over his own duty.
— he becomes fiercely protective of you after the elopement, never letting you out of his sight when guests arrive and keeping his hand permanently resting on the pommel of his sword whenever anyone dares to look at you with pity or disrespect because of the elopement
— in the quiet hours of the night, he would hold you so tightly it almost hurts, burying his face in your neck and admitting in low, muffled tones that he had never been truly happy until the moment you chose him over a comfortable life.
valarr targaryen
— valarr was usually the golden, obedient grandson, but the thought of you marrying someone else turned him into a rebel overnight. he couldn't bear the thought of your smile belonging to another man, and his usual desire to please his father completely vanished under the panic of losing the only person who truly understood the pressure of being the future heir’s heir.
— he approached the elopement with a sort of frantic, youthful romanticism, slipping a silver ring and a note into your hand during a crowded court session, telling you exactly where his horse would be waiting at midnight.
— he was incredibly nervous during the escape, constantly looking over his shoulder and checking your cloak to make sure you weren't cold, his boyish charm melting into a fierce, protective focus as he guided you away from the castle.
— the traditional valyrian wedding was something he had researched in secret, bringing an ancient text from the red keep's library to ensure every single word spoken was exactly as their ancestors had done before the doom.
— he chose a secluded cliffside on dragonstone where the waves crashed violently below, wanting the ancient elements of fire and water to witness the truth of his love when the rest of the world was forcing a lie upon you.
— his voice cracked slightly as he recited the high valyrian vows, his eyes shimmering with unshed tears of pure relief because he could scarcely believe you actually chose him over your duty and your family's wishes.
— the blood binding terrified him a little because he hated seeing you in pain, but he knew it was the only way to make the marriage unbreakable under old valyrian law. he kissed your forehead repeatedly to distract you before drawing the blade.
— when he tasted your blood during the final kiss, it felt like an awakening; all his doubts about being a good heir disappeared, replaced by a fierce, driving ambition to become strong enough to protect you from the consequences of your flight.
— he laughed with pure, breathless joy the moment the ceremony was over, lifting you off your feet and spinning you around on the dark beach, the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders now that you were his wife.
— back in the capital, he had to endure his father’s quiet, disappointed looks, but valarr never broke under the pressure; he just looked down at his boots, thinking of you waiting for him in his private chambers, and felt entirely justified.
— he bought you exquisite gifts with his own coin—silks from lys and old valyrian scrolls—shattering his own allowance just to see you comfortable and happy in the hidden life you had to lead for the first few months.
— he loves combing your hair before bed, whispering sweet, idealistic promises about how one day, when he sits on the iron throne, he would crown you his queen in front of the entire realm.
— every time he looks at the faint, silver scar on your forearm from the ceremony, his eyes would soften completely, and he would press his lips to the mark, reminding you that he belongs to you just as much as you belong to him.
daeron targaryen
— daeron was already a man plagued by terrible, prophetic dreams, but the vision of you clad in another house's colors, weeping at an altar, was the one nightmare he refused to let come true. it gave the usually timid prince a sudden, reckless courage.
— he didn't plan a grand escape; instead, he came to your window in the dead of night, his eyes wide and anxious, begging you to leave with him right then because he had seen a dream where you were lost to him forever if you stayed.
— he was drinking heavily to steady his nerves before the ceremony, but the moment he looked at you beneath the moonlit sky, he set the flask down, his eyes clearing with a rare, sharp lucidity that he only ever possessed when he was with you.
— the valyrian wedding was his idea because he believed the old dragon gods were the only ones who could protect you from the terrible things he saw in his dreams. he wanted a bond written in fire and blood, something the mortal lords couldn't touch.
— his hands shook terribly as he held the dragonglass knife, his voice trembling as he spoke the high valyrian words, but there was a deep, underlying devotion in his tone that made the ancient phrases sound like a desperate prayer.
— when his lip was cut, he pressed his mouth to yours so hard you could taste the iron immediately. the kiss was messy, desperate, and filled with a profound relief that made him sob against your lips.
— he cried softly when he had to draw your blood, murmuring endless apologies against your skin as he made the shallow cut, his tears mixing with the red droplets on your arm before he bound the linen around it.
— after the ceremony, he collapsed against you on the grass, wrapping his arms around your waist and burying his face in your lap, muttering that the dark shadows in his mind had finally gone quiet now that you were bound to him.
— he spent his days pretending to be his usual, useless self to throw off suspicion, drinking in appearance while actually spending every spare coin on food and comforts for you.
— he loves listening to you read to him in the dark; your voice is the only thing that could keep his dragon dreams at bay, and he would sleep peacefully only when his head was resting against your chest, listening to your heartbeat.
— he views his scar from the wedding as a badge of honor, often tracing it with his finger as a secret comfort, knowing that whatever terrible future awaited his house, he had managed to save the one piece of light he cared about.
aerion targaryen
— aerion viewed your upcoming marriage to another lord as a personal insult to his royal blood; he believed you were a creature of creature of old valyria, meant only for a true dragon like him, and his arrogance quickly mutated into a wild, obsessive need to take you.
— his method of elopement was chaotic and terrifying; he essentially abducted you from your chambers in the middle of the night, laughing like a madman as he carried you down the castle walls, entirely unbothered by the guards he had to bribe or threaten.
— he took you to the ruins of an ancient targaryen outpost, a place smelling of old stone and sulfur, where he had prepared a lavish altar adorned with dragonglass candles and wild, dark silks.
— he demanded the most ancient, extreme version of the valyrian rites, dressing himself in elaborate crimson silks and insisting that the gods themselves were watching his triumph over the lesser lords who dared try to steal his prize.
— his eyes danced with a frightening, erratic light during the vows, his high valyrian spoken with a dramatic, theatrical flare that made the ancient words sound like a dark, beautiful spell meant to bind you to him for eternity.
— when he cut his lip, he didn't just make a small scratch; he sliced it deeply, his smile turning wicked as the blood spilled, before slamming his mouth against yours in a fierce, bruising kiss.
— he took an almost unsettling pleasure in drawing your blood, his eyes widening as he watched the red line form on your skin. yet, his touch was strangely possessive, his fingers trailing the blood down your arm before he licked a drop from his own knife.
— he draped a heavy cloak of black and scarlet over you, declaring you his dragon-wife and laughing maniacally at the thought of the look on your father's face when he realized his daughter had been claimed by a true prince of valyria.
— he didn't care about hiding the marriage for long; he flaunted your presence in his quarters, daring anyone to challenge him, his volatile temper flaring violently whenever a courtier even looked in your direction.
— he treats you like a precious, stolen relic, showering you with stolen jewelry and demanding that you wear nothing but the colors of house targaryen, effectively erasing any trace of your former life and identity.
— he took a cruel delight in taunting your former betrothed, sending the lord a letter written in your shared blood to inform him that his prize had been taken by a true god of the realm.
— in his quietest, rare moments of vulnerability, his madness would soften into a fierce, almost desperate dependency, where he would press his face into your hair and whisper that you were the only one who truly understands his greatness.
— he made you promise that if the world ever turned against him, you would burn with him, showing you his scar from the wedding as proof that your fates were permanently intertwined in blood and fire, never to be parted by man or god.
SUMMARY - Having met as children and reuniting once you've grown into a woman, Aerion's previous suspicion of you grows into the softest spot imaginable.
CONTAINS - pure fluff, reader is extremely kind, aerion is only kind to reader, classic sunshine x grumpy
A/N - i personally couldn't stop giggling while writing the "pastry" scene. Ughh i need him
The blazing sun over Summerhall was unforgiving, but it did nothing to melt the sour disposition of Prince Aerion.
At barely ten name days old, the boy was already terror embodied. He sat on a smooth rock by the edge of the river, a fishing rod held tight in his small, tense hands.
His eyes glared at the water as if he could command the fish to bite by sheer noble decree.
“They won’t bite if you keep scowling at them,” a bright voice chimed from behind him.
Aerion stiffened, his jaw tightening. He turned his head sharply, expecting a person sent by his father to drag him back to his lessons.
Instead, he saw you.
You were the daughter of Maekar’s most trusted ally, having arrived only an hour ago.
While the adults spoke of their business, you had wandered out into the sun, your heavy skirts already trailing in the damp grass.
You looked entirely out of place among the solemn guards, a little burst of warmth against the grey stones of summerhall.
“Go away,” Aerion snapped, turning back to the water, “You’ll frighten them.”
“You’re the one frightening them,” you retorted easily, completely unbothered by the venom in his tone.
You marched right up to his rock, your slippers squelching in the mud, and plopped down beside him without asking. “My father says that fishes can sense when someone is angry. They don’t like the energy.”
“Your father is a fool, and so are you,” he hissed, expecting you to cry or perhaps run back to the castle.
But you didn’t seem bothered as you tilted your head, watching the bobber dance on the ripples. “You’re doing it wrong anyway. The bait is too high.”
Aerion opened his mouth to deliver a cutting remark—something about how a dragon did not take lessons from a silly girl—but before the words could leave his lips, your smaller, warmer hands brushed against his.
You reached out, bypassing his defensive posture, and gently adjusted his grip on the handle, lowering the tip of the rod so the bait sank properly into the water.
The prince froze. No one touched him without permission. No one dared.
Yet, as the silence stretched between you, the bobber suddenly dipped aggressively. A heavy tug yanked the line down, nearly pulling the rod from his hands.
“See!” you gasped, your face lighting up with a blinding grin. “Pull, Aerion! Pull!”
Forgetting his pride, Aerion yanked the rod back with all his boyhood strength. A massive trout broke the surface, thrashing wildly and splashing mud and lakewater directly across his pristine tunic, and right into your face.
Aerion braced himself for the screaming. Noble girls and boys always screamed when they got dirty.
But then a bright laughter echoed across the banks. “Look at the size of it! We caught it!”
Aerion looked from the wiggling fish to your mud splattered face. His lips twitched, fighting a smile before he forced his features back into a proud mask.
“I caught it,” he corrected, though his voice lacked any real bite. “You merely watched.”
“We caught it,” you insisted, bending down to take a closer look at the trout.
Your father’s visit ended shortly after, and the brief, strange kinship evaporated into memory as the years pulled you both down separate paths.
Years slipped by like water through fingers, and when you finally returned to court as a young woman, the boy by the lake had become a man feared by the entire realm.
Aerion was breathtakingly beautiful, and notoriously cruel. He walked through court with a sharp tongue and a sharper temper, but that did not faze you.
From afar, Aerion watched you navigate the treacherous nature of court. You were a vision of light, offering warm smiles to the guards, listening patiently to the older women, and showing unfaltering kindness to everyone you crossed.
To him, it was grating. All noble ladies were trained to be sweet, performing acts of grace to secure a good match or win the favour of higher lords.
He waited for you to finally lose your cool.
But the day never came. No, the reality of your kindness crashed directly into him one afternoon near the small council chamber.
You were walking down the corridor with a butterfly that had landed on your arm when the doors of the chamber burst open.
A flurry of lords tumbled out into the hall, fleeing in terror. Among them was the master of coin, frantically wiping dark ink from his doublet with his bleeding hands, his face pale as death.
“Seven hells,” one of the other lords whispered hoarsely, scurrying past you. “The prince has lost his mind entirely!”
You stopped, watching the chaotic retreat. Instead of turning back like any sensible person would, you set the butterfly on a nearby branch and stepped through the heavy doors.
An iron candelabra laid overturned on the floor, dark wax spilling across the polished wood, and an inkwell had been shattered against the wall.
Aerion stood by the high window, his back to you. His shoulders were incredibly tense, and his chest was rising and falling with heavy, angry breaths.
“I thought I made it clear,” Aerion growled without turning, “The next soul to disturb me will lose their tongue.”
“Then it is a good thing I am capable of writing. I do not need my tongue.” you responded lightly, closing the heavy door behind you.
Aerion went still. He turned slowly, his stormy eyes dark with lingering rage. When his gaze landed on you, he let out a harsh, bitter scoff.
“Come to play the saint for me too?” he sneered, maintaining his distance. “Save your sweet smiles for the lords in the hall. I have no patience for your endless charity.”
You took a few measured steps into the room, keeping a respectful distance yourself.
“I don't think they don’t understand how stressful it can be,” you said softly, ignoring his cruel words. “they whisper and push, expecting you to sit quietly while they try to manage your family’s rights. It makes sense that you’d lose your patience when they refuse to listen.”
He stared at you from across the room, his mind struggling to process what he was hearing. He had expected an admonishment, or at the very least, fear.
“They are parasites,” Aerion muttered, his posture unlocking just a fraction. “They look at me as if I am mad because I refuse to let them dictate my bloodline’s terms.”
“I can see that,” you replied gently, giving a small smile. “They may be stressed as well, but no one should have to bend to their whim.”
The room went silent before you spoke again.
“Whenever the court gets too loud for me, I find that walking around the gardens helps. The fresh air is always calming.. maybe it would help you too. It’s quiet out there.”
The fire in his eyes flickered, clearly caught off guard by the suggestion. He stared at your face, the lines of his memory remembering the specific curve of your smile.
A breathless laugh escaped him.
“The gardens?” Aerion repeated, his voice dropping the edge it possessed just moments ago.
He took a step forward, assessing your form. “You haven’t changed at all, have you? Years ago at Summerhall, you told me the fish wouldn’t bite because of my ‘anger.' Now you’re trying to herd me into the bushes to calm down.”
Your eyes widened slightly in surprise, a soft laugh bubbling up. “You remember that?”
“I remember a girl pushing my hands around and getting me covered in mud,” he murmured.
He then let out a soft click of his tongue, turning to look at the doorway. “Fine. We will walk the gardens. But only because your previous method somehow worked.”
“Of course,” you smiled.
As the weeks progressed, a unique friendship blossomed between you.
Aerion still remained difficult as ever to the rest of the world, but your presence seemed to simmer that down.
The shift did not go unnoticed by the ladies of the court, leading to an afternoon that they wouldn’t stop gossiping about for days.
You were walking through the outer courtyard with a small retinue of noble ladies, the daughters of prominent lords from the Reach. They were talking endlessly, giggling as they spoke of whatever irrelevant topics crossed their minds.
“You must be careful, my dear,” one of the ladies said, leaning in closer to you. “Prince Aerion may be amused by your novelty but once he grows bored of playing with his new toy, you will be left with nothing but yourself.”
“He is a prince of the blood,” another lady chimed in, her voice tight. “They take what pleases them for a moment and cast it aside. Do not mistake a tyrant’s passing curiosity for actual regard.”
“Aerion simply values sincerity,” you replied, offering an unbothered smile. “There is no game being played.”
“You are far too gullible–” the former lady was cut when Aerion walked out from the room beside.
The ladies instantly adjusted their posture, immediately dropping to curtsies as he approached, each of them desperately hoping to catch the prince’s favour despite their previous warnings to you.
Aerion ignored them, his eyes locking firmly onto you.
Without a word of greeting, and completely disregarding decorum, he walked into the center of the group and stepped right into your space, his frame towering over you.
“You’re late,” his voice was low—meant strictly for you, though it carried across the hall.
“Late for what, my Prince?” you asked, tilting your head up to meet his gaze with your beaming expression.
“I am going to the cliffs, and you are coming with me,” he stated flatly.
Behind you, a collective intake of breath echoed from the ladies. Here he was, actively seeking you out, his attention consuming you and utterly shattering their spiteful claims that you were just a passing game.
You looked back at the girls, giving one last smile before parting from them. “Very well, my Prince, if you insist.”
“I do,” Aerion tilted his head, turning on his heel to fall into step right beside you, his side brushing against yours as he guided you out of the yard.
That would not be the first or last time the court would witness the two of you separating from the rest of the world.
During one evening, after failing in your search for Aerion through the whole castle, you found him alone in the secluded parts of the library.
He was sitting alone, staring dead at a massive volume of ancient Valyrian history.
“I am not in the mood for company,” he hissed out, “leave.”
Your eyebrows furrowed in worry before approaching and setting down a small plate of pastries on the corner of the table. You pulled out the empty chair beside him and sat down despite his request.
Reaching over the plate, you picked up a small pastry and held it right in front of his face, completely disregarding his brooding glare.
“Eat,” you insisted gently as Aerion still refused to acknowledge you. “You always go for these specific ones. I know you like them.”
His fingers that had been gripping the edge of the book twitched, and he finally turned his head to look at you.
The weight on his shoulders gradually disappeared as he looked at the pastry, then up at your fond expression.
Aerion didn’t move to take it from your hand. Keeping his intense gaze locked firmly onto yours, he leaned slightly forward.
Then, totally unprompted, he took a bite right out of the pastry while it was still held between your fingers.
A tiny giggle slipped past your lips, a bright warmth blooming all the way to the tips of your ears at the sheer intimacy of it.
You tried to bite your lip to hide your surprise, but your shoulders shook with quiet amusement as you looked into his smug face.
Aerion chewed slowly, the corners of his lips twitching at your giddy reaction.
“You are ridiculous,” he murmured as he swallowed.
“Maybe,” you agreed, your heart fluttering as you set the remaining half down onto the plate. “But it worked. You feel better already, don’t you?”
Aerion stared at you for a moment, drinking in your presence. He did feel better—the tight, suffocating knot in his chest had already unraveled. But it was certainly not because of the pastry.
Slowly, he hesitantly reached out across the small space between your chairs. With one deliberate movement, he dragged your chair until it hit his.
Then, his hand moved to flip over on the table with his palm facing up, his fingers sprawling open in a silent, stubborn invitation.
You, on the other hand, did not hesitate. You slid your hand into his palm, your fingers easily weaving through his.
Aerion squeezed your hand, his rings pressing firmly against your skin, though his touch was surprisingly careful.
However, the true demonstration of expanse that you two had built played out before the entire court during a grand feast, where Aerion’s attempt to maintain his reputation crumbled.
The feast was deafeningly loud.
You were seated next to Aerion by Prince Maekar.
Aerion had spent the first half of the feast interacting with other lords while you conversed with other ladies.
He was glaring at a group of lesser lords when he noticed your sudden silence. Just then, some of the lords he had been talking to earlier called out to him and he tried to force his eyes back on them.
Aerion was aware that you two were the topic of conversation as of late. He couldn’t let the people of court think he had gone soft. At least that was what his pride told him.
But the sight of your fragile form pulled at him like a physical anchor, shattering his resolve. His demeanor instantly changed.
He turned fully in his seat toward you, his cold stare evaporating.
“You’re pale,” Aerion murmured, voice stripped away of anything harsh. “What is it?”
“Just… a headache, Aerion,” you whispered softly, giving him a tired smile. “The noise is particularly loud tonight.”
Aerion didn’t waste a second as he gently used his hand to cradle the back of your head.
His fingers began combing through the loose parts of your hair, his thumb tracing circles down your temple to ease the pressure.
The chatter around the surrounding tables died down, dozens of eyes tracking his movements, yet no one dared to disrupt. They watched as Aerion paid no mind to everything else the moment you showed discomfort.
You leaned into his touch, a smile returning to your face. “Aerion… everyone is watching.”
Aerion let out a defeated sigh as he grinned. “Let them stare,” he concluded, his fingers tucking in a strand of hair behind your ear. “You’ve broken me anyway.”
Shifting his broad shoulders, he blocked the rest of the room from view, shielding you from prying eyes.
“You are tired,” he paused, “if anyone breathes a word about that, I will have their heads.”
“You can’t murder the entire court,” you teased, lifting your head up for a moment.
A faint smile broke across his face. “Watch me,” he repeated, guiding your head to rest on his shoulder. “Now hold still and let me fix it.”
Inspired by this post. 18+. mdni. oral (f receiving), obsessive!needy!valarr, possessiveness, established relationship. he's SO pussy drunk in this it's actually crazy! stay safe out there!🙏
✶ tt!au // valarr!first verse.
Valarr comes back to you on a Thursday, near midnight, and you feel him before you hear him.
You don't sleep properly when he's gone. A fact you'd never admit and which Valarr suspects and is far too clever to ever name.
You've been floating in the shallows of slumber, the duvet pulled to your chin, the apartment too large and too quiet around you. Then comes the soft, mechanical click of the front door, the murmur of him dismissing the driver, the weight of his tread crossing the dark floor toward the bedroom. Unhurried stride, familiar. The gait of a man arriving somewhere he's been thinking about for six days.
You don't open your eyes.
You listen to Valarr undress. The rustle of a jacket laid over the chair, the chime of a belt buckle, the carefulness of a man trying not to wake you and failing entirely to understand that you've been half-listening for this exact sequence of sounds since the moment he left.
The bed dips under Valarr's weight. The slate duvet lifts. And then Valarr is behind you, the warm length of him fitting against your spine. His arm coming heavy over your waist and dragging you back into him with a greed he doesn't bother to soften now that he believes you're asleep.
He buries his face in the back of your neck.
He breathes you in. A long, shuddering inhale against your nape, the kind a drowning man takes when he breaks the surface, his chest expanding hard against your back. And you feel something go out of him as he does it. Some tension he's been carrying for six days through whatever rooms full of older men he's been outmanoeuvring and charming into doing what he wanted. It uncoils.
Valarr's whole body loosens against your spine by degrees, muscle releasing muscle, a fist opening one finger at a time. The held set of his shoulders follows, the lock of his jaw next, all of it dissolving against your skin.
"Missed you," he breathes into your hair, so low it's barely shaped into words. "God, the state of me. Missed you like a limb, my love."
He kisses your nape. Warm, reverent. Then again, lower, where your neck meets the curve of your shoulder, lingering, his lips parting against your skin like he means to leave something there.
His arm tightens until there's no space left between you at all. His knees fit into the hollows behind yours. He's wound so tight you can feel it even in the way Valarr holds you, a fine tremor running through him.
You don't say anything.
You let him have it. Let him hold you and breathe you in and press those quiet kisses into your skin. Because you understand, in the wordless animal way you understand most things about Valarr, that he needs this more than he needs you awake.
He needs to arrive. To come home in his body, not merely on his calendar. So you keep your breathing even and your eyes shut. You let him pour six days of want into the back of your neck in the dark.
His breathing slows. The tremor fades little by little. The last of the week leaves him in one long exhale, and somewhere in the warm dark before you both go under, his lips move against your nape one final time.
"My love," he whispers, like a man setting down something he'd been afraid to lose.
You sleep with his arm a dead weight across your waist and his mouth still buried in your hair.
You wake, hours later, before Valarr does.
The light is grey, the first thin wash of it through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the apartment quiet around you.
You've turned in the night. You're facing him now, the duvet pooled around your waist. Valarr sleeps on his back with one arm flung up across the pillows and the other still curled, even unconscious, toward the warm dent where you'd been.
You look at him.
You allow yourself this, in the rare grey hours when he doesn't know you're doing it: the luxury of looking at Valarr Targaryen without performance, without his mismatched eyes on you cataloguing every flicker of your reaction, without the game the two of you are always, on some level, playing.
You let your gaze move over him the way his moves over you when he thinks you aren't watching.
He's beautiful. An almost insulting quantity of it for one man to carry, the kind that made you think, the first time you watched him cross a room toward you, oh, that face is going to be a problem.
The dark hair ruined against the white pillow, falling across his forehead. The white streak at his temple that you know runs coarser to the touch than the rest of the floppy strands. The long sweep of his dark lashes. The pink mouth gone soft in sleep.
It is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing about Valarr, for what comes out of it.
Next comes the dips and lines of his trained, maintained body. Every inch of it claimed and tasted by you.
But this morning there's something else, too.
He didn't shave in Essos. Hasn't shaved, you'd guess, in four days (overrun, he'd said on FaceTime, drowning, back to back, I'll call again when I surface, love) and he never surfaced, never sent the usual photographs. The week swallowed him whole.
So the lower half of his face has darkened. A heavy shadow of stubble crowds along his jaw, his chin, above the bow of his lip, the clean architecture of him roughened and obscured, the boyish gloss sanded clean off.
It changes Valarr completely.
The golden dragon is gone.
The polished, attentive boy who brings you tea with honey and in his place is a dark jawline, a harder set of hollows beneath the cheekbones. A face with weight and shadow in it. The other Valarr. The silky dark one who slips loose when you fist your hands in his hair, when you growl low in your throat, when you push your fingers into his mouth and watch the brown eye go black. When you ask him to fuck you so hard you can't walk the next day.
The one you've spent three years coaxing into the light, luring up out of deep water inch by inch, nurturing the edge of him your father once glimpsed under all that shine and called the dragon, deep beneath. The one you love no less than the golden one. Perhaps more, in some senses, because he's the one Valarr lets no one else in the world see.
He looks, asleep with four days of stubble in the grey light, like the man who lives underneath the man.
You want to touch it.
So you do. You lift your hand and lay your palm flat against the side of Valarr's jaw, against the rough dark grain of him, and the texture catches and drags at your skin, coarse and entirely new under your fingers.
His eyes flutter open.
By degrees, unfocused at first, the blue one catching the light first. Then they find your face and sharpen. Valarr takes in your expression, whatever it is, whatever you didn't have the warning to school it into, and a deep, knowing pleasure unfurls across his features.
"Good morning, my love," he says, his voice wrecked from sleep, dropped half an octave and rough at every edge. "You're staring."
"I am."
"You like it." His mouth curves into something that isn't quite the golden boy's smile. He turns his face into your palm, drags the stubble across it deliberately, and watches you feel it. Takes in the small, involuntary thing your eyes do. "Tell me you like it."
You don't answer right away. You trace your thumb along the dark line of his jaw, learning the rasp of it. Valarr's eyes hood, his attention sharpening on you with the lazy, predatory patience that belongs to the other one.
"Don't shave," you tell him.
He laughs, low and delighted, the sound rumbling up out of his chest. "No?"
"No." You drag your thumb across his lower lip, feeling the place where smooth gives way to rough. "I want you like this."
"Like this," he repeats, tasting it. He catches your wrist, and turns his head to press his mouth to the heel of your hand. The stubble scrapes, his eyes never leaving yours. "Tell me what this is, then. Be specific. What is it you want, sweet girl?"
"You know what it is."
"I want to hear you say it out loud."
You hold his gaze. Neither of you blinks; you've never been the one to blink first, and he's learned not to expect it. "It's the other one," you say evenly. "The one you keep underneath. He's closer to the surface like this. I can see him from here."
An emotion moves through Valarr's face at that. The pleasure goes darker, banked-coal warm, the brown eye dropping a full shade, and his grip on your wrist tightens by a fraction that says he heard exactly what you meant.
"Then come and get him," he says huskily, and it isn't a request.
"I'm right here."
"Not close enough, my love. Nowhere near."
He's already drawing you in, his arm sliding around the small of your back, gathering you across the short distance until you're flush against the bare warm length of him under the duvet, every inch against every inch.
"Six days. Do you have the faintest idea what six days does to me?" Not a question. Valarr's mouth is already moving. Your temple, your cheekbone, the corner of your jaw, leaving that rough new abrasion wherever it lands. "I needed you in every room I walked into. Every meeting. Every dinner. I'd be mid-sentence, closing the deal I flew out there to close, and all I could think was your hands. The sound you make when I first—"
You kiss him quiet.
Valarr kisses you back like a man surfacing from underwater. Nothing careful in it, nothing of the I won't presume he gave you in year one. Just open and immediate and starving, his hand coming up to cradle the back of your skull and hold you exactly where he wants you.
And the stubble burns. It scrapes your mouth, your chin, the soft skin around your lips, raw and hot, and Valarr does it on purpose. You feel the intent in it. Feel him angle his jaw to grind the rough of it across your cheek, watching for your reaction even with his eyes half-shut and his mouth fused to yours. When you moan into the kiss, when the sting of him drags a low, helpless sound up out of your chest, you feel Valarr's mouth curve against yours in dark satisfaction.
"There it is," he murmurs. "I've missed that sound. I've been starving for it, sweet girl."
He does it again. Harder. Drags his jaw down the line of your neck, the burn blooming heat across your skin in a spreading wash, and you tip your head back and bare your throat to him and let him, your fingers driving up into his hair.
The sound Valarr makes against your throat is nothing like the boyish, contented murmurs you usually coax out of him in the half-dark. It's lower than that. It has teeth in it. It belongs to the other one.
"Missed your skin," he breathes into the hollow of your throat, mouthing at the pulse. "Missed the heat of you, my love. Missed every noise I can pull out of you once I stop being polite." His mouth travels down, the rasp of his jaw scoring a hot path to your collarbone and you arch into the sensation with a sigh. "I'm not doing this quickly. I've thought about it for a week. I've earned the long version."
"Val—"
"Six days," he says against your sternum, and keeps moving down, peeling off your linen sleeping shirt.
Valarr kisses the soft swell of each breast, dragging his rough jaw against the tender underside until you arch off the sheets and gasp. He works lower, open-mouthed and wet down the curve of your ribs, the trembling plane of your stomach.
He's leaving that scrape everywhere he's been so your whole body lights like a struck match, nerve by nerve. Valarr's hands settle on your hips and spread wide, thumbs hooking into the points of bone. He kisses one, then the other. Then rubs his stubbled jaw against the soft inner skin of each thigh, back and forth, watching your face the entire time. Until you're squirming under the weight of his hands, slick and aching, your breath frayed into ragged uneven pulls.
Then he settles between your legs and lifts those shadowed eyes to your face.
"Hands off the sheets," he say, low, certain, your golden Valarr momentarily away. He takes your wrists and sets your hands in his hair himself, deliberate, then flattens his palms over your hips and pins you to the mattress. "Hold on to me instead, sweet girl. I want to feel it when you come apart for me."
The first stroke of Valarr's tongue tears a sound out of him that's worse than yours.
A deep, broken, drowning groan against your core. The noise of a man tasting the only thing he's wanted for a week and finally being allowed to have it. He moans into you. He keeps moaning into you. The flat of his tongue, then the point of it, slipping between your folds, relearning you as though he's been kept from this for years and not days.
He's drunk on it, you can feel him going under, the careful man dismantled by the first taste of you, leaving only this: a starving creature with his face buried between your thighs, breathing you in like he can't remember how to do it any other way.
And he uses the stubble. The calculated contrast of his hot, soft mouth and the raw burn of his unshaven jaw against the most sensitive skin of your inner thighs. He sucks on the nub, pressing his cheek against the crease of you, pleasure and sting braiding into something so acute you cry out and your fists clench in his hair.
He won't let your hips move. Every time you try to chase more friction, Valarr presses you flat down, holding you precisely where he wants you, making you take it at the pace he's decided on. His eyes stay on your face through all of it: fevered, drowned-dark, drinking down every helpless thing it does.
"Valarr—"
He hums against you, low and ragged, the vibration bowing your spine off the bed. "I know," he slurs, kissing the swollen folds gently. He sounds raspy, half-pained "I know, sweet girl. God, I know. Let me—just let me have you. I need you."
And then he goes deeper into you. You feel him slip the last of his composure like a coat dropped to the floor.
Whatever was left of the boy is gone; what surfaces is the dark thing he keeps buried, the worshipful animal at the bottom of him, and it doesn't kiss you so much as it adores you.
He noses against you, dragging his open mouth through you bottom to top. Valarr's tongue twists, slower now, then ravenous again, no rhythm any more, only hunger. There's nothing elegant about it now. It's wet, his tongue working you furiously, your arousal dripping into his awaiting mouth.
Valarr keeps making sounds against you, low and broken, sounds that aren't meant for you to hear, the unguarded noises of a man undone by what he's tasting.
"My love," he breathes against you, reverent, dazed. "The taste of you... I've been parched—"
And that's when you feel it: Valarr starting to rut down into the mattress beneath him, helpless, instinctive, grinding the aching length of himself against the sheets because the want has overrun him entirely.
Because eating you out has reduced him to something primal and shaking. He doesn't seem to know he's doing it. His hips move on their own, a slow, shameless grind he isn't aware of. His fingers dig harder into the flesh of your hips, and his whole body has gone fevered and greedy for more. Lost in the taste of you with four days of stubble searing your thighs and both pupils blown to black.
Valarr drags his mouth back just far enough to speak, chin slick, lips swollen like your cunt, eyes barely focused. "More. Give me more. Pull—pull my hair—please, I need to feel it—"
You fist both hands in his dark hair and you yank. Hard enough to sting.
Valarr groans—wrecked, grateful, half-feral, the sound vibrating straight through you and making you clench—and the pull snaps something loose at the core of him.
He drags you back against his mouth and goes after you with a renewed, ravenous greed, his jaw working, the stubble searing. Valarr's tongue turns relentless and exact, and the edge comes rushing up faster than you can brace for.
You tighten your fists until the dark strands strain through your fingers, and you arch off the bed. Your insides clench, coiling, and he takes you over the edge with his hands pinning you down and his mouth never once relenting.
You come apart with his name torn out of your throat and the rough burn of him branding the inside of your thighs, your whole body drawn taut as wire and then breaking. Valarr makes a sound against you that is purely starving, a deep desperate groan as the first wave of you hits his tongue, and he laps at you, parched, greedy, refusing to miss a single drop.
He licks you through it like a man drinking after days in a desert. His tongue working slow and devout against the slick of you, gathering every shudder, every pulse, every spill, drinking down every last thing your body gives him. He doesn't gentle, not really. Valarr worships, drunk and patient in his devotion. Kissing where he's been licking, licking where he's been kissing, refusing to let go of you until you're trembling and oversensitive, whispering his name and he's certain he's had all of it.
Only then does his mouth soften, turning gentle, pressing one final lingering kiss to the trembling inside of your thigh.
You lie there undone, your limbs still trembling, your hands still loosely tangled in his ruined hair, your chest heaving.
"Val," you whisper, when you find your voice.
He crawls back up the length of your body, and there's something dark and unhurried in the way he does it. Almost predatory. His mouth finds yours and you kiss him deeply, holding his face to you. A wet kiss, sloppy, finesse abandoned, you tasting yourself on his tongue, the stubble blazing against your already-tender lips, and neither of you cares in the slightest.
"You're going to be raw," Valarr murmurs against your mouth, sounding obscenely pleased about it. "Every time you feel it today you'll think of me, sweet girl."
"That's the idea," you tell him, and he makes a low sound and kisses you harder.
He's hot and solid above you. He's also, you note with a slow curl of satisfaction, still achingly hard. His length presses to the crease of your hip, untouched, ignored, leaking against your skin.
You reach down between your bodies and close your hand around him.
Valarr hisses sharply through his teeth, hips jerking into your grip.
You hum, low and pleased, and kiss the corner of his mouth tenderly, working him in a firm, unhurried stroke, feeling him pulse hot and heavy in your fist. "You missed me," you say against the rough line of his jaw. Not a question.
"Yes." Valarr's smooth voice is destroyed. He says it the way the dark one says everything—quiet, certain, more dark silk drawn taut than golden charm. "More than anything. More than is reasonable. More than I—" His breath catches and breaks as your hand twists at the wet head of him. "It was a sickness. The whole week. I'd have burned the deal to the ground to come home a day sooner if I could've found good enough excuse. I lay in that hotel every night and reached for you but you weren't there and it was... unbearable, love. You unmade me from an ocean away."
The admission lands somewhere low and bright in your chest, and you bare your teeth at it, pleased to your bones. You roll him.
You roll Valarr onto his back beneath you in one clean motion, legs wrapped around him, and Valarr blinks up at you, startled. For half a heartbeat the golden boy surfaces, the reflexive courtesy, the you've only just—
"Love," he starts, his hand finding your hips. "You don't have to, you just came apart, you—"
"Quiet."
You set your mouth to his throat.
You kiss down the strong column of his neck, dragging your lips over the jumping pulse, and Valarr's protest dies unspoken in his chest. You press your mouth to the curve of his jaw, the hollow under his ear, the spot beneath his jaw that never fails to undo him.
"Val," you say against his throat, and you let him hear the raw need in your voice. "I missed you too. Every night. I kept turning over to feel for you and you weren't there. The bed was wrong and the room was wrong and I was wrong without you." You kiss the corner of his jaw. "Do you understand me? I missed you the entire week."
Valarr groans deep in his chest, a wrecked thing, and his arms come up around you immediately. Both of them, urgent, gathering you in.
He's trying to pull you flush against him, trying to fold you in close, his hand splaying wide between your shoulder blades like he means to crush you to his chest and hold you there. The dark Valarr has gone vulnerable in an instant. The hunger has folded itself around something softer.
He wants to bury his face in your hair and breathe you in and stay like that, just hold you, just have you against him, the way he held you when he first slid into bed last night.
You feel him try to pull you up.
You stop him.
You set your palm flat to his sternum and you press him back to the mattress, kissing his pulse one more time. Then you start moving down.
"Sweet girl—" his voice cracks. "Love, come up—come back up here, let me hold you, that's all I want, just let me hold you—"
"Not yet."
"I don't need anything else, I swear, I only want you in my arms—"
"I know, pretty thing." You kiss the centre of his chest. "And you'll have that. After."
You move lower. The sharp line of his collarbone, then lower still, your mouth finding one flat, pink nipple and closing over it. His hand fists in your hair, no longer pushing you off, holding you to him now, his breath gone short and uneven.
"Sweet girl, please, I'm fine, I don't need—"
"Val." You lift your head just enough to meet his eyes. The blue one is glassy. The brown one is gone black. "I want to taste you too. I've been waiting six days. Let me have my turn."
The sound Valarr makes at that is wrecked. His head drops back against the pillow. His hand stays buried in your hair, holding tight.
"Fuck," he breathes at the ceiling. "Yes. Yes... anything. Yes."
You drag your open mouth down the centre of his chest, his stomach, feeling each band of lean muscle leap and tense beneath your lips. The sharp catch of his inhale, the way Valarr's whole body has drawn taut and trembling and waiting under you.
"There he is," you murmur, pleased, against his skin, giving him his own words back. "Closer to the surface now, isn't he?"
A broken sound is your response, his hand tightening in your hair.
You reach the jut of one hip bone and press your lips there. Then the other, kissing each one in turn, letting your teeth graze the bone, and you feel his stomach hollow out on a sharp indrawn breath, his fingers trembling against your scalp.
"Sweet girl," he rasps again, and there's no refusal left anywhere in it.
It's a plea, low and dark, the golden one and the silken one finally collapsed into a single, helpless want.
A/N - Closed beta test just ended and I'm already missing them. 😭😭 Probably somewhat OOC because all I know of him is from the CBT but my brain wouldn't leave me alone. Kinda angsty.
“A designer's first imperative is to know why they create.”
It is Qi Sili's favourite phrase and his guiding light when it comes to designing, and it's also the phrase that makes him the biggest hypocrite in the world. For he has long lost the reason he designs, and yet he continues to do so, guided by stubborn desperation to not lose the one thing left that connects him to you.
He had started designing for you, of a desire to see you in clothes that would enhance your beauty. To leave his mark on you for the world to see. To ensure that you could be both beautiful and comfortable, for he had often heard that beauty was pain, and he could not stand the thought of you being in pain.
And yet, despite that, he can no longer truly remember you as you were, the crinkle in your eyes when you truly smiled, the warmth of your eyes, the scent and warmth of your skin, the timber of your voice. If you were to appear in front of him again, in a different skin, he would no longer be sure if he would recognise the shape of your spirit.
All he has left of you are imitations, poor imitations in the form of paintings and carvings, and even the most exquisite of those did not capture even an iota of your beauty, and yet, those are all he has left. He mourns the fact that photography and videography were created too late, so maybe he would not suffer so if he could capture your image in videos, and yet, he knows that too is a lie, nothing could capture the essence of you when you are fuller than life itself.
He dreamt of you that night, as he did most nights. None of those dreams linger in the morning light, fading like your presence in his life, and yet, he knew that he dreamt of you because the lingering aching loss that steals his breath is the only thing that remains. Sometimes small bits linger a bit longer, and he savours as much as he mourns, a flash of a smile, the movement of fabric, a soft voice calling his name, bright eyes alight with joy and yet, those too fade before he can truly grasp them.
Unlike everyone else that he had met throughout his existence, you had wanted nothing from him, nothing but one thing, to stay with you. And so he did, even as centuries passed, he had been claimed so thoroughly by you that he didn't know how to be anything but yours. His physical body may be in the present, but his spirit is stuck in the past where you are still beside him.
Sylus was midway through brushing his teeth when you waddled into the bathroom, one hand under your bump while the other rubbed at your eyes. You looked so painfully adorable as you blinked blearily, seemingly guided by instincts alone as you waddled towards him.
He quickly abandoned his brushing as he went to greet you, wrapping his arms around you and pulling you against his chest. You went willingly, pliant in his arms as you nuzzled against the chest, nearly purring like the kitten that you are.
“Awwwww, does the little kitten miss me?” Still, Sylus could not resist teasing you, especially when you pouted at him, your cheeks fuller from pregnancy all puffed up like an angry little kitten, truly irresistible.
“Your pineapple missed you, not me,” you answered cattily. Your habit of referring to the babe by the size of the fruit they were the size of was adorable to Sylus too.
“Is that so?” Sylus asked teasingly as he lowered himself to his knees, pressing a gentle kiss against the swell of your belly, smirking softly. “Then I guess my little pineapple is the only one getting kisses.”
You huffed, not in the mood for his games as you prepared to turn around and head back to the bedroom when he rose to his feet.
“There, there, my lovely wife might not have missed me, but I have missed her very dearly,” his tone is still teasing, but there's an undercurrent of warmth that is solely reserved for you. His hand finds your cheek, caressing it in slow absentminded circles, although you know that it is anything but.
You swiped at his chest half heartedly for the tease even as you leaned your cheek against his hand, nearly whining when he removed it to guide you to the bathroom counter.
If you were truly honest, your belly was far too large at 33 weeks for you to even entertain the idea of sitting on the counter as you had once did, before your pregnancy and even during it, when your bump was smaller and cuter, more uniform in shape. Still, you loved sitting on the bathroom countertop as it allowed you to be closer to Sylus’ eye level, and made it easier to kiss him to boot.
Still, while knowing that you shouldn't, you were still determined to sit on the countertop, your palms flat as you prepared to left yourself up when Sylus gently flipped you around, your face facing his broad chest as he lifted you up effortlessly, depositing you safely on the countertop like you weighed nothing at all.
He did it so suddenly and so easily that you barely had time to gasp, arms cradling your swollen belly as you blinked up at him. His hands joined yours easily as if drawn by magnets, and for one sweet moment, it was just you and him, breaths mingling, both focused on the child growing inside of you.
Your heart felt like it was overflowing with love for him, and you reached out to him, wanting to feel his lips on you when he pulled back regretfully to rinse his mouth. You whine involuntarily, and Sylus chucked, you had been so needy since the start of your pregnancy and he adored it, his kitten wanting his attention constantly.
He rinsed his mouth quickly before reaching under the counter for your pillow, prompting you to straighten up as best as you could from where you were leaning back on your hands to better accommodate your belly as it rested on the countertop between your legs. He slipped the pillow behind you, watching carefully as you settled against it with a sigh of relief.
He chuckled as he stepped into your space, between your legs as he leaned down, bringing his face just inches from yours as his hands found your waist, massaging at the sore spots on your hips. His hands on you felt so good that you couldn't help but groan a little.
“Good?” He asked and you nodded, throwing your head back in relief, baring your neck to him. You don't see the way his eyes darkened with your eyes closed, but you certainly felt his gaze, swallowing audibly from the weight.
“You are very distracting,” he murmured, crowding even closer but still careful of the life between the both of you, voice dropping into that deep register that sent a shiver down your spine.
“Hmm…. Perhaps you should do something about it,” you replied breathlessly, still distracted by his hands on your hips.
“Perhaps I will,” one of his hands left its place on your hips as it cradled your head, bringing your face up to face him, breaths mingling for a moment, sweet minty breath washing over you. His eyes roved over you, seemingly looking for permission and you involuntarily licked your bottom lip.
That seemed to be the permission he needed as he leaned forward, closing the distance to capture your lips in a slow yet bruising kiss that easily stole the remaining air from your lungs. It's slow, heavy and intensely possessive in a way that was so wholly Sylus, his tongue exploring your mouth reverently as his hands tangled in your hair, tilting your head to give him a better angle to explore your mouth even further.
Your arms wrapped around his neck to keep your balance as you let out a soft, helpless whine against his mouth, content and completely claimed by his mouth and the way the scent of him, something dangerously musky mixed with gunpowder thoroughly drowned your senses.
You tugged softly at his hair when you felt like your breath had truly run out, and he pulled back easily, trailing his lips from your puffy cheek to your jaw down to your neck, nipping at your sensitive skin and making you gasp and arch into him. It did make catching your breath an ordeal, but you had no complaints over the attention he lavished on you.
Thoroughly satisfied for the moment, he gently rested his head on your swell, and you easily obliged him by stroking his hair. He rose to his feet when your breathing had steadied, squeezing a generous amount of toothpaste before passing your toothbrush to you, filling a glass with water as you brushed your teeth.
Once you had thoroughly rinsed your mouth only does he assist you in sliding off the countertop, large hands steady on your hips and under your belly as you wrapped both arms around his neck, sliding off carefully. Once you were steady on the ground, he swayed you gently, patiently letting you adjust to the heavy weight of your gravid belly and the return of gravity at your own pace.
Pairing: Valarr Targaryen x Reader
Synopsis: You and Valarr have always called it friendship. Even when his hands lingered, even when his bed felt like yours, even when every man who wanted you seems to always vanished.
Inspired by this post.
Part 3ii
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3i | Part 3ii |
The gallery had opened a small exhibition on Valyrian portraiture and devotional painting. Oil studies of silver-haired saints. Small tempera panels of dragons curled around halos. A rare triptych depicting the Doom as a wound of red light across a blackened sky.
There were private family portraits too, all long throats, pale hair, and violet eyes rendered in fading varnish. Beautiful things. Haunting things. Paintings that made old blood look holy and violence look inherited.
Targaryen money, Targaryen faces, and Targaryen provenance were threaded through half the exhibition, so perhaps you should not have been surprised when an actual Targaryen appeared among the paintings.
You were standing before a large oil painting, guiding Lady Redwyne through its provenance.
The piece was one of the exhibition’s quieter treasures: a devotional portrait of a Valyrian woman in mourning, her silver hair unbound, one hand lifted toward a dragon-shaped reliquary painted in faint, flaking gold. The varnish had darkened with age, turning the background almost black, but the eyes still held their original violet-blue brightness.
You were explaining the restoration notes, pointing out where the old pigment had been stabilized along the edges of the veil, when a familiar voice spoke behind you.
“Careful, Lady Redwyne. If you praise it too much, my family will start demanding the painting back.”
You turned.
Aerion Targaryen smiled at you.
For one stupid, reflexive second, your chest tightened because of the the family resemblance.
Then your heart corrected itself.
Not Valarr.
Aerion.
He was not as beautiful as Valarr.
That was the first uncharitable thought you had, and you hated yourself for it.
Then you corrected that too.
No, he was beautiful. Just differently.
Where Valarr looked carved from old grief and discipline, Aerion looked like pleasure had dressed itself in a leather jacket and come to cause problems. His silver hair was shorter than you remembered, his skin warmer from Lys, his collar too open for the weather, his mouth too quick to smile.
He had the Targaryen eyes.
That was unfortunate.
“Aerion,” you said before you could stop yourself.
His smile widened. “You remember me. I’m touched.”
Aerion Targaryen had never been the sort of man one simply met once and forgot. You had known him for years in the strange, inconvenient way one knew the relatives of one’s closest friends. He had been there at university parties, family dinners you had no business attending, charity galas where Valarr disappeared to argue with his father and left Aerion to entertain you with terrible jokes and worse opinions.
He had always liked you.
Or at least, Aerion had always liked making you laugh.
And for the past two months, he had been in Lys.
A trip, he had called it, though with Aerion that could mean anything from business to exile to a pleasure tour conducted with no regard for consequence. The last you had heard, he had sent Mya a picture of himself on a balcony overlooking the sea with the caption: Still alive. Regrettable for several governments.
“You’ve been gone two months, not dead.”
“People have mourned me for less.”
Lady Redwyne looked between you with open interest.
You remembered yourself.
“Lady Redwyne is considering acquiring the piece,” you said, because you were at work and work had rules, even when Aerion Targaryen appeared behind you looking like trouble with excellent bone structure.
Aerion’s smile sharpened.
“Then I adore her already.”
Lady Redwyne, who was eighty if she was a day and absolutely not immune to handsome men, blushed.
The conversation went smoothly after that because Aerion was shameless, newly returned from Lys with a tan and stories he absolutely should not have been telling donors, and old women loved shamelessness when wrapped in good breeding.
When Lady Redwyne finally wandered toward the next room, Aerion looked at you.
There was less amusement in his face now.
“Hello, darling.”
You stiffened.
“Don’t call me that.”
His brows rose.
“Still?”
“Especially now.”
“Noted.”
You looked back at the display case.
“If Valarr sent you—”
“He didn’t.”
“Are you lying?”
“Frequently, but not currently.”
You glanced at him.
Aerion held up both hands.
“I came because I returned from Lys yesterday and was greeted by three invitations, two furious voicemails from my aunt, and one exhibition promising free champagne and questionably acquired family artifacts.” Aerion’s eyes moved over you, his smile tilting. “Finding you here, looking like a tragic Pre-Raphaelite ghost, is simply the first pleasant surprise I’ve had since stepping off the plane.”
“I don’t look tragic.”
He leaned in slightly.
“You look like someone broke your heart.”
Your throat tightened.
You turned away.
“Stop. I’m working.”
“I can see that.”
“Then let me work.”
For a moment, you thought he would tease again.
Instead, he stepped beside you, hands in his pockets, gaze on the silver prayer disc.
“He’s a mess. Auntie Jena doesn't know what to do.,” Aerion said.
You closed your eyes.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not here on his behalf.”
“Then don’t talk about him.”
Aerion was silent for three breaths.
Impressive, for him.
Then he said, “All right. Let’s talk about you.”
“No.”
“Also fair.”
You almost smiled.
It annoyed you.
Aerion noticed, of course.
He had that same family sickness.
Attention like a blade.
“Has anyone told you,” he said, “that you’re allowed to enjoy punishing him?”
You looked at him sharply.
He smiled, but not kindly.
Not unkindly either.
Knowingly.
“That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Blocking him. Returning sweaters. Refusing letters. Part of you is healing. Part of you is making sure he feels every inch of the distance he taught you to endure.”
Heat rose to your face.
“That’s cruel.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not cruel.”
“No.” Aerion tilted his head. “But you’ve been wounded by someone crueler than you. That creates interesting little imitations.”
You hated him for that.
You liked him a little for it too.
Because he did not soften the truth until it became useless.
You looked back at the display case.
“I don’t know how to make him understand.”
“Understand what?”
“That I’m not his.”
Aerion said nothing.
You expected a joke.
He didn’t give you one.
After a moment, he asked, “Do you believe that?”
You looked at him.
His face was calm now.
Too calm.
“I want to.”
“Ah.”
You swallowed.
“I am not his.”
“Legally? Spiritually? Psychosexually?”
“Aerion.”
“Ah, so that's why he calls you princess. There’s the temper.”
You glared.
He smiled.
Then, more softly, “You’re not his. But you have been living like a country under occupation for so long that independence feels unnatural.”
The words slid under your ribs.
You hated how Targaryen men could say awful things beautifully.
“What do I do?” you asked before you could stop yourself.
Aerion’s eyes gleamed.
“Oh, dangerous question.”
You shook your head.
“No. Forget it.”
“No, no. Too late. I’ve been summoned.”
“No, you have not. You just got back from Lys and immediately decided to make yourself everyone’s problem again.”
“So I’ve been told by priests, professors, and two separate customs agents.”
Despite yourself, you laughed.
It felt strange.
Rusty.
Aerion’s expression warmed, briefly and unexpectedly.
“There,” he said. “That. Start with that.”
“With laughing?”
“With remembering you can do it when he isn’t in the room.”
You looked away.
Aerion did not press.
That was the beginning.
Not of the plan.
Not yet.
Just Aerion returning from Lys and appearing at the edge of your new life like a bad idea with excellent timing.
He came to the gallery again the following Friday.
Then to a group brunch where Mya gave him a suspicious look and Jeyne asked if he had ever committed tax fraud.
“Define committed,” Aerion said.
Jeyne pointed at him.
“I don’t like him.”
“You will,” Aerion said.
“I will not.”
“Give it two mimosas.”
You laughed again.
Across the table, Mya watched you with careful eyes.
After brunch, Aerion walked you to the corner while your friends pretended not to observe from the café window.
“You know they think I’m corrupting you,” he said.
“Aren’t you?”
“Not yet. I like to build anticipation.”
You shook your head.
He glanced down at you.
“Has he tried to see you?”
Your smile faded.
“No.”
Not directly.
That was somehow worse.
Valarr had become a presence even in absence.
You saw signs of him everywhere.
A black car parked too long near your street, pulling away before you could be certain.
Your favorite bakery suddenly had your usual pastries boxed and waiting before you even reached the counter, the girl at the till waving away your card with a nervous smile and saying it had already been taken care of.
It was convenient.
Too convenient.
No waiting in the morning queue. No standing behind students and office workers while your coffee went cold in your hand. Just your order ready, paid for, impossible to refuse without making a scene.
An then a meeting you had been chasing for months with a famous painter who never answered anyone’s emails, suddenly offered to you through his studio manager with no explanation.
You had been trying to convince him to donate a piece for the gallery’s youth program fundraiser. One painting. One work from his private archive. Anything with his name attached to it would have secured enough attention, enough donors, enough money to keep the project alive for another year.
You had mentioned it to Mya once, exhausted and half hopeless, after another polite rejection from his team.
A week later, the artist’s studio called.
Not only was he willing to donate a piece, they said. He would donate one of his most sought-after works.
No fee.
No conditions.
Just support for the program.
You knew.
Of course you knew.
Valarr was trying to care for you without touching you.
Trying to fix the problems around you because he was no longer allowed to reach for you directly.
It made you furious.
It made you ache.
Aerion studied your face.
“He’s still trying to be useful.”
“Yes.”
“That must be maddening.”
“It is.”
“Because it works?”
You looked at him.
Aerion smiled faintly.
“Don’t worry. Your secret is safe.”
“I don’t want it to work.”
“But it does.”
You said nothing.
He leaned one shoulder against a lamppost.
“Then make him useless.”
You frowned.
“What?”
“Stop letting his usefulness matter. Let someone else walk you home. Let someone else buy your coffee. Let someone else make you laugh in public.”
Your pulse quickened.
“Someone like you?”
He spread a hand over his chest.
“I volunteer my services for the noble cause of ruining my cousin’s week.”
“This is not a joke.”
“No,” Aerion said. “It’s theater. Different thing.”
You should have walked away.
Instead, you asked, “What would we do?”
His smile turned wicked.
“Slowly? Nothing obvious. Obvious jealousy is easy. Valarr can dismiss that as a stunt. No, what will make him insane is uncertainty.”
The word sent a chill through you.
Aerion continued, almost idly.
“Coffee first. Somewhere people will see. Then dinner. Nothing romantic enough to be undeniable, nothing innocent enough to be harmless. Maybe I touch your hand. Maybe I fix your necklace. Maybe I become familiar enough that he hears about it from three different people before he sees it himself.”
You stared at him.
“You’ve thought about this.”
“My darling, I have been in Lys for two months surrounded by diplomats, degenerates, and bored aristocrats. I was born for intrigue and tragically underutilized by peacetime.”
“Don’t call me darling.”
“Right. Apologies.”
People moved around you in their ordinary lives, carrying flowers, coffee, shopping bags. No one knew that you were considering using one Targaryen man to break another.
It should have felt beneath you.
Instead, it felt like the first plan that did not involve waiting.
“I don’t want to kiss you,” you said.
Aerion’s brows lifted.
“Devastating. I’ll notify my ego gently.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I. My ego is very delicate.”
“Aerion.”
His expression softened.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to use you like that.”
“You are absolutely using me like that.”
You winced.
“But,” he added, “I am consenting to being used. Enthusiastically. With flair.”
You studied him.
“Why?”
Aerion looked past you toward the café window, where Mya and Jeyne immediately pretended to be fascinated by the menu.
“Because Valarr has spent his whole life with this twisted belief system. It made him him morally serious.”
You blinked.
Aerion looked back at you.
“I would like him to learn that desire is not destiny. Preferably while suffering.”
“You do love him.”
“Unfortunately.”
You smiled faintly.
Aerion held out his hand.
Not to take yours.
To shake.
“Rules, then.”
You looked at his hand.
“What rules?”
“You decide what I can touch. You decide when we stop. If you cry, truly cry, we stop immediately. If you are doing something only to hurt yourself, I say no.”
“That seems hypocritical.”
“I contain multitudes.”
You hesitated.
Then shook his hand.
His grip was warm.
“Rule for you,” you said.
His smile widened.
“Oh?”
“You don’t enjoy it too much.”
Aerion laughed.
“I cannot agree to that in good faith.”
//
The plan began with coffee.
Not a date.
Not exactly.
Aerion took you to a little place in the Crownmarket where the tables spilled onto the pavement and everyone who mattered seemed to pass by eventually.
He ordered espresso. You ordered tea.
“Tea,” he said, scandalized.
“You drink espresso because you have a personality disorder.”
“I drink espresso because I enjoy suffering in concentrated form.”
“You’re definitely related to Valarr.”
Aerion placed a hand dramatically over his heart.
“Cruel.”
You smiled.
He noticed but did not point it out this time.
That was how he was clever.
A lesser man would have teased you for every smile and made you retreat.
Aerion let them happen.
He made you talk about the gallery. About your mother. About the books you wanted to read but never finished because Valarr always distracted you by calling at the wrong time.
He did not let you talk about Valarr for more than five minutes at once.
“Rule three,” he said when you slipped for the third time. “If his name appears too often, you owe me a secret.”
“A secret?”
“Yes. Something small. Something that belongs to you, not him.”
You thought about it.
“I hate champagne.”
Aerion stared at you.
“You drink it constantly.”
“Because everyone orders it.”
“That is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It is not.”
“It is. From now on, you drink what you like.”
“What if I don’t know what I like?”
Aerion’s gaze softened.
“Then we find out.”
That was the second part of the plan, though you did not understand it yet.
It was not only about Valarr seeing you with someone else.
It was about you seeing yourself without Valarr beside you, deciding for you, ordering for you, warning men away from you, calling your innocence rare while keeping you untouched by anyone but his almost.
Aerion took you to restaurants Valarr hated.
Bars Valarr would never enter because the lighting was bad and the chairs were uncomfortable. Because those places were beneath him.
Art shows where no one cared about Targaryens unless they were donating.
He coached you like a conspirator and his apprentice
//
Meanwhile, Valarr spiraled.
You heard about him in fragments, handed to you by people who did not know whether they were warning you, comforting you, or reopening a wound you were trying to keep closed.
Willas said Valarr had stopped going out.
Mya said he had called her once and said nothing for so long she thought the line had dropped. When she finally said his name, he had exhaled once, unevenly, and ended the call.
Jeyne said Damon received an apology letter so formal, so coldly devastating in its politeness, that he had sent back only, I accept, but please never contact me again.
That one made you laugh for nearly a minute.
A real laugh.
Helpless. Startled. Almost bright.
Then the laugh broke in your throat, and you cried into your hands because even the ridiculous things still led back to Valarr.
Valarr stopped sending flowers after you told Mya you hated them now.
You knew she had told him. You pretended not to.
After that, he sent nothing.
No lilies.
No roses.
No irises like little storms.
Nothing.
And somehow, that was worse.
His silence became another kind of presence. A controlled absence. A punishment he was giving himself and making you feel anyway.
Once, at the gallery, you found a small envelope on your desk.
No gift.
No grand gesture.
Just a card.
I did not send flowers because you said no flowers.
I miss you, princess.
— V
You stared at it for a long time.
Long enough that the words blurred.
Then you put it in the drawer with the other letters.
You had stopped tearing them.
That felt like weakness.
Or maybe it was only exhaustion.
//
King’s Landing had always been a city with too many windows and not enough shame.
They noticed Aerion at your side in the Crownmarket.
They noticed how often he leaned down to say something close to your ear, not quite whispering, but close enough to make it look intimate.
They noticed his hand at your elbow when you crossed the street.
Not possessive.
Not like Valarr.
Aerion touched you like he was asking a question every time.
A hand offered, not placed.
A brush of fingers, not a claim.
He touched your wrist when he made you laugh. He fixed the clasp of your necklace outside a restaurant while you stood very still, pretending your pulse had not jumped because you knew exactly how it would look to anyone watching. He rested his hand lightly against the small of your back when guiding you through crowded rooms, and the pressure was always brief enough to be deniable.
That was the genius of it.
The cruelty too.
Nothing Aerion did was enough to condemn.
Everything Aerion did was enough to imagine.
And Valarr had always been very good at imagining.
People noticed you laughing with Aerion outside a bookshop, your head tipped back, your hand pressed against his sleeve as if you needed him to hold still while you caught your breath.
They noticed Aerion taking the coffee from your hand to taste it, grimacing theatrically, and you laughing again, softer that time.
They noticed him walking you home in the rain beneath one umbrella, your shoulders almost touching.
They noticed, most importantly, that Valarr Targaryen was not there.
In King’s Landing, absence was gossip too.
Absence made them creative. And Valarr heard all of it.
A mention at a private club.
A cousin’s careless joke.
A photograph sent by someone who thought they were being helpful.
A pause in conversation when he entered a room.
He collected every fragment of you and Aerion the way a starving man collected crumbs.
Then he tortured himself with them.
Aerion laughing with you outside the gallery.
Aerion touching your elbow.
Aerion beside you at dinner.
Aerion carrying your bag.
Aerion knowing what you ordered.
Aerion making you smile in public, easily, as if it cost him nothing.
That was the part that undid Valarr.
The ease.
For years, Valarr had treated your happiness like something private. Something he could summon with a look, a hand at your waist, a quiet joke murmured into your hair. Something that belonged, if not to him, then near him.
Now Aerion had it in public.
Aerion made you laugh where anyone could see.
Aerion stood too close and did not seem to fear the privilege of it.
Aerion touched you without looking like he was burning alive from the restraint of not taking more.
And Valarr watched himself become unnecessary in pieces.
A photograph appeared online late one Thursday night.
Not in a paper.
Not scandalous enough for that.
Just someone’s social post from a rooftop bar.
In the background, slightly blurred beneath strings of warm lights, you stood beside Aerion. His head was bent toward yours, silver hair catching the glow. One of his hands rested on the railing beside your hip, not touching you, but close enough to suggest that he could have.
Your face was turned up toward him.
You were smiling.
Not with that brittle, wounded smile Valarr knew too well.
You looked happy.
That was what made it devastating.
You did not look healed.
You did not look in love.
You did not look like you had forgotten him.
But you looked happy enough to convince a stranger.
And Valarr saw it.
He saw it alone in his flat, long after midnight, because sleep had become something that happened to other men.
At first, he did not understand what he was looking at.
His thumb stopped on the screen.
His eyes found Aerion first.
Then you.
Then Aerion’s hand near your hip.
Then your smile.
His breath went out of him.
For a moment, there was no anger.
Only disbelief.
A strange, white emptiness opening beneath his ribs.
You were smiling at Aerion like that.
Aerion.
His cousin. His blood. The careless, laughing, reckless thing Valarr had spent half his life dismissing as unserious.
Aerion, who did not deserve to know how your face looked when you forgot to guard it.
Aerion, who had not sat with you through exam panic at three in the morning.
Aerion, who had not memorized the exact pitch of your voice when you were about to cry.
Aerion, who had not spent years wanting you so badly he had mistaken restraint for virtue.
And yet there you were.
Smiling at him.
Valarr enlarged the photograph.
A mistake.
He saw the details then.
The loose strand of hair near your cheek.
The tilt of Aerion’s head.
The way your body angled toward him, not fully, not consciously, but enough.
Enough.
Valarr’s grip tightened around the phone.
His mind began supplying what the photograph did not show.
Aerion’s fingers brushing your hair back.
Aerion’s mouth near your ear.
Aerion making some filthy little joke just to watch your eyes widen.
Aerion touching the inside of your wrist the way Valarr used to.
Aerion learning how easy it was to make you laugh when you were tired.
Aerion walking you home.
Aerion being invited upstairs.
No.
Valarr stood so abruptly his chair scraped hard against the floor.
No.
He looked at the photo again.
You were still smiling.
That was the insult his mind could not survive.
Not Aerion’s closeness.
Not even Aerion’s hand near your body.
Your smile.
The proof that Valarr’s absence had not destroyed the world.
The proof that you could stand beneath lights with another man and laugh.
The proof that someone else could give you a moment of softness while Valarr sat alone, useless and unchosen, with your number blocked and your silence pressed against his throat like a blade.
His vision went sharp at the edges.
He told himself to put the phone down.
He did not.
He stared until the image became unbearable.
Then he threw the phone against the wall.
It hit hard enough to crack the screen and dent the plaster before falling to the floor.
The sound should have satisfied him.
It did not.
Nothing did.
Not the broken phone.
Not the silence after.
Not the fact that, for one violent second, he had done something instead of simply enduring.
He stood in the dark, breathing too hard, hands flexing open and shut at his sides.
Pairing: Valarr Targaryen x Reader
Synopsis: You and Valarr have always called it friendship. Even when his hands lingered, even when his bed felt like yours, even when every man who wanted you seems to always vanished.
Inspired by this post.
Part 3i
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3i
You walked out through the alley gate instead of going back through the restaurant.
You did not say goodbye to your friends.
You did not wait for a car.
You walked three blocks in heels that cut into your feet before Mya found you, breathless and panicked, her coat thrown over her dress.
“Did he—”
“No,” you choked. “No. He didn’t.”
Mya’s face tightened. “What did he say?”
You laughed, but it broke apart into tears. “He offered to teach me.”
For a moment, Mya only stared at you.
Then she took your face in both hands, furious and gentle all at once. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Mya—”
“No. Come on. You’re coming with me.”
“My bag is still inside.”
“Jeyne will get it.”
And then Mya took you home. And since she knew Valarr all too well.
Tonight home was not your apartment.
Hers.
//
For years, you had always returned.
Back to the booth where he waited like nothing had happened. Back to the party with your throat tight and your pride bleeding quietly beneath your smile. Back to his car. Back to his bed. Back to the warm, humiliating safety of being wanted by him, even when wanting you was never the same as choosing you.
You always came back after he hurt you.
Sometimes in silence, your pain held carefully behind your teeth. Sometimes with wounded eyes that would not meet his for too long. Sometimes with a brittle little smile, so brave and so ruined, it made something inside him twist until his hand flexed uselessly at his side.
As if he could reach into your chest and press his thumb to the bruise he had left there.
As if he could smooth the ache away.
As if he had not been the one to put it there.
No matter how badly he wounded you, no matter how carelessly he pushed, you always came back.
But not that night.
That night, after he offered to teach you how to give away the one part of yourself you had been saving for love, something in you seemed to close. Not break. Not shatter.
Close.
You looked at him as if you had finally understood him. As if the last soft, foolish piece of hope inside you had gone cold.
And then you left through the side gate.
No goodbye.
No dramatic last look.
No plea for him to understand what he had done.
Just the sharp click of your heels against wet stone, fading farther and farther away, and the black swing of the alley gate shutting behind you.
Valarr stood there long after you were gone.
Still.
Silent.
Not quite breathing.
The garden heater hissed beside him. Music thudded faintly through the brick wall. Somewhere inside, Willas laughed at something, and the sound seemed obscene.
Valarr looked down at his own hands.
Empty.
That was the thing that stayed with him.
His hands were empty.
For years, he had touched you like a man testing the limits of his own restraint. Your hair. Your waist. Your knee beneath crowded tables. The inside of your wrist when he guided you through a room. He had made a religion out of almost. Almost holding you. Almost claiming you. Almost letting himself want you in a way that meant something.
And now, when he finally reached for you, he was too late.
You were gone.
By the time he got back inside, your friends already knew.
Mya’s chair was empty. Jeyne was standing, your bag clutched in one hand, murder in her eyes. Willas took one look at Valarr’s face and stopped smiling.
“What happened?” he asked.
Valarr did not answer.
Jeyne stepped toward him.
“You're an absolute idiot.”
Valarr’s gaze moved to the bag in her hand.
“Where is she?”
“Not here.”
“Jeyne.”
“No, Valarr.”
His eyes sharpened.
It was the tone that usually made people remember his last name. The tone that bent waiters, assistants, men twice his age in boardrooms.
Jeyne did not bend.
She looked him dead in the face and said, “You do not get to use that voice tonight.”
Willas went very still.
Valarr stared at her.
For one second, something ugly moved behind his eyes.
Then it broke. Not into softness.
Into panic.
“Where is she?” he asked again, and this time it was not a command.
That was worse.
Jeyne looked startled by it.
Then angry again, because pity for him felt like a betrayal of you.
“With Mya,” she said. “And if you follow them, I will call your father myself and tell him his heir is harassing crying women outside restaurants.”
Valarr’s jaw locked.
“You think I care about that?”
“No,” Jeyne said. “That’s the problem because no one can reason with you.”
He moved past her.
Willas caught his arm.
“Val.”
Valarr looked at the hand on his sleeve as if he did not recognize it.
Willas lowered his voice.
“Don’t.”
“She is crying.”
“Yes.”
“I need to—”
“No, you need to give her space. Away from you.”
The words struck him strangely.
Away from you.
As if there was any version of your life where his absence did not count as a wound.
As if he had not been the person you called when you were sick, drunk, lonely, frightened, bored. As if he had not known the exact way you took your coffee, which sweaters scratched your skin, which streets made you nervous at night.
As if the world had the right to contain you without him in it.
Valarr looked toward the door you had not used.
The front one. The ordinary one. Then toward the side exit. The one you had vanished through.
His hand shook once at his side.
Willas saw it.
Valarr did not.
“Give me her bag,” he said.
Jeyne almost laughed.
“Absolutely not.”
“I need to talk to her.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“She is upset.”
“Because of you, Valarr!”
Valarr’s mouth tightened. Then he turned and walked out. Willas followed him halfway to the door.
“Where are you going?”
Valarr did not look back.
“To fix this.”
But there were some things that could not be fixed no matter what.
//
Mya took you home to her flat because she did not trust you alone, and she trusted Valarr even less.
Not near your building. Not near your door. Not with that voice of his, low and careful and devastatingly gentle when he wanted something badly enough.
She did not say any of that.
She only kept one hand around your wrist the whole way up the stairs, as if afraid you might fall apart if she let go.
You sat on the edge of her guest bed in borrowed pajamas that smelled like detergent and lavender, your hands loose in your lap, your hair still pinned from the party. You looked absurdly put together from the neck up. Lipstick faded but still there. Mascara only slightly smudged. Earrings still catching the light.
But below that, you were undone.
Mya knelt in front of you without a word and reached for the buckle of your heel.
The first strap came loose.
Then the second.
The leather had bitten into your skin during the walk. Thin red lines carved around your ankle, angry and raw. You had not felt them when you were walking. You had barely felt the cold. Barely felt the wet stone beneath your feet. Barely felt anything except the terrible hollow place in your chest where your hope had been.
But when Mya’s thumb brushed the mark, gently, almost by accident, something inside you gave way.
Your face crumpled.
And then you cried.
Not beautifully. Not softly. Not the way heroines cried in films, with luminous tears and trembling mouths and music swelling beneath the scene.
You cried like a child trying not to be heard.
Small, broken sounds pressed into the back of your throat. One hand over your mouth. Shoulders shaking as if your body was ashamed of its own grief.
Mya froze for half a second.
Then she put your shoes aside and climbed onto the bed beside you, gathering you against her chest with the fierce, wordless tenderness of someone who knew there was nothing to fix. Not yet. Not tonight.
You kept saying the same thing.
As if saying it enough times would make it stop being true.
“He didn’t say he loved me.”
Mya’s hand moved over your hair, slow and steady.
“I know.”
“He heard me say it.” Your voice cracked so badly the words barely came out. “He heard me say it, Mya. He heard everything, and he didn’t say it back.”
“I know, baby.”
“He just looked at me.” You shut your eyes, but it did not help. You could still see him. That beautiful, ruined face. That silence. That pause where love should have been. “He looked at me and said nothing.”
Mya’s arms tightened around you.
“He didn’t choose me,” you whispered. “Even then.”
Mya said nothing.
And somehow that was worse.
Because before then, some desperate, humiliated part of you had still been trying to save him. Still digging through the wreckage for a softer explanation. Maybe you had misunderstood. Maybe his voice had been too rough and your heart too loud. Maybe he had meant to be tender and only fumbled it because Valarr had never been good at saying things plainly. Maybe you had heard cruelty because years of wanting him had made you cruel to yourself first.
Then you said the last part.
“He offered to teach me.”
Mya’s hand stilled in your hair.
Only for a second.
Only long enough for you to feel the truth pass through her.
Then she continued stroking your hair, gentler now.
“Oh, honey.”
And there it was.
That was the moment you understood it had been as awful as it felt.
Not dramatic.
Not imagined.
Not the wild overreaction of a girl who had wanted too much and received too little.
It had been cruel.
Even if he had not meant it that way.
Maybe especially then.
Because Valarr had known you. He knew the shape of your silence. He knew what it meant when your hands shook. He knew how carefully you had kept that part of yourself untouched, not because you were afraid of desire, but because you had been foolish enough to make it sacred. Foolish enough to save it for love.
For him.
And when you had finally placed your heart in his hands, bare and trembling and humiliatingly honest, he had answered as if your longing was a problem of experience.
As if your love was something to instruct out of you.
Your phone began ringing at 1:13 a.m.
The sound cut through the dim room like a blade.
You both looked at it.
Valarr.
His name filled the screen, bright and impossible.
For one terrible second, your whole body reacted before your pride could stop it. Your breath caught. Your hand twitched. Your heart, stupid loyal thing, lurched toward him as if he had not just broken it open.
You stared at his name until the screen went dark.
Then it lit again.
Valarr.
Again.
Valarr.
Again.
Valarr.
Mya looked at you, waiting.
You whispered, “I can’t.”
Your voice was so small you hated it.
“I know,” she said.
So she took the phone.
She did not answer.
She did not scold you for wanting to. She did not tell you to be strong. She only turned the screen face down on the bedside table and sat with you until the ringing stopped.
Then started again.
Then stopped.
Then started again.
By morning, the sky outside Mya’s curtains had gone pale and dirty blue. You had not slept so much as drifted in and out of exhaustion, your body heavy, your mind cruelly awake.
There were seventeen missed calls.
Eleven texts.
One voicemail.
You did not listen to it.
You told yourself you would not read the texts either.
Then you did, because you were weak.
Because loving someone for years did not end just because they had finally given you a reason to stop.
Valarr: Where are you?
Valarr: Please answer me.
Valarr: I need to know you are safe.
Valarr: I didn’t mean it like that.
Valarr: I know what it sounded like.
Valarr: Please let me explain.
Valarr: Princess.
Valarr: Don’t do this.
Valarr: Please.
Valarr: I love you.
You stopped breathing.
The room went very still around you.
I love you.
There it was.
The thing you had wanted for years.
The thing you had imagined in a hundred pathetic, private ways. In his car. In his bed. In the dark between almost and never. You had wondered what it would sound like in his voice. Whether he would say it softly or desperately. Whether he would look ashamed of it, or relieved. Whether he would touch your face when he said it. Whether the whole world would tilt, finally, into place.
And now it was here.
Not in his voice.
Not with his hands on your face.
Not when it could have saved you.
It sat in a blue bubble at 3:42 a.m., small and glowing and almost obscene.
After you had walked away.
After he had watched your face collapse under the weight of what he had not said.
After he had made you feel like a body before a beloved thing.
After the damage.
Only after the damage.
Your vision blurred. For one wild, aching second, the words went straight through every defense you had managed to build overnight. They found the softest part of you. The foolish part. The part that had waited and waited and waited.
He loves me.
Then, almost immediately, another thought came.
No.
He is afraid.
And somehow that hurt more.
Because you could see it too clearly. Valarr standing somewhere in the dark, jaw tight, control slipping from his hands for once. Valarr realizing you had not gone home. Valarr realizing you were not answering. Valarr realizing, perhaps for the first time, that you could leave and stay gone.
So he had reached for the one thing he had never given you.
Not because he had finally understood your heart.
But because he wanted to calm you down.
Because he wanted the crying to stop. The silence to stop. The consequence to stop.
Because he thought those three words might bring you back to him.
And God, the worst part was that once, they would have.
Once, you would have answered before the second ring. Once, you would have forgiven him before he finished explaining. Once, you would have held that little blue confession against your chest like proof that the years of ache had meant something. Like proof that he had only been slow, not cruel. Frightened, not selfish. Yours, just not ready.
But now the words felt different.
They did not feel like a confession.
They felt like panic wearing love’s clothes.
A rope thrown after you had already drowned.
A bandage pressed over a wound he had refused to stop making.
Your thumb hovered over the message.
I love you.
You wanted to believe it.
That was the humiliation of it.
Even now, after everything, some broken, tender part of you wanted to curl around those words and let them warm you. You wanted to imagine him meaning it. You wanted to imagine him suffering. You wanted to imagine that somewhere between the garden and 3:42 a.m., he had finally understood what he had done.
But wanting had ruined you once already.
You looked at the message until the letters stopped looking like words.
Then you handed the phone back to Mya.
Your hand was shaking.
“Block him,” you said.
Mya’s face softened with something like grief.
“Are you sure?”
No.
You were not sure.
You were heartbroken. You were exhausted. You were still in love with him. You were still the same girl who had waited years for that message and had finally received it too late.
But you thought of his silence.
You thought of his offer.
You thought of the way love, from him, only seemed to arrive when you were already halfway out the door.
So you swallowed the sob rising in your throat and nodded.
“Block him,” you said again. “Before I answer.”
//
The first week was the hardest because your life still expected Valarr.
Your body expected him.
At eight in the morning, you expected a message complaining that you never ate breakfast.
At noon, you expected him to ask whether your gallery director was still being incompetent.
At six, you expected the black car he sometimes sent without warning if it was raining.
At night, you expected him to call with some ridiculous complaint about Matarys, or his father, or the way you always stole his better pillows and then denied it.
Silence did not feel like absence.
It felt like impact.
A bruise pressed over and over.
You went back to your flat after three days. Mya said she could keep you forever but not if you were going to haunt her guest room like a Victorian widow.
Your apartment smelled faintly of the candle Valarr hated.
Peony and vanilla.
“Smells like a brothel for cupcakes,” he had said the first time he came over after you lit it.
You had thrown a cushion at his head.
He had caught it, laughing, and stretched across your sofa as if he had paid for the furniture.
Now the cushion was still there.
The sofa still held the faint dip of him.
In the bathroom, his spare toothbrush sat beside yours.
In the kitchen, his preferred coffee was in your cabinet because he said yours tasted like burnt soil.
In your closet, one of his sweaters hung between your coats.
You touched the sleeve.
Dark grey cashmere.
You had stolen it during a cold snap in university, and he had pretended to be annoyed while wearing visible satisfaction for an entire week.
You took it off the hanger. Pressed it to your face.
It still smelled like him.
That was when you almost unblocked him.
Almost.
Your thumb hovered over the settings. Your breath shook.
Then you remembered his face in the garden.
Not loving.
Not confessing.
Offering.
Let me teach you.
You threw the sweater into a laundry bag, tied it shut, and shoved it into the hall closet.
//
On the fourth day, the flowers began.
The first arrangement arrived at your apartment just before noon.
White lilies and pale winter roses, arranged so beautifully, Once you would have told there were romantic. Not anymore. Just precise. Expensive. Valarr.
You stared at them from the doorway for a long moment while the delivery man held out the card.
You did not take it.
“Miss?”
“Leave it,” you said.
He placed the arrangement on the small table beside your door and left.
For nearly an hour, the flowers sat there untouched, filling your hallway with their soft, funeral-sweet scent.
You did not open the card.
You already knew who it was from. You already knew what he would try to say.
The second arrangement came to the gallery.
Blue irises.
Your favorite.
Because once, years ago, you had told him they looked like little storms. You had not even remembered saying it until Lysa carried them toward your desk with wide eyes and a poorly hidden smile.
“Someone’s very sorry,” she said.
You looked at the flowers.
Something in your throat closed.
They were beautiful. Of course they were beautiful. Valarr never missed details. He remembered things no one else remembered. The name of the artist you liked. Which flowers made you stop walking past a market stall just to look.
He remembered everything except how to love you when it mattered.
“Put them in the back room,” you said.
Lysa’s smile faded. “Should I read the card?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Your eyes stayed fixed on the irises. Those little storms.
“No.”
The third arrangement came to Mya’s apartment, though you were no longer staying there.
The fourth went to Jeyne’s office.
That was when you understood Valarr had stopped trying to reach only you.
If he could not get past the silence directly, he would send proof of himself into every room connected to you. He would make your grief bloom on your desk, in your friends’ hallways, beside their computers and coffee mugs. He would force his remorse into the lives of everyone who loved you until one of them softened enough to carry it back.
Jeyne called you after that one.
“I’m going to set them on fire.”
“Don’t,” you said quietly.
“Then I’m going to invoice him for emotional labor.”
“That’s fair.”
“He wrote a card.”
“Don’t tell me.”
A pause.
You closed your eyes.
“Jeyne.”
“I won’t.”
“Did you read it?”
“Yes.”
You pressed your lips together until they hurt. “Was it bad?”
“No.”
That was worse somehow.
Jeyne exhaled softly.
“It was… not bad.”
Your hand tightened around the phone.
“I can’t.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean it.” Your voice broke despite how hard you tried to hold it steady. “I can’t hear it. Not now. Not when I’m still this weak.”
“You’re not weak.”
“I am with him.” The confession came out small and raw. “If he says the right thing now, I’ll forgive him because I want to. Not because he deserves it. Not because he’s changed. Just because I miss him.”
Jeyne went quiet.
For a moment, all you heard was the low hum of the gallery around you. Footsteps. The distant murmur of visitors. Someone laughing softly in the next room, as if your heart had not become something you had to physically hold together.
Then Jeyne said, “You’re being smart. I’m so proud of you.”
A weak, startled laugh slipped out of you.
“Thank you?”
“You’re welcome. I’m still keeping the flowers, though. They’re expensive, and I’m petty.”
The letters started after the flowers failed.
He could not text you.
He could not call.
So he wrote.
The first envelope appeared beneath your door.
You recognized his handwriting before you even bent to pick it up.
That was the awful thing about loving someone for years. Their handwriting could hurt you. The slope of a letter. The careless confidence of his name. The dark press of ink where his hand had lingered too long.
You left the envelope on the floor for six hours.
Then twelve.
Then you moved it to the kitchen counter because stepping over it began to feel like stepping over a body.
Then, when you could not bear seeing it there either, you put it in the drawer beside the sink.
You did not open it.
Not that day.
The second letter came by courier.
The third was handed to Mya by a man in a suit, which made Mya so furious she nearly slammed the door on his hand.
The fourth arrived at the gallery, tucked inside a book you had mentioned wanting months ago.
That one nearly broke you.
Because he had remembered the book.
Of course he had.
Valarr remembered everything that made leaving him harder.
You opened one letter on the eighth day.
Not the first.
Not the one slipped beneath your door, because that one felt too much like begging in the place you lived. Not the fourth, because the book still hurt too badly to touch.
You opened the third.
Just because.
Just because you were tired.
Just because you missed him.
Just because grief made bargains with you in the dark, and that morning you lost one.
The paper was thick and cream-colored. His handwriting was neat at first, controlled the way Valarr always was when he was trying not to show his hand.
Then, halfway down the page, it began to loosen.
As if the control had started failing him.
My princess,
My love,
I do not know if I am allowed to call you either of those things anymore. I do not know if I am allowed anything.
I keep thinking of your face when I said it. Not love. Not the thing I should have said. The other thing. The unforgivable thing.
Let me teach you.
I have heard myself say it every hour since.
It was cowardice dressed as restraint. Possession dressed as care.
Jealousy pretending to be protection.
You told me you loved me. I heard the thing I have wanted most in the world, and I answered like a man more afraid of being vulnerable than of hurting you.
There is no explanation I can give that will not become an excuse if I let it.
So I will only say this.
I am sorry.
I love you.
I should have said it first.
— V
You read it once.
Then again.
Then a third time, slower, as if there might be some hidden cruelty between the lines. Some proof that he still did not understand. Some reason you could use to hate him cleanly.
But there was none.
That was the problem.
It was not perfect, but it was close enough to what you had needed that your heart turned toward it before your pride could stop it.
He knew.
He knew exactly what he had done.
And somehow that did not make it easier.
It made it worse.
Because if he understood it now, why had he not understood it then? Why did your pain always have to become unbearable before he learned how to be gentle with it? Why did love, from Valarr, always arrive late and bleeding?
You folded the letter carefully.
Then you tore it in half.
Then you stared at the torn pieces in your hands and began to cry because you had torn it.
Because some part of you still wanted to keep it.
Because some part of you wanted to press it to your chest like proof.
Because some part of you still loved him enough to mourn the destruction of his apology.
That was the rhythm of the second week.
Trying to move on was not dramatic.
It was practical.
Small.
Humiliating.
It was changing your sheets because they still smelled faintly like him.
It was taking his preferred coffee out of your cabinet and giving it to Lysa, who accepted it with the solemnity of someone receiving contraband.
It was throwing away the takeaway menus from restaurants he always ordered from because you could not bear seeing his usual circled in black pen.
It was deleting the draft of a message you wrote at two in the morning that said only, I miss you.
It was surviving your own weakness in increments.
One hour.
Then another.
Then another.
You returned his sweater through Willas.
You could not send it by courier. That felt too cruel, too formal, too much like pretending Valarr was only some man whose things you needed removed from your life.
But you could not bring it to him yourself.
So Willas came.
He stood in your doorway looking unusually subdued, one hand shoved into his coat pocket, his eyes dropping to the paper bag in your hand.
For a moment, neither of you said anything.
Then you held it out.
“His sweater.”
Willas took it carefully.
Too carefully.
As if it were something fragile.
As if it were not just dark grey cashmere, folded badly in a paper bag, but a piece of your life you were trying to return before it could undo you.
“He hasn’t been sleeping,” Willas said.
Your fingers tightened around the edge of the door.
“I didn’t ask, Willas.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t tell me.”
He looked down at the bag.
You should have closed the door.
You should have said goodbye. You should have protected yourself from the part of you that still wanted to know whether Valarr was suffering. Whether he was sorry. Whether he missed you in a way that punished him.
Instead, you heard yourself ask, “Is he really that bad?”
Willas’ expression changed.
Softened.
And there was your answer before he even spoke.
“He’s… not himself.”
You laughed once, without humor.
“That sounds healthy for everyone.”
“He went to work yesterday.”
“Good,” you said. “Then he’s still functional.”
Willas hesitated.
You hated that hesitation.
“He sat in his office for six hours,” he said. “Didn’t turn on the lights. Didn’t take meetings. Didn’t answer his father. Baelor came in, looked at him, and walked back out.”
Despite yourself, you pictured it.
Valarr in that perfect office high above the city. All glass and steel and inherited power. Valarr at his desk in the dark, immaculate and ruined, surrounded by every weapon he had ever known how to use.
Money.
Influence.
Charm.
Control.
None of it useful now.
None of it able to force your name back onto his screen.
None of it able to make you answer.
You hated that the image hurt you.
You hated that some foolish, tender part of you wanted to go to him. To turn on the light. To touch his face. To say, I’m here. I’m still here.
You hated yourself most for that.
“He’ll get over it,” you said.
Willas looked at you.
Quietly, too gently, he asked, “Do you want him to?”
The question struck exactly where you were weakest.
Because no, you did not want Valarr to get over you.
You wanted him to ache.
You wanted him to understand.
You wanted him to miss you so badly it remade him.
You wanted him to suffer enough to prove that losing you meant something.
And you hated that too.
So you did not answer.
You only took one step back and closed the door in Willas’ face before he could see you cry.
//
That night, you dreamed of Valarr’s hands.
Not in the way you used to.
Not with heat. Not with want.
Worse.
You dreamed of something ordinary.
You were standing in a queue somewhere, maybe for coffee, maybe outside some crowded bar, and Valarr was behind you. Close enough that you could feel the warmth of him at your back. Close enough that his fingers had found your hair without asking, dragging slowly through the curls as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
In the dream, Mya stood beside you, watching.
You smiled too brightly and said, “We’re just friends.”
And all the while, Valarr’s fingers moved through your hair with the quiet, intimate confidence of a man who knew that was a lie.
You turned to him then.
Your pride was gone. Your anger was gone. There was only the bare, pathetic truth of you, standing there in the middle of the dream with your heart in your throat.
“Please love me,” you said.
Valarr looked down at you.
Softly. Almost wounded.
“I do.”
For one suspended second, you believed him.
Then you woke up.
The bed was empty.
No hand in your hair.
No warmth at your back.
No Valarr.
Only the pale morning light against the wall and the cruel ache of having been loved perfectly by a dream.
By the third week, your friends had begun treating Valarr like weather.
Something dangerous.
Something everywhere.
Something you had to plan around even when you could not see it.
Mya saw him outside your gallery first.
Not directly outside. Valarr was too careful for that. Too controlled. Too aware of how things looked.
He stood across the street beneath the black awning of a closed jewelry shop, coat collar turned up against the rain. He was not looking at the gallery door.
He was looking at its reflection in the opposite window.
That detail made you feel sick.
Because it was so him.
Careful even in ruin. Watching without appearing to watch. Close enough to know whether you came out safely, but far enough away to tell himself he was respecting your space.
As if distance made it less frightening.
As if the problem was how close he stood, and not the fact that he could not make himself leave at all.
“He didn’t approach you?” you asked.
Mya shook her head. “No.”
“Did he see you see him?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He left.”
You were quiet.
Mya sat beside you on the sofa, folding one leg beneath her. She looked tired in a way that made you feel guilty, as if your heartbreak had spread outward and started bruising everyone who loved you.
“I think he’s trying not to scare you,” she said.
A laugh caught in your throat, sharp and humorless.
“He is scaring me.”
“I know.”
“If he knows, why does he keep doing it?”
Mya looked down at her hands.
For once, she did not answer immediately.
That scared you more than anything else.
“Mya.”
She exhaled slowly. “Because I think he loves you.”
Your face went still.
“No.”
“I’m not saying that makes it right.”
“No.”
“I’m not defending him.”
“Then don’t say that.”
“I have to,” she said softly. “Because I think it’s true.”
You pulled back as if the words had touched you.
Mya’s expression tightened, but she kept going.
“I think he loves you. I think he really does. But I also think the way he loves you is…” She stopped, searching for the least cruel word and not finding one. “It’s not simple. It’s not clean.”
Your throat tightened.
“He doesn’t love me. He wants control.”
“I think he wants both.”
You looked at her.
Mya’s voice lowered. “I think he loves you, and I think that love has nowhere healthy to go inside him. So it turns into watching. Into protecting. Into deciding he knows what is safest for you. Into standing across the street in the rain because he has convinced himself that as long as he doesn’t approach you, he’s not doing anything wrong.”
Your eyes burned.
“Mya—”
“I think he is terrified something will happen to you if he isn’t close enough to stop it. And I think he is terrified you will be okay without him if he gives you enough room to breathe.”
The words settled between you.
Heavy.
Awful.
True in a way you did not want them to be.
Mya reached for your hand, but stopped before touching you.
“That’s what scares me,” she admitted. “Not that he doesn’t care. If he didn’t care, this would be easier. If he was just cruel, we could hate him and be done with it.”
You swallowed hard.
“But he does care,” she said. “Too much. Badly. Possessively. Like care and claim got tangled together somewhere inside him, and now he can’t tell the difference.”
You looked away.
Outside, rain tapped against the window in soft, uneven threads.
“I think he believes he has a right to worry,” Mya continued. “A right to know where you are. A right to make sure you’re safe. A right to remove anything that might hurt you before you even decide whether it hurts.”
Your voice came out small.
“That isn’t love.”
“No,” Mya said gently. “Not by itself.”
You looked at her then.
Her eyes were sad.
“But I think love is in it,” she said. “That’s the problem. I think he loves you, and I think he’s using that love to justify everything else.”
Something in your chest twisted.
Because simple would have been easier.
If Valarr only wanted to own you, you could hate him cleanly. If every soft thing he had ever done had been a lie, you could gather those memories up and burn them. If his tenderness had only ever been another form of control, then you could stop grieving the love and only grieve the damage.
But you knew better.
That was the cruelty.
Valarr had taken care of you with real tenderness.
He had warmed your hands between his when you forgot gloves. Walked you home without making a performance of it. Stayed up with you during panic attacks before exams, talking you down in that low, steady voice until you could breathe again. He remembered your mother’s birthday. Sent soup when you were sick. Held your hair when you drank too much and never once teased you for it afterward.
He knew when you were tired before you said it.
He knew when a room made you uncomfortable.
He knew how to stand beside you in a crowd so you never felt alone.
He had told every room, without ever using the words, that you mattered.
And still.
And still.
Love did not absolve him.
Love did not make watching you from across the street romantic.
Love did not make his fear your responsibility.
Love did not make his protectiveness harmless.
Love did not make it okay that he had wanted you like something precious but treated your heart like something he could postpone.
You pressed the heel of your hand against your chest, as if you could hold the ache in place.
“I don’t want to be protected like that,” you whispered.
Mya’s face softened.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to be loved like something he’s afraid to lose.”
“I know.”
“I wanted him to choose me.”
Your voice broke.
“Not guard me. Not manage me. Not hover around the edges of my life like I’m something that might disappear if he looks away.”
and he's delighted about it. oh, his love is being playful, she's teasing him, how sweet, how fun. look at that little smile you're trying to hide. valarr targaryen is a man who lives for your attention in any form it comes, and if you want to play some bit you saw on the internet, he'll play along. he's so happy. you can see it in the way his whole face goes soft, the way the brown eye warms up and the corner of his mouth twitches.
"hey, bro, can you pass me that?"
he passes you the remote with this indulgent look, like aren't you adorable, like he's waiting for you to break and laugh and admit you're fucking with him.
"thanks, dude."
still smiling. still patient. "of course, my love."
but you don't stop.
ten minutes later: "appreciated, mate."
the smile's still there but it's thinner now. he's trying to figure out how long this bit is supposed to run, where the punchline is, when you're going to drop it and call him baby or val or literally anything that isn't a term you'd use for a fucking co-worker.
twenty minutes later: "you're the best, man."
okay. okay, it's starting to chafe now.
this is a man who calls you my love and sweet girl like they're your legal names, who has, on multiple occasions, literally shut down (gone soft and pliant) when you call him pretty thing or beautiful val or my golden dragon. those words do something to his brain chemistry. they make him yours in a way nothing else can. he's pavloved himself to them. they're his.
and you've just replaced all of them with bro.
who the fuck is bro? bro is not the man whose chain you tug when you want his mouth. bro is not the man you've spent two years making yours. bro is some interchangeable guy. he is not bro. he's your val, and this is—this is wrong, this feels wrong, and he's trying very hard not to let it show on his face but you can see it anyway because you know him.
the next time you call him dawg, valarr's jaw tightens and he doesn't respond immediately. he's running diagnostics. what did he do? what cue did he miss? is this punishment? are you actually mad and disguising it as a joke? his whole brain is trying to backwards-engineer what the fuck he did wrong to get demoted from love to bro in the span of an afternoon.
"are you alright?" he asks carefully, and his voice is too controlled, which means he's not controlled at all.
"yeah, dude, why?"
something behind his eyes flinches. he doesn't answer. just nods. but the brown eye's gone darker and you can see him pulling into himself a little. that specific valarr thing where he goes contained and very polite when he thinks he's fucked something up.
by the time you call him man again, he looks like you've personally attacked him.
you take pity on him.
you cross the room, and when you reach up to cup his face, valarr leans into your palm like he's been holding his breath for the past forty minutes and you've just given him permission to exhale again.
you chuckle—soft, low, affectionate—and kiss his mouth gently.
he deepens it immediately, one hand coming up to cradle the back of your head, and when he pulls back just enough to speak, his voice is rough and annoyed and relieved.
"you're so mean to me," he grumbles against your lips.
"i know." you kiss him again. "i'm sorry, my love. my pretty val."
the noise he makes is small and broken, so pleased it's almost obscene. he's home. you just said my love and pretty val and his entire nervous system is flooding with whatever chemical reward you've conditioned him to associate with being yours.
"never do that again," he mutters, but he's already kissing you again, and his hands are settling at your waist, and you can feel him smiling against your mouth despite himself.
"no promises, bro."
valarr pulls back just far enough to give you a look—the kind that says i will put you on your back right now—but his mouth is curving, because you're laughing, and your hand's in his hair, and he knows you'll call him my love again in the next two minutes because you always do.
because that's his.
because he's yours, and you've spent two years making sure he knows it.
but if you call him dude one more time, he's going to make you say his name properly a dozen times before he lets you up.
Aerion Targaryen x wife!reader - A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Summary: Dunk accidently mistakes Aerion's lady wife in his tent for a common whore because she did not arrive with the rest of the Targaryen party to the Ashford tourney. This is a oneshot, not related to any series.
Warnings: SMUT 18+ p in v, unprotected sex, possessiveness, power imbalance, dubiously consensual situations, Aerion wants to roleplay, pregnancy mention, talks about killing, Aerion has insane ideas, breeding.
The morning of the tourney had dawned bright over Ashford Meadow, the kind of morning that promised glory and broke that promise before the sun reached its zenith. You had watched the Targaryen party arrive from the shade of the pavilion, your hands folded, your spine a straight line of practiced composure. The three-headed dragon of House Targaryen, red on black, snapped in the wind, a sight that still made your stomach tighten.
Dunk, Ser Duncan, now, though it sat awkwardly on his broad shoulders, stood near the lists with his squire, a small, shaven-headed boy with sharp eyes. The hedge knight watched the procession with a wariness that bordered on rude, his great height making him impossible to miss among the crowd of lords and ladies and smallfolk alike. He had heard the whispers, same as everyone else. Prince Aerion Targaryen was coming to Ashford. Prince Aerion Brightflame, they called him. Some called him other things, though not to his face. This one, he had heard, was cut from different cloth entirely.
The prince was fair to look upon, all the Targaryens were, with hair like spun silver and eyes the color of violets, a sharp jaw and a mouth that seemed perpetually on the verge of a sneer or a smile, and it was difficult to tell which was which. He wore black riding leathers chased with silver thread, a cloak of deep crimson slung over one shoulder, and he did not look at the smallfolk who gathered to gawk. He looked through them, as if they were made of glass and of no consequence.
Duncan watched him dismount with an easy grace, handing his reins to a squire without a word of thanks. The prince stretched, rolled his shoulders, and cast a lazy glance across the meadow toward the rows of tents and pavilions that had sprouted like colorful mushrooms overnight.
“I am for my tent,” Aerion announced to no one in particular, though his voice carried well enough. It was a pleasant voice, cultured and smooth, with an undercurrent of something that made the hairs on Duncan’s arm prickle. “Tell them to bring wine. Something red, from the Arbor, if they have it. None of that Dornish swill.” He paused, and a slow, private smile curved his lips. “I, myself, shall be finding a pretty woman to share it with.”
Chuckles followed. A couple of Kingsguards shared a knowing look. Duncan frowned. He had heard, somewhere in the jumble of heraldry and gossip that accompanied any great tourney, that prince Aerion was married. To some lady of a lesser house, a match that had raised eyebrows among the high lords but had been pushed through by the prince’s father, Maekar, for reasons Duncan did not pretend to understand. A wife. And here the prince was, speaking of finding a pretty woman as if he were a knight with nothing but a horse and a sword to his name. Duncan’s sense of honour, simple and stubborn as an ox, bristled at the casual dismissal. A man wed was a man wed. He ought not speak so.
But Duncan was no fool, not entirely. He kept his frown to himself and watched the silver-haired prince stride off toward the largest of the black-and-crimson pavilions, his cloak billowing behind him, and he thought, not for the first time, that the blood of the dragon was a strange and unsettling thing.
You heard the commotion before you saw him. The Targaryen encampment was a hive of activity, servants hurrying with trunks and tapestries, grooms leading horses to the picket lines, guards taking up their posts. You had arrived a day earlier, traveling with your family, separately from your husband despite his insistence. The roads are dusty, he himself had said, after all, with that faint curl of his lip that might have been concern or might have been disdain. You will arrive fresh and rested. I will not have my wife looking like a Dothraki crone at her first great tourney. So you had come ahead with a small retinue, and you had waited.
Now he was here.
You remained in your chair within the pavilion, a book open on your lap that you had not read a single word of in the past hour. Your heart was beating too fast, a traitorous thing that had never learned to be calm around him. It was not fear, not precisely. It was something more complicated, something that knotted in your belly and made your breath come shorter and your skin feel too warm.
You heard his voice outside, giving orders, and then the flap of the pavilion was thrown back and he stepped inside, bringing with him the smell of horse and leather and something else, something that was just him.
“Wine,” he said to the air, not looking at you. He shrugged off his cloak and tossed it over a chest. “I told them to bring wine. If it is not here by the time I have removed my boots, I will have someone flogged.”
You said nothing. You watched him sit on the edge of the camp bed and work at his boots, his long fingers deft on the buckles. His silver hair fell forward. He was beautiful. You had thought so the first time you saw him, standing in your father’s hall with that faint, mocking smile and those impossible violet eyes, and you thought so now, even knowing what lay beneath the beauty. Perhaps because of what lay beneath it. You had never been able to untangle that knot.
A servant appeared, breathless, bearing a silver tray with a flagon of wine and two goblets. Aerion waved a hand dismissively. “Leave it. Go.”
The servant went. Aerion poured himself a goblet of deep red wine, swirled it, inhaled, and took a long drink. Only then did he seem to notice you, though you knew he had been aware of you from the moment he stepped into the tent. He was always aware of you. It was one of the things that made him so unsettling.
His violet eyes traveled over you slowly, from the crown of your head to the tips of your slippers, and you felt the weight of that gaze like a physical touch. You wore a gown of pale blue silk, cut low enough to be pleasing but not so low as to be vulgar, your hair dressed simply but becomingly. You were not a great beauty, you knew. You were pretty enough, with good skin and kind eyes and a mouth that smiled easily, but you were no silver-haired Targaryen princess. You were just you. And he was Aerion Brightflame.
“Well,” he drawled, setting down his goblet. His smile curved slowly, lazily, like a cat stretching in the sun. “How very fortunate. A pretty wench has finally found her way to my tent.”
Your spine stiffened. Your hands tightened on the book in your lap. “Aerion.”
“I wonder,” he continued, as if you had not spoken, “what brings you here. Looking to earn some silver for your services, perhaps?” He leaned back on his hands, his legs spread slightly, his entire posture one of indolent amusement. “I am told I am generous. When the service pleases me.”
Heat flooded your cheeks. It was anger, you told yourself. Only anger. Not the other thing, the thing that made your thighs press together beneath your skirts. “You are my husband.”
“Am I?” He tilted his head, feigning surprise. “I had forgotten. You must remind me. Wives and whores are so easily confused, are they not? Both warm. Both willing.” His smile sharpened. “Both so very eager to please their prince.”
You rose from your chair, the book sliding forgotten to the cushion. “If you wish to play games, Aerion, find someone else. I am not in the mood.”
“Oh, but you are.” His voice dropped, losing some of its mocking edge and gaining something darker, something that vibrated in the air between you. “You are always in the mood for me. I can see it in your eyes. I can smell it on your skin.” He inhaled deeply, theatrically, his nostrils flaring. “Like honey. Like summer. Come here.”
Your feet carried you forward before your mind could catch up. You hated that. You hated how easily he commanded your body, how your legs moved to his voice as if pulled by strings. You stopped a few feet from him, close enough to see the small scar on his jaw from some childhood mishap, the way his pupils had swallowed the violet of his irises.
“I am your wife,” you said again, quieter this time.
“Yes.” He reached out and caught your wrist, his grip warm and firm but not painful. He tugged, gently, and you stumbled forward until you were standing between his spread knees. “You are. And yet here you are, in my tent, dressed unbefitting your station, looking at me with those eyes. What is a prince to think?”
He released your wrist and patted his thigh. The gesture was casual, but his eyes were fixed on your face with an intensity that made your breath catch. “Come. Sit. Show me what a pretty wench does when she wants to earn her silver.”
You hesitated. The game was cruel, you knew. It was like him, to push and push until you did not know whether you wanted to slap him or kiss him, until the lines between anger and desire blurred into something indistinguishable. But beneath the cruelty, beneath the mockery, there was something else. You had learned to see it, over two years of marriage. A flicker in his eyes, a slight softening around his mouth. He wanted this game, yes, but he wanted you. He wanted you to play it with him, to meet him in this strange space he had created, where you were both more and less than husband and wife.
You lowered yourself onto his lap.
His hands came up immediately, settling on your hips, fingers pressing into the silk of your gown. “There,” he murmured, his breath warm against your throat. “That was not so difficult, was it?”
“I am not a whore,” you said, your voice steadier than you felt.
“No,” he agreed, and his lips brushed the curve of your jaw, feather-light. “You are not. A whore would know what to do. A whore would have her hands in my hair by now, or her fingers on my laces. A whore would be rocking against me, seeking her own pleasure as much as mine.” His teeth grazed your earlobe. “You, my sweet wife, are sitting on my lap like a startled doe. It is charming. It is also, I confess, somewhat frustrating.”
You turned your head and met his eyes. They were so close, those violet eyes, and they were laughing at you. But there was warmth there too, a heat that had nothing to do with mockery. “Then teach me.”
Something shifted in his expression. The lazy amusement remained, but beneath it something kindled, something hungry and intent. “Oh,” he breathed. “I intend to.”
His hands slid from your hips to the laces of your gown. He did not fumble, did not hesitate. His fingers worked the knots with practiced ease, loosening the silk until the bodice gaped and cool air kissed your skin. You shivered, and his smile widened.
“First,” he said, his voice a low murmur against your collarbone, “a whore does not sit still and wait to be undressed. She participates. She wants the business concluded quickly, so she may move on to the next customer. She is efficient.” He tugged the gown down over your shoulders, baring your breasts to the warm air of the tent. “She does not blush like a maiden on her wedding night.”
You could feel the heat spreading down your chest. But you lifted your hands and began to work at the laces of his tunic, your fingers less deft than his, trembling slightly. He let you struggle for a moment, watching your face with those intense violet eyes, before he covered your hands with his own and guided them.
“Like this,” he said, and his voice had gone rough at the edges. “Slowly. There is no rush. The customer will pay for your time regardless.”
“You are the customer,” you pointed out, your voice breathless.
“I am.” He shrugged out of his tunic, letting it fall to the floor of the tent. His chest was lean and pale, dusted with fine silver hair, the muscles shifting beneath his skin as he moved. “And I am a generous man. I will pay for every moment.”
His hands found your breasts, cupping them, thumbs brushing over your nipples until they tightened into hard peaks. You gasped, your hips jerking forward instinctively, and he laughed, a low, pleased sound.
“There,” he said. “Now you are beginning to understand. A whore knows her own pleasure. She takes it where she finds it, because the night is long and there are many customers. She does not wait for permission.”
He shifted beneath you, and you felt the hard length of him pressing against your thigh through his breeches. Your breath caught. You rocked against him, experimental, and his eyes fluttered half-closed.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Like that.”
His hands slid down your body, gathering your skirts, pushing them up until they bunched around your waist. The air was cool on your bare thighs, and you shivered again, but it was not from cold. His fingers found the waist of your smallclothes and tugged, and you lifted your hips to help him, your body moving without conscious thought now, driven by a need that had been building since the moment he stepped into the tent.
“Now,” he said, his voice a dark purr, “you will take what you want. I am merely a customer. A paying customer. Do you understand?”
You did not understand, not entirely, but you nodded anyway. His hands settled on your hips again, guiding you, positioning you. You felt the blunt head of him pressing against your entrance, and you were slick and ready, your body traitorously eager. You sank down onto him, taking him inside you in one slow motion, and the sound he made, a low, guttural groan that seemed torn from somewhere deep in his chest, made your inner muscles clench around him.
“Gods,” he muttered. His head fell back, his throat exposed. “You are...you are...”
You did not let him finish. You began to move, rocking on his lap as he had instructed, finding a rhythm that made pleasure spark up your spine. His hands tightened on your hips, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, but you did not care. You were watching his face, watching the way his composure cracked and crumbled, watching the mocking prince dissolve into something rawer, something more honest.
“Look at you,” he said, his voice strained. “My pretty little whore. Taking what she wants. Riding me like a...like a...”
His words broke off into a groan as you shifted your angle, finding a spot that made you both gasp. You braced your hands on his shoulders, your fingers digging into the pale skin, and moved faster. The tent was warm, filled with the scent of wine and sex and the faint sweetness that always clung to him. Outside, you could hear the distant sounds of the tourney grounds, horses, voices, the clash of practice swords, but they seemed very far away, from another world entirely.
He was watching you now, his violet eyes wide and dark, his lips parted. The mockery was gone. The game was forgotten. There was only this, the slide of your bodies together, the wet sounds of your joining, the way his hips bucked up to meet your downward strokes.
You leaned forward and kissed him. He kissed you back with equal ferocity, one hand leaving your hip to tangle in your hair, holding you close as his tongue swept into your mouth.
When you broke apart, gasping, he pressed his forehead to yours. His eyes were squeezed shut, his brow furrowed as if in pain. “I cannot...you are too...I need...”
You did not know what he needed. You were too far gone yourself, the pleasure building and building like a wave preparing to crash. Your rhythm faltered, became erratic, and you buried your face in the curve of his neck, breathing in the scent of him.
His arms came around you, crushing you against his chest. One hand splayed across your bare back, holding you close, while the other gripped your hip, guiding your movements. His mouth found your shoulder, and he kissed the skin there.
You shattered. The pleasure broke over you in waves, making you cry out against his throat, your body clenching around him rhythmically. He followed a moment later, his hips jerking up into you, a low groan tearing from his lips as he spilled inside you.
But Aerion, being Aerion, did not let up.
His grip on your hips tightened before you could catch your breath, holding you firmly in place atop him. You were still trembling, still gasping, your forehead pressed to his shoulder, when his voice came again: that same lazy, mocking drawl, as if nothing at all had happened between you.
"What a pretty girl you are," he murmured against your hair, and you could feel his lips curve into a smile. "So eager. So willing. If you please me well enough, I may take you back to Summerhall as my paramour."
You stiffened in his arms. He was still playing the game. Even now, with his seed still warm inside you, with your bodies still joined, he could not simply be your husband. He had to be this: this infuriating, impossible creature who needed to twist everything into something strange and sharp.
"Aerion..." you started, but he cut you off, his hand sliding up your spine to cup the back of your neck.
"I'll even put a babe in you," he continued. His other hand pressed against your lower belly, where his seed was taking root, if the gods willed it. "I would wager you would give me a beautiful child. Silver hair, violet eyes. A true dragon." His thumb traced a slow circle on your stomach. "A son. You would like that, would you not? To give a prince a son?"
Your breath caught. The words were part of the game, they had to be, but there was something in his voice, some thread of genuine yearning, that made your heart clench. He wanted a son. He had always wanted a son. It was the reason he had married you, or so he claimed. A wife to give him heirs. A warm body to fill with dragon seed. Nothing more.
But his hands on you were gentle now, even as his words remained cruel.
"You are so soft," he breathed, his lips brushing your temple. "So supple. I would wager you make good coin at tourneys. Rotating through tents, spreading your legs for any knight with silver in his purse." His hips shifted beneath you, a small, lazy movement that made you gasp. "But I would keep you for myself. I am a jealous man. I do not share what is mine."
You pulled back enough to look at his face. His violet eyes were half-lidded, his lips curved in that familiar mocking smile, but there was a tension around his jaw, a tightness that betrayed him. He was waiting for something. Waiting to see if you would play along, or if you would break the game and demand he be your husband instead of this strange, cruel stranger he pretended to be.
"A prince's paramour," you said slowly, finding your voice. "That is a generous offer. But I have heard the prince of Summerhall already has a wife."
Something flickered in his eyes. Satisfaction, perhaps. Or something softer.
"His wife," Aerion said, and his voice changed, the mockery falling away like a cloak dropped to the floor, "is a vexing creature who does not know her place."
There it was. The shift. You were his wife again, and he was your husband, and the game was over. Or so you thought.
"She came to Ashford days ago," he continued, and now there was a genuine edge to his voice, a sharpness that had nothing to do with play. "With her own house. Her own retinue. As if she were not a Targaryen. As if she were not mine."
You opened your mouth to protest, but he was not finished.
"I arrived today and found my wife already ensconced in my pavilion, wearing a gown of pale blue silk that any merchant's daughter might own." His fingers plucked at the fabric pooled around your waist, his lip curling. "Plain. Unadorned. No jewels. No finery. As if I had not bought her a dozen gowns finer than this. As if I had not given her rubies and sapphires and pearls enough to drown a lesser woman."
"I thought..."
"You thought wrong." His hand came up to cup your face, his thumb tracing your lower lip. His touch was gentle, but his eyes were hard. "You are a Targaryen now. My wife. When we travel, you travel with me. Not ahead, not behind, not separately. With me. At my side. Where you belong."
"I did not want to slow you down," you said quietly. "You said the roads were dusty. You said..."
"I said many things." He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the corner of your mouth, brief and fierce. "I am your husband. It is my right to complain about dusty roads while you ride beside me. It is my right to be irritated by your presence and comforted by it in equal measure. You do not get to escape me so easily."
You stared at him, your heart beating too fast. He was impossible. He was infuriating. He was looking at you with those violet eyes, and beneath the irritation, beneath the princely arrogance, there was something that looked almost like hurt.
"You were lonely," you realized aloud. "You arrived and I was not with you, and you were lonely."
His jaw tightened. "I was bored. There is a difference."
"Is there?"
His hand slid from your face to your throat, not squeezing, just resting there, a reminder of his strength, of the power he held over you. "Do not presume to know my mind, wife."
But you did know. Marriage had taught you to read him, to see past the barbs and the mockery to the man beneath. A man who did not know how to say I missed you without wrapping it in thorns. A man who had been raised to believe that wanting someone was a weakness, and so he pretended he wanted no one at all.
"And this gown," he continued, his thumb stroking the column of your throat. "You will not wear it again. Not in public. I have bought you silks and velvets. I have given you the jewels to wear. You will wear them. All of them. At once, if you must. I will not have the realm whispering that prince Aerion cannot care for his wife."
"No one would think that," you said.
"They would." His voice dropped, and for a moment, the mask slipped entirely. "And what if someone had seen you, dressed like this? What if some knight or lord had mistaken you for a common wench, a camp follower, and dragged you to his tent?" His grip on your throat tightened fractionally. "What would I have done then? Burned the entire tourney to ash? Killed every man who looked at you? You are mine, and you walk about looking like anyone might have you, and I cannot..."
He stopped. His breath was coming faster, his chest rising and falling beneath your hands. His eyes were wide, wild, and you realized with a start that he was genuinely afraid. Not of losing you to another man, Aerion Targaryen feared very little, but of the rage that would consume him if anyone tried. Of what he might do.
"Aerion," you said softly. You lifted your hand and touched his face, your fingers tracing the sharp line of his jaw. "I am sorry. I did not think."
"No," he agreed, but some of the tension bled out of him. "You did not."
He turned his face into your palm and pressed a kiss there, his lips warm and surprisingly soft. Then he kissed your wrist, the inside of your elbow, the curve of your shoulder. His hands slid down your body, over your ribs, your waist, settling once more on your hips.
"I will wear the gowns," you promised, your voice breathless as his mouth found the hollow of your throat. "And the jewels. All of them. I will look like a Targaryen princess."
"You are a Targaryen princess." His teeth grazed your collarbone. "My princess. My wife."
"And I will ride with you," you continued, your fingers tangling in his silver hair. "Always. I will not go ahead again."
"See that you do not." He lifted his head and looked at you, and the mockery was gone from his eyes, replaced by something fiercer and far more dangerous. "I will not be parted from you again. I find I do not care for it."
Before you could answer, his hands tightened on your hips and he guided you into motion again. You gasped, your body still sensitive from your first release, but he did not stop. He moved you slowly, rocking you against him in a rhythm that made pleasure spark up your spine all over again.
"Aerion," you managed, your voice unsteady. "I am...your breeches...I am drenching them..."
"Let them be drenched." His voice was rough, his breath coming in short pants against your throat. "I have other breeches. I have a hundred breeches. I will ruin them all if I must."
You could not argue. You could barely think. He was moving you faster now, his hips rising to meet yours, and the wet sounds of your joining filled the tent. His hands roamed your body: your breasts, your waist, the curve of your backside, touching you everywhere, as if he could not get enough of the feel of you.
"You are prettier than any wench," he panted, the words tumbling from his lips like a confession. "Prettier than any woman I have ever seen. My pretty wife. My sweet wife. You are always so...so warm...so perfect for me..."
His words dissolved into a groan as you clenched around him, your own pleasure building again. You buried your face in his neck and let him move you, let him take what he needed, because you needed it too. You needed this: this fierce, consuming thing between you, this fire that burned away all pretense and left only the raw truth of your wanting.
"I am going to..." he started, but he did not finish. His body arched beneath you, his hands gripping your hips hard enough to bruise, and he spilled inside you with a broken cry. The sensation pushed you over the edge after him, your body milking him greedily, drawing out every last drop of his seed.
For a long moment, you simply breathed together, your bodies still joined, your hearts pounding in tandem. You expected him to release you, to let you slide off his lap and find your feet. Instead, his arms tightened around you, holding you in place.
"Aerion," you said, shifting slightly. "I should..."
"No." His voice was firm, though still roughened with pleasure. "Stay."
"But I am..."
"Stay." His hand pressed against your lower back, keeping you flush against his chest. "I like you here. Warm and soft and full of me. You will stay until I say you may move."
You squirmed, and his grip tightened. A small, cruel smile curved his lips, the first hint of the old Aerion, the one who liked to push and test and see how far you would go for him.
"Uncomfortable, my love?" he asked, his voice a lazy drawl once more. "Good. Think of it as penance. For leaving me to ride alone. For wearing that plain little gown. For making me worry."
"I did not know you worried."
"I did not know either." He said it lightly, but there was something raw beneath the words. "It was a most unpleasant discovery. I do not recommend it."
He leaned back on the camp bed, pulling you with him, so that you were sprawled across his chest. His hands roamed your back in slow, idle strokes, tracing the curve of your spine, the dip of your waist. His eyes were half-closed, his expression one of sated contentment, but there was an expectation in the set of his mouth, a silent demand.
You leaned down and pressed your lips to his throat, just below his jaw, where his pulse beat slow and strong. He made a small sound, not quite a sigh, not quite a groan, and tilted his head back, offering you more of his neck. You kissed your way along the elegant line of his throat, feeling the vibration of his hum of approval against your lips.
"That is better," he murmured, his fingers tangling in your hair. "My sweet wife. My dutiful wife."
You dragged your tongue along his skin, tasting salt and the faint sweetness that always clung to him. He shivered, and you felt a surge of power. He might command you, might order you about and mock you and play his cruel games, but here, in this, you had power too. You could make him shiver.
You kissed his jaw, the corner of his mouth, the high curve of his cheekbone. His eyes had fallen fully closed now, his lips parted, his breathing slow and deep. He looked almost peaceful. Almost gentle. You knew better than to believe it entirely, Aerion Targaryen was never entirely peaceful, never entirely gentle, but in these moments, after he had spent himself inside you, when your body was still wrapped around his, he came close.
He smiled, a real smile, not the mocking curve he showed the world, and pulled you down for a kiss. It was slow and deep and thorough, his tongue sliding against yours, his hand cradling the back of your head as if you were something precious.
When he finally released you, his eyes had sharpened again, a new hunger kindling in their violet depths.
"Now," he said, and his voice was a dark promise. "Let us see how sturdy this makeshift bed truly is."
Before you could respond, he rolled, taking you with him, and suddenly you were on your back on the camp bed, staring up at him. His silver hair fell around his face like a curtain, his eyes burning down at you, his body still joined with yours.
"Aerion..."
"Quiet," he said, but there was no cruelty in it. Only want. Only need. "You owe me. For the lonely ride. For the plain gown. For every moment I spent wondering where you were and whether you were safe."
He began to move, slow and deep, and you forgot how to speak.
The bed creaked beneath you, a rhythmic sound that matched the thrust of his hips. He braced himself on his forearms, his face inches from yours, his eyes never leaving your face. He watched every flicker of pleasure that crossed your features, every gasp, every moan, as if he were memorizing them.
You reached up and pulled him down for a kiss, and he groaned into your mouth. His rhythm faltered, became more urgent, and you wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper.
The bed creaked louder. Neither of you cared.
"Give me a son," he gasped against your lips. "Give me a son, and I will give you anything. Everything. Just...give me..."
The bed gave way with a splintering crack that echoed through the tent like a thunderclap.
One moment you were beneath him, your back pressed into the thin mattress, your legs wrapped around his waist as he drove into you with that single-minded intensity that only Aerion Targaryen possessed. The next, the wooden frame splintered and collapsed, sending you both tumbling to the ground in a tangle of limbs and furs and broken slats.
You gasped, more from surprise than pain, your hands flying to grip his shoulders. Aerion barely paused. He grunted as the bed gave way beneath him, catching himself on his forearms before he could crush you, and then he kept moving.
"Aerion," you managed, your voice breathless and startled. "The bed..."
"I noticed." His voice was strained, his hips never slowing their relentless rhythm. The furs beneath you provided some cushion against the hard ground, but you could feel the broken slats of the bed frame pressing into your back through the layers. He shifted, adjusting his angle, and a broken moan escaped your lips.
"You are..." you started, but the words dissolved into a gasp as he hit that spot deep inside you, the one that made your vision blur.
"I am what?" His voice was a dark purr, his violet eyes gleaming down at you in the dim light of the tent. Sweat gleamed on his brow, and his silver hair hung in disheveled strands around his face. He looked wild. He looked beautiful. He looked like a dragon in human form, all fire and hunger and terrible grace. "I am your husband. I am a prince. And I am not going to let a poorly constructed camp bed prevent me from taking what is mine."
Your laughter surprised you, a breathless, slightly hysterical sound that bubbled up from somewhere deep in your chest. "The bed is in splinters."
"Then I will have lord Ashford pay for a new one." His hips snapped forward, hard and deep, and your laughter turned into a moan. "He should have provided sturdier accommodations for a prince of the realm. It is his own fault if his furniture cannot withstand proper use."
Proper use. As if this was proper. As if anything about Aerion Targaryen could ever be called proper.
Aerion did not slow. If anything, he seemed to find new vigor in the destruction, his pace increasing until you were gasping and clutching at his shoulders, your nails leaving crescents in his pale skin.
"That is it," he breathed, his forehead dropping to yours. His eyes were squeezed shut, his brow furrowed in concentration. "That is...yes...you feel..."
He did not finish the thought. His rhythm stuttered, became erratic, and then he was spilling inside you. You cried out, your back arching off the furs, your body clenching around him as wave after wave of pleasure crashed through you.
You lay there, tangled together on the ruined bed, your chests heaving, your bodies still joined. Aerion's weight pressed you into the furs, and you could feel the hard edges of broken wood beneath you, but you could not bring yourself to care.
Finally, he stirred. He lifted his head and looked down at you, and there was something soft in his violet eyes, something that only ever appeared in these private moments, when the mask slipped and the real Aerion peered through.
He pulled out of you slowly, and you winced at the loss, at the sudden emptiness. But before you could mourn it, he was moving down your body, pressing kisses to your skin as he went. Your throat. Your collarbone. The valley between your breasts. Your ribs. And then, when he reached your belly, he stopped.
His hands framed your hips, his thumbs tracing slow circles on the soft skin there. He pressed his lips to the curve of your stomach, just below your navel, the place where, if the gods were kind, a child might one day grow.
"This," he murmured against your skin, "will surely have a babe put in your body."
Your breath caught. You lifted your head to look at him, at the silver hair spilling across your stomach, at the reverence in his touch. He was not mocking now. There was no cruelty in his voice, no sharp edge of humor. Only want. Only hope.
"A son," he continued, his lips brushing your skin with each word. "A strong son. A dragon. I will fill you every night of this tourney, and every night after, until your belly swells with my child. Until the maesters confirm what I already know, that you were made for this. Made to carry my heirs."
Your hand found his hair, your fingers threading through the silver strands. He kissed your belly once more, lingering and soft, and then he lifted his head. His eyes met yours, and for a moment, you saw everything: the loneliness, the fear, the desperate need to prove himself, to leave a legacy, to be more than just a second son with a dangerous reputation. You saw the man beneath the prince, and your heart ached for him.
Then the moment passed. He sat up, stretching with the lazy grace of a cat, utterly unbothered by his nakedness or the wreckage surrounding him.
"We will sleep in lord Ashford's castle tonight anyway," he said, waving a dismissive hand at the ruined bed. "This was merely for the afternoon. A place to rest between the lists and the feast. It matters not if it is broken."
You looked at the splintered wood, the torn mattress, the furs scattered across the ground. "The servants will talk."
"Let them talk." He rose to his feet in one fluid motion, utterly unconcerned with his nakedness. His body was lean and pale, muscled in the way of a man who trained daily with sword and lance, and there was a fine sheen of sweat still glistening on his skin. He looked like something from a tapestry: a warrior, a prince, a creature of myth made flesh. "Let them whisper about the passion of prince Aerion and his lady wife. Let them wonder what we do behind closed tent flaps. I care not."
He found his breeches, miraculously intact, unlike the bed, and pulled them on. Then he turned back to you, still sprawled on the furs, and something flickered in his eyes.
"You should dress," he said. "I am going to find more wine. The servants here are incompetent, and I will not suffer dry throat because of their laziness."
He crossed to you, leaned down, and pressed a kiss to your lips, brief but thorough. Then his hand found your hip, and he pinched, just hard enough to make you yelp.
"That," he said, straightening with a smirk, "is for breaking the bed."
"I did not break the bed. You broke the bed."
"The bed broke because of your..." He gestured vaguely at your body, still disheveled from his attentions. "Your enthusiasm. Your movements. Your inability to lie still while your husband takes his pleasure."
You stared at him, incredulous. "You were the one..."
But he was already gone, sweeping out of the tent with the arrogance of a man who had never been forced to finish an argument he was losing.
You lay there for a moment longer, staring at the tent ceiling, your body still humming with the aftershocks of pleasure. Then, slowly, you sat up and began to put yourself to rights.
The gown was a lost cause, crumpled and stained and likely unwearable until it could be properly laundered. You found a simple shift in one of the trunks and pulled it on, then a robe of soft grey wool to ward off the afternoon chill. You combed your fingers through your tangled hair, doing your best to tame it without a proper brush, and splashed water on your face from the basin in the corner.
When you emerged from the tent, the afternoon sun was warm on your face. The tourney grounds sprawled before you, a sea of colorful pavilions and snapping banners, of knights and squires and smallfolk milling about. The sounds of the lists drifted on the breeze: the clash of practice swords, the shouts of men, the whinny of horses.
You found a camp chair just outside the tent flap and settled into it, careful not to stray far. Aerion's words echoed in your mind. You will not leave my side. You will stay where I can see you. You had promised, and you meant to keep that promise, even if he was not here to enforce it.
The sun was warm. The chair was comfortable. You let your eyes drift half-closed, your body still pleasantly sore from the afternoon's activities. A small, secret smile curved your lips.
Footsteps approached: heavy, hesitant footsteps, the tread of a man who was very large and trying very hard to be quiet. You opened your eyes and found yourself staring up at a veritable giant of a man.
He was tall, taller than any man you had ever seen, easily seven feet, with broad shoulders and thick arms and hands the size of dinner plates. His face was plain and honest, with a strong jaw and kind eyes and a thatch of unruly brown hair. He wore a simple tunic of green and brown, well-made but not fine, and he carried himself with the careful awkwardness of a man who had never quite grown accustomed to his own size.
He was also staring at you with an expression of profound discomfort.
"Begging your pardon, my lady," he said, and his voice was deep and rumbling, like distant thunder. "I did not mean to disturb you. I was looking for...that is, I was trying to find..."
He trailed off, his brow furrowing. He looked at the tent behind you, the black-and-crimson Targaryen pavilion, and then back at you, and something like confusion flickered across his honest face.
"You are the hedge knight," you said, because you had noticed him earlier. Everyone at Ashford had noticed him, if only for his size. He towered over every other man in the camp, a great shambling giant with a boy squire at his heels and a look of perpetual bewilderment on his plain, earnest face. "The tall one. I saw you near the lists this morning."
"I am," he confirmed, and he seemed surprised that you had noticed him at all. "Ser Duncan, if it pleases my lady. Though most call me Dunk." He hesitated. "I was looking for...there was a knight I knew once, Ser Arlan of Pennytree. I thought someone here might remember him. I have been asking at the tents, but I fear I have lost track of which ones I have visited and which I have not."
"I am sorry," you said gently. "I do not know the name."
His shoulders slumped, just slightly. "No one does. It has been many years. I thought perhaps...but it does not matter." He made to leave, then stopped, his brow furrowing again.
"My lady," he said slowly, "are you…are you well?"
You blinked. "I am perfectly well, Ser Duncan. Why do you ask?"
He shifted his weight from foot to foot, his big hands opening and closing at his sides. "It is only...I saw prince Aerion enter this tent some hours ago. And I heard him say...that is, I could not help but hear..."
"I am well," you said quickly. "Truly. There is no cause for concern."
But Ser Duncan was not a man who let things go easily. His honest face was troubled, his brow deeply furrowed. He took a half-step closer, lowering his voice as if afraid of being overheard.
"Was he...did he hurt you?" The words seemed to cost him something. His jaw was tight, his eyes earnest and worried. "The prince. I know his reputation. I know what they say about him. If he was too rough with you, if he forced you..."
"Ser Duncan." You held up a hand, stopping him. Understanding was dawning, slow and strange and almost amusing. He did not know you. Aerion had most likely said something vulgar, and then he had seen you - a woman in a plain gown, no jewels, no finery, enter that same tent. And he had drawn the obvious, if incorrect, conclusion.
He thought you were a whore. He thought you were a camp follower, a woman paid for her services, and he was concerned, genuinely, deeply concerned, that the prince had been cruel to you. That he had hurt you. That you might need help.
It was so earnest. So kind. So utterly, completely mistaken.
"The prince did not hurt me," you said, and you could not quite keep the amusement from your voice. "I assure you, Ser Duncan, I am quite unharmed."
He did not look convinced. "If you are afraid to speak, my lady, I understand. Princes are...they have power. They can do things. But I would not let him harm you further. I would..."
"Ser Duncan." You leaned forward slightly, your voice gentle. "What do you think I am doing here?"
He hesitated. His face flushed a deep, ruddy red. "I...that is...it is not my place to judge, my lady. A woman must do what she must to survive. I know that. I have known many good women who..." He stopped, clearly floundering. "I only meant that if the prince was cruel, if he did not pay you what you were owed, I would speak to him. I would make it right."
You stared at him for a long moment. Then, despite yourself, you laughed.
It was not a mocking laugh, you did not have it in you to mock this earnest, well-meaning giant of a man. It was a laugh of genuine, surprised delight. He thought you were a whore awaiting payment. He thought Aerion had used you and cast you aside. And he, a poor hedge knight with nothing but his honour and his size to his name, was offering to confront a prince of the realm on your behalf.
"You are a good man, Ser Duncan," you said, wiping your eyes. "Truly."
He looked confused, and faintly wounded. "I do not understand. If you are not...then why are you..."
Before you could answer, a familiar voice cut through the afternoon air like a blade.
"What is this?"
Aerion emerged from between two neighboring pavilions, a flagon of wine in one hand and two goblets in the other. His silver hair was still disheveled, his tunic only half-laced, and his violet eyes swept over the scene before him with a sharpness that belied his casual posture. He took in you, seated in your camp chair in your plain grey robe. He took in the enormous hedge knight looming over you, his big hands raised in an awkward, abortive gesture.
"I leave my wife alone for a handful of minutes," Aerion said, his voice soft and dangerous, "and I return to find some great lumbering stranger hovering over her like a vulture over carrion. Explain yourself."
Ser Duncan went pale. He took a hasty step back, nearly tripping over his own feet, and raised his hands higher in a gesture of surrender. "Your Grace, I meant no harm. I was only...I did not realize...that is, I thought she was..."
Your mind raced. You saw the path this conversation was about to take: the hedge knight's earnest confession, Aerion's cold fury at being thought the kind of man who would pay for a whore when he had a wife, the potential for humiliation and violence that would follow. Ser Duncan did not deserve that. He had been kind. He had been concerned. He had offered to help a woman he believed to be in need.
"He was lost," you said quickly, rising from your chair and stepping between the two men. You placed a hand on Aerion's chest, feeling the tension coiled in his muscles. "He was looking for a tent, someone he knew once, a Ser Arlan of Pennytree, and he lost his way. He stopped to ask me for directions. Nothing more."
Aerion's gaze flickered from the hedge knight to you. His eyes narrowed. "Directions."
"Yes." You kept your voice light, pleasant. "He is new to tourneys of this size, I think. The camp is a maze. Anyone might lose their way."
Ser Duncan, to his credit, was not a complete fool. He latched onto the lie with the desperate gratitude of a drowning man seizing a rope. "Yes," he said quickly. "Yes, that is it exactly. I was lost. I asked the lady for directions. Nothing more, Your Grace, I swear it. I would never...I did not mean..."
"You should be grateful to even gaze upon her," Aerion interrupted, his voice dripping with bored disdain. He did not look at the hedge knight. He looked at you, and some of the tension bled from his shoulders, though his posture remained rigid with proprietary pride. "Let alone speak to her. She is a princess now, by marriage if not by birth. Her face is not for the likes of you."
"I am grateful," Ser Duncan said, and he sounded it. "Truly, my prince. The princess was most kind. Most generous with her time. I thank her. I thank you both."
"Yes, yes." Aerion waved a dismissive hand, already bored with the interaction. "You have gazed. You have spoken. You have been granted more than you deserve. Now fuck off."
Ser Duncan did not need to be told twice. He sketched a hasty bow, awkward and unpracticed, the bow of a man who had never quite learned the proper forms, and retreated with impressive speed for a man of his size. You watched him go, disappearing between the pavilions, and felt a small pang of sympathy. He had meant well. He had been kind. And you had lied to protect him from your husband's wrath.
Aerion's hand closed around your wrist. "Inside."
He did not wait for your response. He tugged you back into the tent, letting the flap fall closed behind you. The ruined bed still lay in splinters on the ground, the furs scattered, the evidence of your afternoon's activities plain for anyone to see. Aerion ignored it. He set the wine and goblets on a chest and turned to face you, his arms crossed over his chest.
"A hedge knight," he said flatly. "A great lumbering hedge knight, looming over my wife, making her laugh."
"He was lost," you said again, keeping your voice soft. "Nothing more."
"He was looking at you." Aerion's jaw tightened. "The way men look at things they want."
"Aerion." You stepped closer to him, reaching up to smooth the collar of his unlaced tunic. Your fingers brushed his throat, and you felt his pulse leap beneath your touch. "He was a poor hedge knight who lost his way. He asked for directions. I gave them. He was grateful. That is all."
"He wanted you," Aerion said again, but some of the sharpness had faded from his voice. "I saw it in his eyes."
"He wanted to know if I was well." You rose on your toes and pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "He heard sounds from the tent. He was concerned. That is all."
Aerion's hands found your waist, pulling you closer. "Concerned. About my wife. As if I would ever harm what is mine."
"You play rough games, husband. You cannot blame a stranger for misunderstanding."
"I can blame anyone I like. I am a prince."
You laughed, and the sound seemed to ease something in him. His grip on your waist gentled, his thumbs tracing slow circles through the wool of your robe.
"This gown," he said. "This grey wool thing. You look like a septa. A very pretty septa, but a septa nonetheless. I will not have it."
"It was the first thing I found. My other gown was..."
"I know what your other gown was." His smile curved, sharp and satisfied. "I remember removing it. I remember every moment of removing it." He leaned down and pressed a kiss to your throat. "But you cannot wear this to lord Ashford's castle. You cannot wear this to the feast tonight. You cannot wear this anywhere that anyone might see you and think I do not dress my wife as befits her station."
"Then take me to the castle," you said, your voice soft and coaxing. "Lord Ashford has given us chambers. Let us go there now. You can rest properly before the tourney tomorrow, on a real bed, not this splintered mess." You gestured at the ruined camp bed. "And I will try on every gown I brought. Every jewel. You can choose which one you would like to see me in for the feast."
His eyes darkened. "Choose?"
"Choose." You reached up and traced the line of his jaw with your fingertips. "I am your wife. I should dress to please you. Should I not?"
He stared at you for a long moment. Then, slowly, his lips curved into that familiar, dangerous smile. "You are playing me."
"I am pleasing you. There is a difference."
"Is there?"
You smiled and said nothing.
He kissed you and then released you. "Very well. To the castle. But if I am to rest properly, wife, you will be resting beside me. I did not travel all this way to sleep alone."
"I would expect nothing less."
a/n: You can donate on Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3
a/n: Aerion is not as nice here as in Growing Strong series because nobody can train him quite like lady Tyrell!reader.
Pairing: Valarr Targaryen x Targaryen!OC (Aella) x Aerion Targaryen
Warnings: Targcest, don't like it, don't read it. Daeron is suffering. OC is Valarr's cousin and Aerion's twin. Playing a bit harder on Aerion "He was a glad child once" bit because of his twin's presence.
Other bits and pieces can be found here.
Valarr was no less obsessed with his cousins than they were of him, or each other, though it may not seem so to the court. He had no need for overt obsession after all, no need to centre his life around them when they had already arranged theirs around him.
Aerion's obsession was fiery, a dragon's obsession. It led him to the yard where he beat overconfident green boys who thought that they could talk about his sister without fear, about his cousin without respect, and most of all, without awe. It led him to tourneys where he unhorsed men twice his size and with twice his experience for disrespecting his sister or his cousin. The masses called him Aerion Brightflame, and Valarr and Aella knew it true, for Aerion's love burned like the brightest of flames, swallowing all in its wake except for the dragons who thrive in the burning. No one could survive Aerion's love save for those as draconic as he was.
Aella's love was no less in its obsession, if softer than Aerion's. Her love for her brother and her cousin was just as likely to find her in the yard, besting men twice her size for disrespecting the ones she loves the most, only if Aerion did not find them first. Neither twin tolerated disrespect better than the other, barring their fangs as easily as they swung their swords. Sometimes, however, Aella's love drove her to tea parties and the ladies’ circles instead, where she drove ladies to tears for gossiping about her cousin or her brother. Aella tolerated gossip as poorly as she tolerated disrespect, and her tongue was as sharp as her sword, and just as cutting.
To the unknowing eye, Valarr's love looked dull in comparison, for it did not drive him to the yard nor the tourney. His obsession did not sharpen his tongue, but sweeten it instead. Valarr's obsession was devotion, the gentle devoted protection he offered to his cousins and his cousins alone. His love drove him to shield them from consequences, no matter how many knights and lords the twins embarrassed, no matter how many ladies Aella humiliated, Valarr shielded them both from any and all backlash. Valarr's obsession was the quietest of them all, and yet the most ruinous of them all as well. Lords would find their lands examined, their books audited, insidious gossip spreading faster than dragonfire in a forest and ruin chasing at their heels.
Valarr was no natural at the sword, not in the way that Aerion and Aella were. He did not begrudge them the way they wielded blades and other weaponry as easily as one breathes. After all, how could someone resent the very gods he placed on the altar of his life? Only a fool would resent his own heart for beating, and Valarr was no fool. Still, Valarr trained with the sword daily with his cousins, because that was what was expected of a prince.
“You are staring,” Daeron stated as he carried Valarr's blow, easily batting away the swing before reversing his grip on his own sword as he swung at Valarr.
“I'm not,” Valarr denied far too quickly, which further proved Daeron's point. The way Valarr barely dodged Daeron's blade also served to further prove his point. Valarr was not a natural at the blade, but he was practised, and furthermore could read Daeron like one of his books, or a treaty.
“You are,” Daeron pressed on, both with his blade and his words, disarming Valarr with an ease that spoke more of Valarr's distraction than of Daeron's skill. “Your attention has been on them rather than our match.” Dearon saw no need to elaborate on precisely who he was referring to when both parties, nay, anyone would know who had captured Valarr's attention.
“I have not,” Valarr denied again, pulling his mismatched gaze from behind Daeron to Daeron himself though his denial was poor when the back of his neck and ears were flushed Targaryen red in a way that was not caused by the training field.
“You have,” sighed Daeron long sufferingly in a way that only Daeron could, like he was a man of eighty and not a boy of four-and-ten. “You have been staring at them all morning.”
When no response came from Valarr, Daeron finally chanced a glance at him and the sight, well, once it would have sickened him, but time had hardened his stomach. Valarr looked boyish in a way that he rarely was, too serious even in Daeron's earliest memories.
Daeron did not even need to follow Valarr's gaze to know where it had settled, the softness that had settled upon Valarr said enough. Only two people in the world could cause Valarr pause, and they were crossing swords under their father's watchful eyes behind Daeron.
“You are drooling,” Daeron could not resist the tease, even now, even after so long. He wasn't, Valarr was far too dignified and princely to drool like a hound at the sight of his cousins, even if they were the targets of his obsession.
“I'm not,” Valarr quickly refuted even as he wiped at his mouth, eyes never moving. Daeron merely rolled his eyes, already exhausted. Aerion and Aella may be his siblings, and Valarr his cousin, but that did not mean that they were not exhausting in their own right. In fact, he would go so far as to say that it made them even more exhausting, for all it did was grant Daeron a front row seat to the mess that was his siblings’ relationship with their cousin.
He turned around anyways, for there was no reason to continue their spar when Valarr was so thoroughly distracted, and truly, Daeron had no love for the blade. He found his breath caught in his throat at the sight. His younger twin siblings were a sight to behold, unnaturally beautiful as all Targaryens were, surely, but also alight as if they were flames themselves.
They sparred as if they were merely dancing, wielding their blunt training swords as if they were extensions of themselves, their eyes alight with joy. At three-and-ten, his siblings were slight of figure, though only seemed to work to their advantage as they dodged and parried, moving as one rather than as enemies facing each other. It was easy to see how they had managed to so thoroughly catch Valarr's attention earlier and even now.
Even as he watched, Aella pivoted away from Aerion's thrust only for Aerion's foot to trip her, sending her face first into the ground. Aerion worriedly dropped to his knees next to her, hurriedly pulling her up as she laughed, knocking his blade from his hand.
“Aerion, if you dropped your sword, you are dead,” barked their father, Prince Maekar striding forward as he hauled both of them to their feet. “And watch your feet, Aella.”
“Yes, father,” both of them replied brightly, still flushed and high off the adrenaline of their fight.
“But good job,” Maekar muttered as he ruffled their hair, pulling bright grins from both of them before glancing over at Dearon and Valarr. He did not seem the least surprised to see that they had long concluded their bout as he barked at them to take a short break before switching partners and resuming.
Daeron kept his distance, sipping from his water pouch as he watched Valarr fuss over Aella, wiping her face free of dirt as he lectured Aerion, both of them sipping from their water pouches without a care. It was as sickening a sight as it was sweet.
Finally, his father barked at them to resume their training, pairing him with Aerion and Valarr with Aella. Daeron could only sigh, resigning himself to being beaten black and blue by his younger brother. He could not even hope for mercy, not with the way Aerion was grinning at him dangerously. Aerion was only younger by a year, but it still stung sometimes though he was used to it. It seemed that all of their father's prowess in battle had been inherited by his twin siblings, leaving none for the rest of them.
‘At least I'm not Valarr,’ Daeron would think later, watching as Aella held her blade to Valarr's throat. It was not an easy fight, talented as Aella may be, she was a slim girl of three-and-ten and of average height whereas Valarr was a man grown at seven-and-ten and tall and broad-shouldered, no doubt inherited from his father.
To be disarmed by a girl child four years his junior would do terrible things to any man's ego, and yet Valarr merely smiled as he raised his hands in surrender, eyes gleaming with pride. He easily took Aella's hand as she reached out, pulling himself to his feet and as expected, did not let go of her hand at all as his father dismissed them.
Daeron hung back slightly as they put away their training blades, Aella chattering happily about the pastries she hoped would be on the table when they break their fast after. They would be, Daeron knew, because Valarr would have made sure of it, because Valarr would never allow his cousins to go without if he could have any say in it.
A/N - Thank you so much for reading! I honestly just wanted to see how far I can take this without writing Aella's POV.
SYNOPSIS! when a split mission leaves you waiting in an empty penthouse past midnight, the silence begins to taste like jealousy
PAIRINGS: sylus x non!mc reader
WARNINGS! MINORS DNI!
Part 2 of BOUND, but can be read as a stand alone, jealousy, rough kissing, kissing involving blood, porn with plot, unprotected piv, thigh riding, fingering, wap and I mean it, oral!m recieving where she spits out his cum back on his dick and licks it, a lot of spit honestly, overstimulation, they switch, edging, teasing, I imagine reader as a femme fatale with abandonment issues, it's messy, fluids, lots of em, big dick sylus, mean sylus, multiple orgasms, he licks your panties spits on them and stuffs them in your mouth, bondage, manhandling, reader is mentioned to have long hair, kinda hate sex??? she pretends she doesn't want it, mentions of mc, he puts his regeneration at use, i'm also a zayne girl who doesn't know all sylus' lore, and probably more I forgot to mention
W.C: 7.7k
a/n: Hellooo! Well, it sure has been a while since I first posted Bound. I completely ran out of inspiration for the second part, and this isn't even close to what I originally had in mind, but I think it works! That being said, I am still thinking of turning this into a multi-part series if there’s a demand for it (which is honestly my sole motivation for writing, lmao). The only reason I'm considering it is because I have a lot of just pure filth left over for these two... Anyway, N821 here is heavily inspired by Prague, and I really wanted to incorporate a version of Sylus who isn't softened by MC. Also, the dialogue about the mission was completely written by my dear friend (hi Anika) because I have no idea how mafia missions work...!
It was late. Beyond late, the kind of hour where the dark ceases to be a shield and begins to feel like a countdown
Two hours had bled away since midnight, the precise deadline Sylus had given you to return with the shipment routes. Two hours since his last text had flashed across your screen: "I'm on my way." A terse response to your notification that you had successfully wrung the coordinates from the broker. The deal had come with a condition, of course, but a win was a win.
Now, you stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows of the most expensive penthouse in N821. Your skin was still radiating the residual heat of a hot shower, the heavy ivory silk of your robe trailing against your ankles as you knotted the belt around your waist.
N821 was a different kind of monster than N109
Where N109 was a chaotic, bleeding theater of crime, N821 was the same beast refined sleeker, heavily organized, masked in exorbitant wealth, and brutally cold
You closed your eyes, exhaling a slow, sharp breath through your nose. The frustration didn't leave you, it merely settled deeper into your chest. He was with her. That little hunter. The one he taunted. The one you had once discovered practically in his lap
Granted, during that particular encounter, she had a loaded barrel pressed flush against his sternum. And God, how Sylus had thrived on the bite of it. He didn't just tolerate her defiance; he fed on it.
Irrelevant, you reminded yourself, your jaw tightening. Your arrangement with the leader of Onychinus was built on concrete and blood, not sentiment
If there was closeness between you, it was found exclusively in the dark sharp, high friction intimacy utilized purely as stress relief. When two apex predators unite, you do not expect a love story. You expect an alliance
He desired you; that much was undeniable. You were a crown jewel in the underworld silently deadly, poised, and impossibly elegant. A trophy for a man who claimed to own the world
Not an ornament for him though. Never that. Sylus had little interest in fragile things
Yet, your eyes rarely deceived you. Every time he looked at the hunter, there was a faint, intolerable fondness in his gaze. It was childish to even note it, but the great, wanted criminal's eyes actually softened whenever he called her kitten
You despised the word. If he ever dared utter that nickname to you, you would ensure his next glass of wine was laced with cyanide.
Why did she get a title born of affection while you received a title born of strategy? With a quiet sigh, you stepped away from the glass to gather the paperwork scattered across the desk. Time was a luxury you didn't possess
The documents required your signature and a thorough review before they could be handed over to your dear husband by morning
Your dear, dear husband.
The man you swore you didn't crave. The man you swore you didn't miss. You swore it because it was the absolute truth. You were detached. It was the only state of being you had ever known
As the perfect daughter of a sprawling empire, love had never been factored into your record.
Neither had vulnerability
For someone who could afford everything the world had to offer, you couldn't afford a heart
You had never been in love. Intimacy itself was a foreign language until Sylus Qin. To this day, the irony of it brought a cold, humorless smile to your lips. Embarrassing, really, that a man so ruthless had been your introduction to the flesh.
Then again, he had set a incredibly high standard.
While other girls your age were experiencing the trivialities of teenage romance, you were busy learning how to strip a firearm in under ten seconds. You had spent your youth enduring grueling training sessions, followed by hours studying the art of high stakes negotiation under the suffocating, stern glare of your father
In your world, knowing how to distinguish which protocore dealer lied and which one merely inflated prices for survival was the key
But you knew how to hate. Sylus knew it, too, and he drew an infuriating amount of satisfaction from drawing that hatred to the surface
You sat in the plush, albeit uncomfortable, armchair, closing your eyes briefly to soothe the pulsing pressure building behind them. You forced yourself to reopen them, scanning the lines of text to highlight the clauses Sylus would inevitably want to contest.
Think of the devil
The heavy click of the penthouse door echoing through the foyer broke the silence. You didn't bother to lift your head. You were furious, and you had no intention of granting him the courtesy of an immediate greeting.
He called your name once. Then, as if tracking the scent of your irritation, his heavy footsteps moved towards the stufy where you were.
When he stepped into the light, he was a vision of controlled violence. His silver hair was damp, plastered slightly against his forehead from the storm outside. His clothes were dark with melted snow. His knuckles were split freshly cleaned, but faint traces of copper still stained the creases of his skin. A shallow, clean cut marred the high ridge of his cheekbone.
Yet, by the slow, deliberate grace of his stride, you could tell he was entirely unbothered. He looked utterly smug
You permitted yourself exactly one second to take in the sight of him. Then, with a fluid, dismissive motion, you tossed the files onto the marble coffee table. You swung your legs over the armrest of the chair, leaning back into the cushions with calculated laziness
Svlus stoned. He knew that nosture. He knew he was walking on razor thin ice
An amused brow arched upward, a familiar, infuriating smirk threatening to touch his lips before he smoothly schooled his expression. He slipped his damp coat from his shoulders, tossing it aside. Now, it was his turn to take you in
The silk robe had slipped, exposing the curve of one shoulder. Your long legs were draped carelessly over the velvet arm of the chair, and the ends of your hair were still dark with moisture. A vision. Perfect, dangerous, and entirely unimpressed.
"Read," you commanded
Your voice was a low, smooth blade. You didn't look at him as you spoke, your slender fingers wrapping instead around the stem of your champagne glass. You brought it to your lips, taking a slow, elegant sip
Sylus picked up the documents. His crimson eyes scanned between the lines, his expression entirely unmoved by the staggering demands written into the contract. It was the face of a man who found exactly what he expected.
You had done your job flawlessly. As always
"I assume it went well on your end as well" you murmured, boredom perfectly lacing your voice, though the underlying edge remained razor-cold. "Though if I were to critique, you are quite late. And we do have a time limit."
Sylus didn't look up from the pages immediately, flipping one over with a crisp, deliberate sound that echoed in the quiet room.
"Worry not, The twins handled it." he replied, his deep voice scraping pleasantly against the stillness
"it was supposed to be your job–"
"–The broker tried to alter the delivery terms at the eleventh hour," he murmured, tilting his head. The shallow cut on his cheek caught the amber light of the fire. "He brought a few extra bodies to enforce the new price. It took a moment to remind him of his place."
"Remind him of his place."
You set your champagne glass down on the marble table with a hollow, deliberate clink. Your eyes didn't track the movement; they remained locked on the neat, bloodless line across his cheekbone
"A clean cut for a back alley broker," you remarked, your tone smooth, devoid of the irritation simmering beneath your skin. "He must have exceptional aim. Or a very specific model of an Association-issued blade."
Sylus didn't blink. The corner of his mouth twitched. He tossed the folder onto the desk, the heavy paper settling with a dull thud
"The Association tried to intervene. They failed."
"And you let them walk away," you countered, sliding your legs off the armrest. You stood, the ivory silk parting slightly at your thigh as you crossed the room toward him. "You left the financing channel exposed. I noticed the omission before you walked in. It's a vulnerability, Sylus. My board will reject that transit exposure immediately."
You stopped a mere foot away from him. The scent of him, and the distinct, metallic tang of fresh blood rolled off him in waves, overpowering the scent of the in the room
"I don't tolerate sloppiness," you murmured, tilting your chin up to look him in the eyes. "Especially not when my family's name is masking your assets. If your little shadow play in N109 is bleeding into our territory, fix it."
Sylus stood his ground, a towering monolith of damp wool and dark intent. He didn't offer an excuse. He didn't even look at the paperwork you were weaponizing against him
Instead, his gaze dropped to your lips, then traveled slowly down the exposed column of your throat to where the silk of your robe loosely met at your chest
"Sloppiness" he repeated, the word rolling out of his chest like low thunder. He took a single step forward, crowding your space until the heat radiating from his body began to melt the chill in your own. "Is that what you're calling it?"
"I call it what it is. A liability."
Sylus reached out. His split knuckles were rough against your skin as his thumb caught the underside of your jaw, forcing your head back a fraction of an inch. His touch was cold, a harsh contrast to the feverish warmth of your skin, but his grip was unyielding.
"You don't give a fuck about the southern transit line" he murmured softly.
"I care about our metrics"
"You care that she was there."
The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating.
The amusement left his face, replaced by something entirely different. The smug, detached mask he usually wore around you cracked, revealing the dark, predatory focus underneath. His crimson eyes searched yours, not with the cold calculation of a business partner, but with the raw, heavy intensity of a man who had just found a crack in an unbreachable wall.
"Look at you," Sylus whispered, his deep voice dropping an octave, becoming rougher, more intimate. His thumb stroked the line of your jaw, the friction sending a sharp jolt straight down your spine. "Jealous." He leaned down, his breath ghosting over your lips
Your breath hitched a small fracture in your armor, but to a man like Sylus, it was a siren song.
"Don't flatter yourself," you hissed, your voice dropping to a dangerous, venomous whisper. You wrapped your hand around his wrist, trying to push him back. "I don't care who you entertain in your spare time. Just keep your goddamn pets out of my ledger."
Sylus didn't move an inch. If anything, your resistance only made his grip tighten, his fingers sliding from your jaw to wrap fully around the back of your neck, tilting your head up to fully meet his gaze. The coldness in his eyes was entirely gone. In its place was a dark, feral satisfaction that burned hot enough to scald
"will you say that again?" He asked, his lips brushing yours with every syllable, a torturous, high-friction promise.
You didn’t answer. You didn’t get the chance to
You tried to twist your face out of his grip, a sharp, dismissive jerk intended to re establish the boundary, but Sylus didn't let you breathe.
The moment your fingers tightened on his wrist to shove him back, he used his massive momentum to drive you backward
The small of your back hit the solid wall with a heavy thud. Nearby, the champagne glass you had set down wobbled, tipped, and shattered against the marble floor, the sharp crack of crystal completely swallowed by the sudden, suffocating proximity of his body
His hand shifted from your jaw, split-knuckled fingers tangling ruthlessly into the strands of your hair, tugging back until your neck arched, He used the leverage to feast on you completely without restraint. It was a violent, undisciplined wreck of a collision messy, desperate, and entirely devoid of the elegance you both prided yourselves on
He didn't give you a clean, strategic kiss. He didn't offer the practiced precision you both used to mask your intentions in public.
He bit you.
It was a bruising, desperate clash of teeth and lips that tasted immediately of the starved, mutual want you had both spent days denying. You let out a muffled, furious sound against his mouth a protest born purely of your refusal to break first and tried to wedge your forearm tightly between his chest and yours to force some distance.
Sylus didn't care. He pinned your arm flat against the wall, his thigh crowding ruthlessly between yours, the rough of his trousers parting the heavy silk of your robe.
The past four days of silence, of separate territories and calculated distance, boiled over in a single second.
It was unpolished. It was feral. The slick, wet sound of his tongue sliding against yours filled the quiet room, deep and demanding, dragging the air straight out of your lungs until your chest heaved uselessly against his.
You tried to bite him back, to hurt him, to remind him of the danger of crowding an apex predator, and your teeth caught his lower lip, drawing a fresh bead of dark blood.
Sylus groaned into your mouth, He thrived on the high friction of your resistance.
He pulled back for a fraction of a second, just enough for a thin, silver string of spit to break between your swollen lips. His eyes were entirely blown out, the right crimson of his iris practically glowing in the shadows of the room, dark with a terrifyingly possession. He looked like a beast that had finally been given permission to tear its cage apart.
"My, my, is my sweet wife finally showing her teeth?" he murmured against your lips, his voice a ruined, breathless rasp as his mouth left yours for a single second to track a wet, heavy path down your jawline.
"Move." you gasped, your fingers clawing deep into the fabric of his shoulders, though your nails dug in so hard you were actively pulling him closer, betraying the very lie you were telling. "Sylus–"
He didn't let you finish.
Our blood. Our slick, hot saliva,
It mingled into a chaotic, violent smear between your mouths as he devoured your protest.
The grip on your hair tightened, tugging hard enough to make you gasp before he buried his tongue back into your mouth, deeper this time, swallowing your breath whole. It was a suffocating, borderline foul display spit slicking your chin, the metallic taste of his torn skin smearing between you, while his large, calloused hand slid inside the parted silk of your robe to grip the bare skin of your hip with a bruising force that would absolutely leave a mark by morning.
You hated how easily he broke your composure. You hated that you had spent days pretending his absence didn't claw at the inside of your ribs, only for him to wreck your perfect armor in a matter of sentences.
Sylus broke the kiss, His forehead rested heavily against yours, his chest rising and falling in violent, uneven synchronization with your own
"Say it again," he rumbled, his thumb dragging across your wet lower lip, smearing the crimson stain. "Tell me you don't care who I keep in my spare time while you're choking on me."
"You're a bastard," you whispered, your voice shaking with a dangerous mixture of fury and unadulterated arousal, your hips twitching helplessly against the heavy, solid weight of his thigh pressed between yours
"Yours," he growled against your skin, a dark, stolen vow before his lips curled into that insufferable smirk
His mouth descended on your throat with feral hunger, biting and sucking the sensitive skin until a deep bruise began to bloom while his thigh anchored firmly between your legs, the sudden, blunt friction wrung a sharp, fractured sob from your lips
It was humiliating the immediate, pathetic rush of your own juices instantly soaking through the lace panel of your underwear. Your logical mind screamed to fight, but your body, instinctively chased the bruising pressure. You rolled your hips against his leg, a desperate, rolling twitch to catch the edge of relief.
But Sylus had no patience left tonight. His large, rough palms slid beneath the hem of your slip, scraping up, up, up, the bare skin of your thighs, your hips, trailing a path of fire. His hands found your chest, fingers roughly squeezing the tight, aching weight of your breasts, his thumbs snapping against your nipples without a shred of shame
"Need I remind you sweetie," he rasped, pausing only to sink his teeth into the junction of your shoulder, biting hard enough to draw the metallic taste of blood. "She is not the one who wears my name."
Not the woman he loves, but the woman in his bed. or at least that's how it sounded to you.
The bitter thought tasted like ash, but the fire between your thighs was blinding. Lured into his trap, your hips moved once again against his leg practically begging for the friction
Sylus let out a low, rumbling growl of pure triumph. Before you could reclaim your breath, his hands locked around your waist. With terrifying, fluid ease, he hoisted you onto his broad shoulder.
"What are you–"
The words were knocked out of you as he manhandled you across the penthouse, his brute strength on effortless display. You hung like a prized, captive trophy, until he threw you face down onto the mattress.
Your face pressed into the plush bedding, your breath hitching. Before you could scramble to your elbows, heavy, crackling energy flooded the space. Black-and-crimson mist bled from his fingertips, weaving through the air like liquid iron before snapping tight around your wrists.
The heavy pressure of his evol pinned your hands behind your back, completely unyielding.
"This won't solve anything, Qin," you hissed, turning your head to glare at him with venomous, hatred
But the threat died on your lips. In the dim amber light of the room, you were utterly exposed. Your silk slip had ridden up to your waist, baring the flush, plush curve of your ass and the perfect, arch of your spine. You looked like a feline caught in a trap, beautifully undone.
And fuck did Sylus adore the sight.
"It will," he murmured.
He stepped closer, his long fingers trailing down the small of your back before he leaned down to press a hot, mocking kiss against your lower spine.
His hand hooked into the lace of your underwear, pulling the material taut.
Even without looking, you could picture the sick, smug satisfaction written across his features. The panties were heavily damp, soaked through with the visible, glistening evidence of how badly you wanted him
Frustration and arousal coiled tight in your gut. You tugged uselessly against the heavy weight of bound hands "Uncuff me. This is fucking stupid! You can't just–"
"Can't?"
The word cut through your protest, smooth, amused, and dripping with absolute authority. He didn't care about your rules. With a swift, deft motion, his fingers hooked the damp lace, stripping it from your hips and leaving your dripping, swollen slit completely bare to the room
Before you could even process the movement, he brought the ruined lace to his mouth, licking and savouring the slick on it before letting saliva gather and spat on the same place he sucked, his large, calloused fingers ruthlessly stuffed the wet, panties into your open mouth after, forcing it past your teeth and cutting off your scream
Your eyes widened in absolute shock. The sheer audacity of it, the profound humiliation of being gagged by your own soaked underwear, sent a paralyzing jolt straight down your spine. You had never felt this helpless.
This desperate.
"Ah. Still trying to fight?" Sylus whispered, his lips curving into a dark, wicked smile as he looked down at your exposed, dripping heat. "Cute."
He reached down between your thighs. A heavy, viscous pearl of your own wetness was clinging desperately to your pussy, hanging from your swollen outer lips. With agonizing slowness, he used his thumb to catch the drop, breaking it and smearing the slick heat upward, coating your sensitive clit with your own fluids until you were covered in your essence
A muffled, strangled sob caught in the back of your throat, completely swallowed by the silk in your mouth as your inner thighs trembled
And Sylus thrived on the sound. With a deliberate, forceful shove, he buried two thick, rough fingers straight into your tight hole. The contrast was intoxicating, the feverish pulsating warmth of your walls instantly clamped down, desperately squeezing the cold, length of his fingers.
"Look at how wet you are," he rumbled, his voice a ruined, gravelly rasp as he began to pump his fingers inside you, driving them deep, stretching you open with a crude, slow pace. "...don't get the wrong idea, I'm not trying to mock you."" and you swore he almost sounded amused, but you couldn't focus
How could you, when the wet, squelching sound of his fingers sliding in and out of your pussy filled the quiet room. You were completely dripping, your juices running down his hand and pooling onto the dark sheets beneath you as he used his thumb to viciously hook and rub against your swollen clit with every deep thrust, driving you toward a blind, desperate peak while you lay pinned and gagged
Breathless and whining is what you were, one of the most important board pieces in N019 reduced to this, and you knew this was not even close to it all.
You could feel it. just beneath the shadow of your straining hips, you could feel the thick, rigid length of his cock pressing hard against your thigh
Impending fucking doom it was.
He gave your ass a taunting squeeze, his large hand bruising the plush flesh before he finally pulled away.
The agonizing loss of his touch was immediately replaced by a different kind of torture. The slick, wet sound of his fingers inside you was gone, replaced by the harsh, metallic rasp of a zipper parting, followed by the slide of his boxers.
Pinned face down, your view was restricted, but you didn't need to see it to know what was happening. Peering over your shoulder, you caught a dizzying glimpse of his toned, sculpted stomach, and the thick, unyielding length of his cock standing proud against it. A viscous bead of precum already glistened at the blunt tip.
You watched his large, scarred hand wrap around his own girth, pumping twice in a slow, deliberate stroke before he aligned himself behind you
He slid upward, but he didn't push inside.
Instead, he wedged the broad, mushroomed head of his cock perfectly against your swollen clit. His fingers gripped the base of his shaft, holding himself firmly in place while he ground against your clit. Your own slick juices immediately coated him, the wetness running down his heavy length with every agonizingly shallow slide
He was teasing you. He was actively refusing to give you the ruinous relief of his cock stretching you wide, denying you the fullness you could feel aching in your gut. No matter how many times you fucked, taking Sylus Qin was a chore, because the universe was cruel enough to give the man a dick as impossibly big as his ego.
You whined, a fractured, pathetic sound, rolling your hips back in a desperate attempt to sink onto him, to soothe the need boiling in your blood
"Relax, wife," he drawled, his voice a low, teasing vibration as he delivered another shallow, grinding thrust that sent a shower of sparks straight to your stomach. "You'll get what you want."
The heavy palm of his hand flattened against your lower back, pressing you down as his cock remained glued to your dripping slit. "Today. Tomorrow." He leaned down, pressing a hot, open mouthed kiss to your trembling shoulder. "Over and over again, until you tire of me."
He pressed one final, bruising kiss to your skin, and then, the heavy, crackling weight of his evol vanished.
The sudden release of pressure made your arms give out, your chest hitting the mattress, but Sylus didn't let you rest. His massive hands gripped your waist, and in one fluid, effortless motion, he flipped you onto your back.
And fuck, was it a sight.
You were beyond divine. Your usually immaculate hair was a wild, tangled mess. Your cheeks were flushed a feverish, beautiful crimson, and tears of absolute frustration pooled in your waterlines. Your lips were swollen and thoroughly wrecked, while between your parted thighs, your dripping, perfectly ruined pussy was fully on display.
Sylus literally choked on a breath.
There was a reason you were hailed as the most beautiful, dangerous woman in the underworld. Everyone else only ever saw you armored in million dollar gowns and a blood chilling smile. No one on earth would ever get to see you like this. Reduced to a beautiful, panting wreck.
His. Entirely his.
But while he was busy staring at you with open, starving reverence, you were absolutely furious. You reached up, ripping the soaked lace panties from your mouth and hurling them directly at his sculpted chest.
It only angered you further when his lips curled into a wicked, devastating grin.
Your chest heaved. Despite your fury, your body betrayed you, throbbing violently at the sight of him caging you in, looking like a greek god, taking in his physique
But the ache wasn't enough to dull your pride.
You needed revenge.
You surged upward, your hands shooting out to fist violently in the short, silver locks at the nape of his neck. You yanked him down, crashing your lips against his in a brutal, bruising kiss.
Sylus groaned into your mouth, a deep, guttural sound of approval. His body automatically chased the closeness, climbing over you to press his heavy weight down.
The second he did, your long legs instantly wrapped around his waist, locking tightly at the small of his back.
You squeezed your thighs, pressing right against the base of his rigid cock, wringing a sharp grunt from his throat. Using the leverage, you rolled your hips
The world tilted, and the next thing Sylus knew, his back hit the mattress, and you were straddling his hips.
You sat up, looking down at him with the cold, authoritative superiority.
"You've played enough," you murmured, your voice a smooth, dangerous blade. "So now, keep your hands flat on the mattress, Qin. If you even think about touching me before I give you permission, I swear to god I’ll leave you exactly like this."
His crimson eyes glistened with dark, feral amusement. It was a bluff. You knew it, he knew it. Sex between the two of you was like breathing; neither of you would ever actually stop. But Sylus loved this game just as much as you did
Slowly, he raised both hands in mock surrender, letting them fall flat against the dark sheets.
He watched, thoroughly trapped, as you reached down and slowly pulled the ruined silk slip over your head, tossing it aside. His eyes darkened, locking hungrily onto your perfect breasts, his jaw ticking with the desperate urge to bite, to taste, to ruin
But you kept yourself deliberately out of reach. You leaned down, taking his lower lip between your teeth for a sharp, stinging bite before dragging your open mouth down the strong column of his throat. You painted his skin with hot, wet stripes of your tongue, trailing down his collarbones, over the hard planes of his chest, and tracing the sharp, dangerous V-line that disappeared beneath his waist.
His breath hitched, his abdominal muscles jumping under your mouth.
Then, your slender fingers wrapped around his impossibly thick cock. You felt him flinch, a full body shudder ripping through him as you leaned down and pressed the softest, sweetest kiss directly to his weeping tip.
You were going to make him beg.
You flicked your tongue out, catching the thick bead of his precum, tasting the hot, salty tang of his arousal. You were aching, sticky, and dripping wet because of him, and it was time he felt that exact same desperation.
Sylus let out a sharp, ragged exhale as you parted your lips. Maintaining absolute, unblinking eye contact with him, you slowly sank down onto his crown with your mouth.
Fuck.
You took him deeper, hollowing your cheeks. Taking his entire length was physically impossible, but you took as much as your throat would allow, your hands ruthlessly wrapping around the thick, heavy base to pump the rest.
His hands twitched violently against the sheets. His fingers curled into fists, fighting the agonizing urge to grab fistfuls of your hair not to force you down, but to drag you up and kiss you. He needed to be inside you. He needed to feel you whole. Watching you worship him like this made you look like a filthy deity.
The visceral, wet sounds of your mouth sucking and slopping against his heavy flesh echoed in the quiet room. You gagged softly, choking once as he unconsciously bucked his hips upward, driving himself deeper into your throat.
You could taste the shift in his pulse. You knew he was close.
So, right as his hips snapped up, chasing the final, blinding high of his climax you pulled off completely.
The sudden rush of cold air hitting his slick, painfully hard cock made him freeze. He stared up at you blankly for a fraction of a second, chest heaving, before a rich, breathless laugh tore from his throat. He was left entirely high and dry, his eyes burning with a dangerous fire.
"Give me one good reason," Sylus rasped, his voice rough as gravel, "why I shouldn't flip you over right now and show you exactly what you just did."
You hummed, entirely unimpressed. "You could," you whispered, leaning down to drag your tongue up the underside of his shaft. "But you won't."
Before he could argue, you wrapped your lips tightly around him again, taking him agonizingly deep. A single tear escaped your lash line from the sheer, suffocating size of him, a thick string of spit and precum dripping down your chin to smear over his skin.
Sylus couldn't hold back anymore. Breaking your rule, his large hand shot up, tangling ruthlessly into your hair to guide your head, his hips bucking up in short, desperate thrusts to chase the edge.
With a deep, guttural groan, he shattered.
Hot, thick, salty liquid erupted into the back of your throat. You whimpered, your eyes fluttering shut for a moment at the overwhelming taste and volume of it.
But you didn't swallow.
You pulled back slowly, parting your swollen lips. Sylus watched you, his pupils blown wide, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. Your hand remained wrapped firmly around the base of his twitching cock
Maintaining eye contact, you let his thick, pearlescent cum spill from your mouth.
It was absolute, exquisite filth. The heavy white fluid fell in thick droplets, landing directly onto his still erect cock, sliding down the slick, inflamed veins.
It was disgusting. It was perfect.
Sylus was utterly mesmerized, trapped in a state of primal shock as he watched his own seed run down his length. But it was infinitely worse when you leaned back down.
With slow, deliberate strokes, you stuck your tongue out and began to lick him clean.
You chased the hot rivulets of sperm up and down his shaft, swallowing every last drop of the filthy mess you had made.
You sat back on your heels, wiping a stray drop of sperm from your lower lip with the back of your hand, a triumphant, wicked gleam in your eyes.
He was broken. You had taken the king of N019 and reduced him ruined mess beneath you
Or so you thought.
The heavy, suffocating shift in the room's atmosphere was your only warning.
Sylus’s chest was still heaving, the silver strands of his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, but the hazy, blown out look in his crimson eyes was already sharpening.
The dark, look in his eyes returned, instantly wiping away any illusion that you were the one in control.
A low, vibrating sound started deep in his chest.
"Beautiful," he rasped, his voice a dark, gravelly purr that was breathless and made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. "You played your hand well."
Before you could even register the sudden flex of his muscles, his hands lashed out
His massive palms clamped around your waist like iron vises. With a violent, he flipped you. Slammed into the mattress, the heavy, unyielding weight of his body instantly crashing down to cage you in
He didn't give you a second to recover. His hands caught your wrists, pinning them squarely above your head with just one of his massive hands.
"But the house," he whispered, leaning down until his lips brushed the shell of your ear, his hot breath sending a violent shiver down your spine, "always wins."
He shifted his weight, his knee driving ruthlessly between your thighs to force your legs impossibly wide. Even after his climax, he hadn't softened. If anything, he was harder, the thick, rigid length of his cock pressing hot and demanding against your soaking wet entrance.
His regeneration worked in more ways than one.
Your breath stuttered. The adrenaline of your revenge was instantly swallowed by the immediate, reality of what was about to happen.
"Sylus–"
"Shh," he commanded softly, silencing you not with cruelty, but with an agonizing, possessive intensity.
His free hand slid down your torso, his calloused fingers tracing your stomach before slipping between your thighs.
He didn't bother waiting anymore. You were already dripping, completely melted down for him, your slick fluids pooling against his fingers as he guided his thick, blunt head squarely against your opening.
He locked his crimson eyes onto yours, demanding you watch him. Demanding you feel every single agonizing second of your surrender.
And then, he pushed.
A sharp, fractured cry tore from your throat. Despite how wet you were, taking him was a visceral, shock to your system. He was too thick, too unyielding, stretching you wide open with a blunt, heavy pressure that sent a blinding flash of white hot pleasure straight to your brain
Your nails dug violently into the back of his hand where he held your wrists. "Fuck–wait, wait–"
"I’m done waiting," he growled, the muscles in his jaw ticking as he forced himself deeper, inch by excruciating inch. "You wanted to play the tyrant? Take it."
He didn't slam into you. He knew exactly what he was doing, driving himself inside with a slow, relentless, torturous pace that forced your body to accommodate every single millimeter of his girth. The friction was maddening
You could feel the distinct, heavy throb of his pulse buried deep inside your walls, stretching you until you felt completely, utterly full.
When he finally bottomed out, his hips snapping flush against yours with a heavy, wet slap, your back bowed off the mattress
You were completely lost to him. The meticulous, flawless daughter of a syndicate empire, reduced to a trembling, mewling mess, completely ruined by her husband.
Sylus let out a long, ragged exhale, burying his face in the crook of your neck. For a few seconds, he just held you there, letting your body adjust to the staggering invasion, reveling in the feverish, desperate way your inner walls clamped down around him, milking him
"Mine," he breathed against your skin
the word tasting like a vow and a curse.
Then, he began to move
He pulled back almost completely, the slow drag of his length nearly drawing a sob from your lips before he drove his hips forward, burying himself to the hilt with a heavy, concussive thud.
The rhythm he set was ruthless. It wasn't the frantic, desperate fucking of amateurs; it was the measured, devastatingly powerful pace of a man who intended to wring every drop of sanity from your mind.
PLAP! PLAP! PLAP!
The wet, obscene sounds of your bodies colliding echoed off the marble walls of the penthouse. With every deep, grinding thrust, he deliberately angled his hips, ensuring the thick ridge of his cock dragged ruthlessly against your swollen clit.
Your mind shattered.
"Sylus" you sobbed, the name tearing from you in a broken, high pitched plea that you would have killed anyone else for hearing. Your legs instinctively wrapping tightly around his waist to pull him even deeper, desperately chasing the blinding high.
"Hush now," he mocked, though his voice was thick with his own desperation, his breathing turning ragged as he pounded into you. He finally released your wrists, only to slide his hands under your shoulders, lifting you up so your chest was crushed against his. "Where is all that anger now, sweetie? Where is the woman who was going to walk out on me?"
"Shut up" you gasped, biting down hard on his shoulder to ground yourself against the overwhelming onslaught of pleasure.
He hooked his arms under your knees, folding your legs back toward your chest, exposing you completely. The new angle drove him impossibly deeper, the nerves of your clit so exquisitely sensitive that your vision literally whited out.
And as the suffocating, brilliant wave of your climax began to crest, snapping your muscles tight around his cock in violent, pulsating waves, Sylus let out a guttural moan, driving deep inside you one final, devastating time to meet you in the dark
...
The silence that crashed back into the penthouse was deafening, filled only by the ragged, synchronized cadence of your mixed breathing.
His palms, rough and heavily calloused, framed your jaw with a sudden, grounding warmth. Sylus looked down at you, his crimson eyes were completely blown, dark with an unreadable, heavy emotion as he leaned down to share the very air between your lips, sealing your surrender with one final, bruising kiss
Your fingers tangled into the short, silver locks at the nape of his neck. You pulled him down tightly against you, anchoring yourself to his massive chest. Heartbeat against heartbeat, you closed your eyes and focused on the heavy rise and fall of his torso, desperately trying to piece your fractured composure back together.
"If you ever use your evol to bind me like that again, Qin," you whispered against his mouth, your voice a breathy, thin threat, "I will have your head"
A low, rumbling vibration started deep in his chest, breaking into a breathless, genuine laugh that brushed hot against your collarbone. "Is that a promise, my dear? I'd say you are not in the position to threaten me right now"
He nipped at the sensitive skin of your neck before his large hands slid beneath your thighs. With a fluid, effortless roll, he shifted your limp body directly on top of him. He stayed buried deep inside you, a heavy, unyielding anchor as the sticky, cooling residuals of your shared cum smeared between your skin.
You completely melted, turning to absolute putty against the hard planes of his chest. His broad palms traced slow, soothing patterns up and down your bare spine, but the gesture did little to cure the boneless, trembling exhaustion holding you hostage. You were entirely unable to function
Sylus stared up at the ceiling, his jaw tightening. He wanted to say something. He wanted to offer a rare, uncharacteristic reassurance, to tell you that while he thrived on the fire of your jealousy, there was absolutely no one else
But the words remained trapped in his throat. Did you even want to hear that?
Absolute, non negotiable loyalty had been the bedrock of this arrangement for a full year now. It was a cruel twist of fate, the invisible threads of his life were bound to a different woman yet the only woman who truly mastered him was currently draped across his chest.
His wife.
He looked down at your tangled hair, unable to fully articulate the staggering weight of what you actually meant to him. It was a terrifying admission, but you had completely rewritten his parameters. Every cold smile, every sharp word, every calculation you made left him utterly mesmerized. Without ever demanding it, you had him wrapped entirely around your fingers
"I should get you cleaned up," he finally rasped, his deep voice scraping pleasantly against the quiet room.
A faint, stubborn hum of disapproval escaped your lips. Beneath the sheets, your exhausted inner walls involuntarily clamped tight around his half hard length, wringing a low, strained groan from his throat. A dark, amused smile touched his lips at your defiance. He leaned up, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to your heated forehead.
You were already slipping, the heavy pull of exhaustion dragging you over the brink of sleep, but the syndicate princess refused to let the business fade. Without opening your eyes, you murmured your final, drowsy command into the crook of his neck:
Sylus savors the moment he returns home to his wife.
sylus x pregnant reader fluff
It’s late when Sylus finally returns. Whatever late means in the N109 zone. He opens the door to your shared bedroom, the weight of the day seeping off him the moment he sees your sleeping form. You lay halfway under the silk sheets, a flimsy nightgown barely covering your swollen belly, heavy with his child.
Sylus never thought he would have this. A real home. No amount of grandeur could ever fill the feeling of emptiness in his estates and penthouses.
Now, he’s fulfilled. He could live in a tin can with you and still feel as if he was the richest man in the world.
He sheds his tailored suit before slowly slinking over to you. He cannot stop staring. Taking in every detail of your face and ever-changing body. He swears it was only a moment ago your belly was flat. The only proof of a child being in those fuzzy ultrasounds and your never-ending nausea. Now the baby that he pressed into you months ago makes itself undeniably known.
Your hips have widened, breasts swelled, and face softened. He can’t take his eyes off you. It’s as if he’s been enchanted by your very existence. His every thought is consumed by the safety of you and your baby. Even tonight—he was barely 4 miles away but could not stop the nervous tapping of his foot during whatever tedious business deal he was attending to. He knew you were safe. He knew. Not only Mephisto but Luke and Keiren had become your personal helicopters in the past months. The constant surveillance would annoy you if you didn’t know how much it eases your beloved's nerves.
He knows how important your sleep has become to you but just cannot resist the urge to reach out and caress your cheek.
You stir gently from your sleep, adjusting your eyes in the dim room before finally landing on your husband. You look into his crimson eyes for a moment, not speaking, not moving—just looking through into his very soul
“Sylus,” you mumble, covering his hand with yours on your cheek.
“You’re beautiful,” you let out a breathy laugh. Of course, only he would find you beautiful with dried drool on your cheek and ankles so swollen it was no longer even funny.
“What? Do you find my appreciation for your beauty amusing?” You shake your head. This man. He truly is like no other. “No, no, not amusing. Just unbelievable.”
“The fact that you do not believe it does not make it any less utterly true, sweetie.” With that, he rounds the bed and settles behind you. He rests his hand on your belly, and your daughter begins to stir. He smooths his hand over you to encourage her movements.
“She only moves for you, you know? She doesn’t listen to me.” He smiles into your neck, continuing to caress your belly.
“Guess she approves of her father, huh?” He says sleepily, almost drifting. You don’t have it in you to reply (agreeing, no doubt), the exhaustion of the day getting to you.
The last thing Sylus can think before drifting off is how lucky he is. Lucky to have you, lucky to have this home and child he has made with you.
Sylus is a man not favored by fate, but he will defy and fight its every command to come back to you. Back to this exact moment of sleepy bliss.
Of course, it's a sight he always hopes to never see again. Still, every time he's inevitably forced to confront it, he's able to push his feelings aside.
This time is a little different.
"Are you alright?" Zayne is already out the door of the Onychinus base as Sylus gingerly lifts your frame from the car. Who his question is directed at is slightly unclear, so Sylus answers.
"She's bleeding. Nothing broken though." Your eyes open with clear effort, and Zayne can tell how exhausted you are. Still, your smile eases a small part of him.
"Hi Doc." You murmur, reaching for his hand. He takes it, the sight of the dirt and blood on your skin making his stomach twist once more.
Sylus carries you inside, over to the sofa in the living room where Zayne has already set up his tools.
"You should really buy me dinner first." You mumble as Zayne begins to pull away your tattered, bloody shirt from your skin. He sighs at your joke, while Sylus huffs a laugh. He procures a glass of whiskey, bringing it to your lips.
"She shouldn't be drinking." Zayne chides, studying the depth of the gash on your side.
"If you're gonna stitch me up, I'd like to be drunk." You note, leaning into Sylus's calming touch.
Later, when you’ve been thoroughly stitched and cleaned and tucked into bed, and the blood has been scrubbed from Zayne’s hands, he asks the question.
Pairing: Valarr Targaryen x Reader
Warning: Death
Word Count: 8.2k
Synopsis: Bound by a love that felt fated, you and Prince Valarr Targaryen are torn apart when a plague claims him before you can say goodbye.
The bells began before dawn.
Not the bright bells that rang for feast days, nor the heavy bronze thunder that rolled for coronations and victories, but the slow, measured tolling that seemed to come from the very bones of the Red Keep. It moved through the stone like grief through an old wound. One note. Then another. Then the long silence between, wide enough for all of King’s Landing to fill with dread.
You were awake before the first bell sounded.
You had not truly slept in three nights.
The candles in your chamber had guttered low, their wax run into pale rivers upon silver stands, and the sky beyond the narrow windows was the color of bruised milk. The room still smelled faintly of the fever herbs the maester had sent for you days before, though none had been for your use. Burn this, Lady. Boil that. Pray. Keep apart from others. Do not go near the prince. Above all, do not go near the prince.
As if distance had ever been a thing your heart understood.
The first bell rang.
Your hand tightened around the edge of the coverlet.
The second came slower. Meaner.
By the third, you no longer needed anyone to speak the words. You knew them before they could be carried up the stairs by a servant with a white face and red-rimmed eyes. You knew them before your women came stumbling from the adjoining chamber, half-dressed and frightened. You knew them before one of them began to weep openly, as though that alone were answer enough.
Prince Valarr Targaryen was dead.
The sound left the world.
Not all sound, perhaps. Somewhere a brazier hissed. Somewhere outside, feet hurried over stone. Somewhere one of your women was saying your name again and again in a voice grown thin with fear. But none of it reached you whole. It all seemed to come as if through water, distant and distorted, while the bells went on tolling and tolling and tolling, each one striking the same place inside your chest.
Dead.
No.
You had been told the sickness was worsening. You had been told the fever had climbed too high. You had been told his breathing had turned ragged in the night, that blood stained the cloths held to his mouth, that even the Grand Maester’s voice had changed when he spoke of him. But told was not the same as believed.
Prince Valarr had always seemed made of the same hard, impossible substance as dragonbone and firelit steel. Even as a boy, he had walked as if the world had been built with the expectation that he would inherit it. As a man, he had become something finer and more terrible; all dark beauty and courtly grace, with that dangerous gentleness people mistook for softness. He was the sort of prince songs were stupid enough to promise and life too cruel to keep.
He could not be dead.
And yet the bells kept saying otherwise.
A knock came at the outer door, soft at first, then louder. No one moved to answer it. The knock came again.
At last your woman Gweneth stumbled forward, wiping at her face. The hinges groaned. Murmurs followed. Then the door closed, and Gweneth turned back to you carrying a folded length of black velvet in shaking hands.
“For mourning,” she whispered.
You looked at it without seeing it.
The bells went on.
You remembered another morning. Another chamber. Another hour before dawn.
Prince Valarr to the realm, but just Valarr to you, had come to you dripping rainwater and moonlight, half laughing because he should not have been there but he did not care. The storm had lashed the windows. The braziers had burned low. He had stood at the end of your bed with his dark hair damp against his brow and his dark cloak soaked through, looking not at all like the heir to the Iron Throne and very much like the boy he had once been, the one who had climbed walls and broken rules and smiled as though every closed door had been built solely for the pleasure of opening it.
“You’ll catch your death,” you had whispered.
His mouth had curved. “Then let it be here.”
You had scolded him for the blasphemy of the jest even while pulling him into your warmth. He had kissed your forehead first, then your cheek, then the corner of your mouth with such deliberate tenderness that it had made your heart ache even then, in happiness. He had always known how to make gentleness feel yearnful.
“Sleep,” you had murmured against him.
“I cannot.” His voice had been low in the dark. “Not when I am with you.”
“You have council at first light.”
“Then the realm must suffer.”
You had laughed softly and touched the line of his jaw. “You would let seven kingdoms burn for an hour more in my bed.”
He had turned his head and pressed a kiss into the center of your palm as if it were a vow. “My lady, you know I would.”
You had known many things where Valarr was concerned.
You had known the way his face changed when he first saw you at ten-and-three, at a spring feast in the gardens below Maegor’s Holdfast, when you had looked up from a rose thorn caught in your sleeve and found the prince himself kneeling before you in silks too fine for the grass and eyes too old for his young face. He had not spoken at once. He had only freed the thorn from your gown with absurd care, as though he feared hurting cloth or skin. Then he had looked up at you, not bold exactly, but intent in a way that made you suddenly aware of your own breathing.
“My lady,” he had said.
Just that.
Yet it had sounded like the beginning of something.
You had known the way he watched before he spoke. The way he listened not only to words but to pauses, half-smiles, evasions, the shift of shoulders, the glance away. Prince Baelor was said to be wise. Valarr was worse. He noticed everything.
You had known the way his beauty unsettled people. He had his father’s grave patience and his mother’s impossible coloring, that dark hair with a touch of silver and those mismatched eyes which, in candlelight, could seem almost bruised with blue. Men called him courteous. Women called him kind. Old lords called him promising. Smallfolk blessed him when he rode through the city and children ran after his horse.
They all saw the prince.
You saw the man who, beneath all that polish, wanted with a depth that frightened him.
The first gift he ever brought you had not been jewels. Any fool with dragon blood and a treasury at his back might send gems.
He had brought you a book.
You could still see him standing awkwardly beneath the painted dome of the Maidenvault’s library, one hand behind his back as though he were a boy again, not yet practiced in the elegant ease the court admired. He had held out a worn leather volume of Nymeria’s voyages, copied long ago in a steady old hand, its margins filled with notes from some dead scholar.
“I remembered you said the singers always ruin her,” he had said.
You had taken it from him too quickly, startled into honesty. “They do.”
He had smiled then, small and pleased. “I thought perhaps you might prefer the woman to the song.”
That had been Valarr. Not grandness, though he could do that better than any man living. Not spectacle, though he wore it like armor. The truest parts of him had always been quieter. A remembered opinion. A ribbon brought in your favorite winter color. A brazier lit before you arrived because he had noticed your hands ran cold. The way he shifted on the dais at feasts so his body blocked the worst of the draft from the doors. The way he loosened the jewels at your throat himself when you were too tired to lift your arms. The way he never let your cup stand empty, nor your laughter go unanswered, nor your silences pass unmarked.
He did not merely love you.
He attended to you.
There was devotion in that. Not showy. Worse. Truer.
The bells tolled on.
A hand touched your shoulder. You startled so sharply that Gweneth gasped and dropped the mourning gown. Black velvet spilled across the floor between you like a pool of night.
“My lady,” she said, kneeling at once to gather it, “forgive me.”
You stared at her bent head. Her brown hair had come half loose from its pins. She had served you for years. She had dressed you on the morning of your betrothal and wept after the ceremony because you had looked, she said, so happy she could not bear it.
That day had been all sunlight.
The Great Sept of Baelor had blazed with candles enough to shame the stars, and every lord of note had pressed close in silks and velvets, gems at throat and wrist, eager to witness the joining of prince and bride. You had stood beside Valarr beneath the seven-pointed crystal, your hand in his, while the High Septon droned blessings so ancient they seemed older than language.
Yet you remembered almost none of the words.
You remembered Valarr’s thumb moving once over the inside of your wrist.
A tiny thing. Barely a touch. Hidden from every eye in the realm save yours.
Are you afraid? That touch asked.
You had turned your hand within his and pressed back once.
Not while you are here.
The corner of his mouth had moved. Not enough to scandalize the septons. More than enough to alter your fate.
When the vows were done and the blessings spoken, he had bent not only to kiss you, as ceremony required, but to rest his forehead against yours for one stolen heartbeat longer than was proper. The whole sept might as well have vanished. There had been only the heat of him, the scent of clean linen and cedar and the faint spice of the oil he favored, and the fierce, unbelieving joy in his eyes.
Made for each other, the court had said afterward.
It was the sort of foolish phrase ladies liked, all sighs and smiles and clasped hands.
But sometimes, in the privacy of your own thoughts, you had believed it too.
Not because you were similar. In many ways you were not.
Valarr had been born to a world of watching eyes and sharpened expectations. Duty sat on his shoulders as naturally as a cloak. He understood command before most boys understood themselves. He had patience where you had temper, reserve where you had candor. He could endure insult with a calm that made his enemies feel shabby for having spoken. You, by contrast, had never mastered the art of pretending not to bleed when cut.
And yet.
He was the stillness to your fire.
You were the truth to his caution.
He softened your griefs. You sharpened his joys. He gave weight to your wildness; you gave warmth to his restraint. Around others, Valarr could become all measured courtesy and princely distance, silver and velvet and old Valyrian composure. With you he laughed. With you he spoke too quickly sometimes, forgot the carefulness of court, let amusement crease the corners of his eyes. With him you found yourself less alone in your own unruly heart. He made the world seem less like a place you endured and more like one you might inhabit without fear.
No singer’s pair had ever been more falsely adorned than the two of you by song, yet for once the lie had contained a kernel of truth.
You had fit.
Not perfectly. Nothing living ever did.
But deeply.
Deeply enough that now, with him gone, your own shape no longer made sense to you.
The bells stopped.
The silence afterward was worse.
At last Gweneth rose and tried again to hand you the mourning gown. “They will come soon,” she whispered. “The queen, perhaps. Or Princess Daenora. Someone will come.”
You looked at the black velvet in her hands and thought of the crimson silk Valarr had once chosen for you himself.
He had found you in the eastern gallery as autumn light slanted through the high windows and painted the floor in red and gold. The gown had been draped over his arm, rich as a king’s ransom and scandalously fine.
“It is much too grand,” you had said at once.
“For whom?”
“For me.”
He had stepped closer, lifting the silk between two fingers. “No.”
“Valarr.”
He had ignored your protest with the serene arrogance of a man born prince. “You will wear it at the harvest feast.”
“I will look ridiculous.”
“You will look of fire and blood.”
You had rolled your eyes and taken the fabric from him, though not before your hand brushed his. “You are persistent, my prince.”
His gaze had rested on you, warm and intent. “I am in love with you.”
Such things were not meant to be said so simply. Not in corridors. Not in daylight. Not as if they were both ordinary and enormous.
You had gone still.
He had done that sometimes—spoken from some deep interior place without warning, as if truth had risen too fast for caution to catch it.
“I know,” you had whispered.
“And yet,” he had said, very softly, “it pleases me to say it.”
You remembered looking down because the tenderness in his face had almost been too much to bear.
Later that same night, at the feast, he had scarcely let his gaze leave you. Lords spoke to him; he answered. Musicians played; he listened. Cups were raised, petitions mentioned, flatteries offered. Through it all, again and again, his eyes came back to yours as if by instinct. Once, while a Reach lord droned on about grain levies, you had hidden a smile behind your cup. Valarr, seeing it, had nearly smiled back—and then had to cough it into his hand to preserve his dignity before the court.
That had been one of your favorite things about him. Not that he loved you. Love could be declared.
But that he was so often delighted by you.
As if he still could not quite believe his own fortune.
A fresh knock sounded at the door. This one harder.
Gweneth opened it, and Ser Willem entered with two guards behind him. He removed his helm at once. His face was gray with exhaustion. He had stood outside the prince’s sickroom these last days, admitting none but maesters and those commanded.
“My lady,” he said, and faltered.
You waited.
His throat worked. “I am bid tell you that none are to go near the prince’s chambers. By order of the king and Grand Maester both. The sickness—”
“Do not.” Your own voice sounded strange to you, flat and distant. “Do not say sickness to me as though I do not know what stole him.”
Ser Willem lowered his eyes.
The pity in the room turned suddenly unbearable.
You rose.
Gweneth hurried forward. “My lady—”
You did not know where you meant to go. Only that standing still had become impossible. You crossed to the window and set your hand against the cold stone. Far below, the city spread in tiers of mud roofs and temple domes, alleys and towers, all of it shrouded in a pale morning haze. Smoke lifted from cookfires. Somewhere, dogs barked. Somewhere, market carts rattled. Somewhere, ordinary life continued with the simple obscenity of indifference.
You hated the city for not stopping.
You hated the sky for being light.
You hated your own body most of all, for continuing its tasks; lungs drawing air, blood moving, fingers curling against stone, heart beating and beating in a world he had left.
Behind you, Ser Willem said, “There will be rites. Preparations. The body must—”
The body.
You closed your eyes.
Not him, then. Already not him.
The body.
Valarr, who had once lifted you with laughing ease when you slipped on wet stones by the godswood pool.
Valarr, who had drawn your hair over his wrist and said it felt finer than summer silk.
Valarr, who had sat beside you through one whole night when your father died, saying little, only staying, one hand over yours until dawn turned the windows pearl-gray.
Valarr, who knew the names of the stable boys and the old kennelmaster and half the washerwomen besides.
Valarr, who could quote old histories badly and songs even worse.
Valarr, who pressed his mouth to your knuckles before battle tournaments, to your temple before court, to the inside of your wrist in the dark as if the pulse there were a promise.
The body.
Your hand slid from the window ledge.
Something inside you had not broken when the bells rang. It broke then.
You sank, not gracefully, not like a lady in songs, but all at once, as if your bones had gone liquid. Gweneth caught at you, crying out. Someone moved a chair. Someone called for water. You heard none of it clearly. There was only the jagged rush of breath in your throat and the ache, the ache, the unbearable animal ache of wanting him.
You wanted his hand in yours. His forehead against yours. His voice saying your name the way he did when the rest of the room had fallen away. You wanted one more breath from him, even fevered, even weak. One more look. One more word. One more minute in which he was not yet beyond your reach.
But the realm had taken even that.
The plague had taken even that.
No final farewell. No last kiss. No chance to tell him that if he went where you could not follow, then all the silk and stone and crowns in the world would become mere props in a hollow play.
They had kept you from him while he died.
Later, when the room had emptied and the day had grown old and sour, you learned the rest in fragments.
How the fever had worsened by the second night.
How he had asked for water and then not been able to keep it down.
How his hands had burned so hot one of the younger maesters wept after changing the cloths upon his brow.
How once, toward dawn, he had spoken your name.
That last came from Ser Willem, who told it reluctantly, with a soldier’s shame at being the bearer of tenderness.
“He thought I was someone else, I think,” Ser Willem said quietly, eyes lowered. “Or perhaps he dreamed. But he said—he said not to leave you standing in the rain.”
For one moment you had only stared.
Then memory struck like a knife.
A year before, caught in a sudden storm returning from the river road, your wheelhouse mired axle-deep in mud. Guards cursing. Horses stamping. Rain hammering the roof. You had climbed down despite all protests, skirts in both fists, determined to help where you could, and within moments had been soaked through to the skin, shivering and furious.
Then a cloak had come over your shoulders, warm from another body.
Valarr.
He had wrapped it around you with impatient care, pulling the wet hair from your face with one hand and scolding you with the other at your elbow. “Must you make a martyrdom of every inconvenience?”
“It is only rain.”
“You are freezing.”
“And you are insufferable.”
His eyes had traveled over your face, checking for chill, for unhappiness, for anything he might fix. Even then, even in weather and mud and delay, he had looked at you as if your discomfort were an insult to the order of the world. “Get back in the carriage,” he had said.
“Not while you are out here.”
“My love.”
A warning.
You had folded your arms. “No.”
A beat. Then another. The rain falling harder.
At last he had exhaled through his nose, half exasperated, half amused, and climbed in after you himself, leaving the men outside to handle the mess while the two of you sat damp and laughing in the dark like children who had run from a lesson.
That was what he had remembered.
Not treaties. Not titles. Not the names of lords waiting upon his favor.
Rain. A cloak. You.
Your mouth had trembled so violently you could not trust it to speech. Ser Willem, seeing that, bowed and backed away.
By sunset the Red Keep had changed its face.
Courtyards stood half-empty. Servants moved in whispers. Fires burned hotter in the passages as if heat could hold death at bay. Black draperies appeared along the gallery rails, their folds drinking light. Everywhere you looked there was mourning. On bannisters. On sleeves. On the queen’s veil when at last she came to you, eyes swollen and mouth set hard with the discipline of a woman who had known loss before and knew it again now.
She held you for a long time without speaking.
When she drew back, she cupped your face as she had once done when your betrothal was announced. Only now there was nothing bright in her gaze.
“He loved you dearly,” she said.
The word loved landed inside you like a piece of cold iron.
You turned away.
That night they set guards on every passage leading to the lower sept chambers, where the dead were washed and wrapped and prepared before the dragon princes were carried to the pyre. The Grand Maester insisted. None but sworn attendants, silent sisters, and septas were to go near the body.
As if death were a treasure to be protected from thieves.
As if love could be barred by doors.
You sat before your mirror while Gweneth unbound your hair for the night. Strand by dark strand it fell over your shoulders, heavy as grief.
“My lady,” she whispered after a long silence, “you must try to sleep.”
You met her eyes in the glass. “Would you?”
She began to cry again.
After she left, you did not summon her back.
You sat alone until the last candle shortened into a trembling bead of light.
The chamber was full of him. Not truly, of course. He had never slept there more than a handful of times, propriety being the favorite cruelty of courts. Yet traces remained everywhere, too small for other eyes and thus all the more intimate for that.
A book he had left open on the table beside the hearth, face down despite your endless complaints that it damaged the binding.
A glove tucked half behind a carved box because he had once pulled it off with his teeth and forgotten where he flung it.
A ribbon from a feast in Oldtown, faded now, which he had tied around your wrist during the voyage home because he said the color looked better against your skin than any lady’s favor ever had against his armor.
These things were nothing.
These things were all you had.
You rose at last and crossed to the carved chest at the foot of the bed. Inside, beneath folded gowns and winter furs, lay a smaller cedar coffer. You opened it.
His letters.
They smelled faintly of him still, or perhaps that was imagination and despair making their own perfume.
You took out the first one. Then another. Then another.
My dearest heart—
My love—
Beloved—
He wrote as he spoke; more plainly than poets, more truly than singers. When duty took him from King’s Landing or confined him to councils that dragged into the night, he sent notes even when you would see him by dawn. Ridiculous things sometimes. A complaint about an envoy’s beard. A sketched dragon in the margin breathing fire upon some pompous lord’s name. A single line only; I passed the pomegranate tree and it has flowered. You were right. Or, I miss you. Or merely, are you asleep? I am not.
Once, when he had ridden north on royal business and a snowstorm delayed his return, a letter arrived so blotched by weather you thought at first the ink had run. Then you realized the marks were from thawed snow falling off the messenger’s gloves.
I am angry with the road for keeping me from you, it read. This seems unreasonable. I do not care.
You laughed then, tears in your eyes, and kissed the page.
Now you pressed it to your mouth once more and tasted only salt.
The poison came to you by chance, if such things could still be called chance in a world where everything had narrowed toward one decision.
Months earlier, one of the older ladies at court had pressed a tiny crystal vial into your palm with a knowing smile and a whisper about women’s protections in dangerous times. For sleep, she had said too lightly. For peace if ever peace is denied you. You had hidden it at once, shocked and angered and faintly frightened. Such things belonged to ugly stories told in hushed voices, not to your life, not to your bright and impossible future beside the man who had made every tomorrow seem survivable.
Yet you had not thrown it away.
It lay now in the bottom of the cedar coffer, half forgotten beneath the letters.
The glass caught candlelight and flashed.
You looked at it for a long while.
Outside, the castle settled into midnight silence. Somewhere far below, boots crossed stone. Somewhere a woman coughed. Somewhere a door shut softly. The world had the terrible calm of a held breath.
Slowly, you closed your fingers around the vial.
By the time the moon had climbed behind the clouds, your resolve no longer felt like resolve. It felt like recognition.
They had kept you from his dying.
They would not keep you from his dead.
You rose and began to dress.
Not as yourself. Yourself would never pass.
Septa’s gray instead.
The novice’s robe had been easy enough to steal two days past, when fear and confusion loosened the order of the castle. You had hidden it behind the panel in the garderobe alcove like some guilty child concealing sweets. Now you drew it on over your shift, rough wool replacing silk, plain cord replacing jeweled girdle. You braided your hair tight to your head and covered it with a veil. In the mirror the woman who stared back looked older, hollower, less like a bride than a ghost.
Good, you thought.
At your waist, beneath the fold of the robe, you tucked the vial.
The corridors beyond your chamber were dim and nearly empty. Torches hissed in iron brackets. Shadows pooled in the corners beneath statues and alcoves. Twice you heard voices and flattened yourself into the dark until they passed. Once a pair of guards crossed at the far end of a gallery, their mail whispering softly, but neither spared more than a glance for a veiled woman in septa’s gray carrying prayer beads in her hand.
Grief had made everyone careless with holy women.
Or perhaps the gods themselves were tired of being obeyed.
The lower passages smelled of beeswax and vinegar and ash. Here the Red Keep gave way to older stone, cooler and rougher, as if the hill itself pressed close around its dead. Two silent sisters passed you with covered basins. Neither spoke. Their bare feet made no sound at all.
At the final turn you saw the guards.
Not many. Four. One at the stair foot, two by the carved cedar doors, one half-dozing on a bench beneath a torch bracket with his helm in his lap.
You lowered your eyes and walked on.
“Hold,” one of the standing guards said.
You folded your hands into your sleeves. “The Mother sees all suffering,” you murmured in the soft, flattened cadence you had heard septas use since girlhood. “I was told prayers were wanted for the prince before the dawn rites.”
The guard hesitated.
The second said, “We’ve had three already.”
“And can a prince have too many prayers?” you asked without lifting your head.
The first shifted, uncomfortable beneath sanctimony. “Be quick.”
The door opened with a groan.
Warmth met you first. Not comforting warmth. The close, herb-thick warmth of too many braziers fighting the chill of death. Then candlelight, golden and steady. Then the smell; cedar, myrrh, vinegar, crushed mint, linen, and beneath it all the cold, unmistakable stillness of a body no longer inhabited.
You nearly stumbled.
The chamber was larger than you expected, its vaulted ceiling painted long ago with stars now dimmed by smoke. Tables lined the walls, each holding cloths, bowls, oils, combs, and folded grave wrappings. At the room’s center, upon a raised bier of carved dark wood, lay Valarr.
There were no septas in the chamber now. No silent sisters. Whoever had attended him last had gone, perhaps to fetch fresh cloths, perhaps to rest, perhaps because even the pious could not endure such work without pause.
For one strange moment, all you could do was stare.
He had been washed. His hair lay brushed and dark over the linen beneath him, shining softly in the candlelight like old silver. A black tunic had been fastened over his chest, worked in subdued thread rather than princely display. His hands rested folded, one atop the other, as if in sleep.
No.
Not as if in sleep.
Sleep still had breath.
This had none.
Your knees nearly gave way beneath you. You crossed the room in quick, unsteady steps, then slower as you neared him, then slower still, as though some part of you believed moving gently might keep the sight from shattering altogether.
“Valarr,” you whispered.
The name broke in the middle.
You reached him.
His face—
That was the worst mercy.
Death had taken the fever’s flush. It had smoothed the lines of suffering from his brow. Whatever pain had twisted him in the end was gone now, leaving only the beloved architecture of his features; the straight nose, the strong sweep of cheekbone, the mouth whose softness had always surprised those who did not know him well enough to notice. His lashes cast faint shadows upon his skin. His lips were slightly parted, and for a wicked instant your body prepared itself for relief, for the rise of his chest, for the impossible miracle of waking.
He did not wake.
You touched his cheek.
Cold.
Not the mild coolness of sleep. Not even the chill of illness.
The true, deep cold of absence.
A sound left you then, low and raw and torn from somewhere beneath speech. If anyone heard it outside, they did not come.
You sank to your knees beside the bier and pressed both hands to his face, thumbs at his temples, as if you could warm him back by sheer need.
“You should have waited,” you whispered. “You should have waited for me.”
Your tears fell onto his skin and slid away shining.
You had thought, in all the hours of imagining this, that you would say something noble. Something worthy of the songs they would never sing rightly. Some final speech of devotion to bind the broken pieces of your life into meaning.
Instead you wept and told him foolish truths.
That you had hated the maesters.
That the bed still smelled faintly of cedar from the night he last slept there.
That Gweneth had burned the oatcakes because she would not stop crying.
That the pomegranate tree in the eastern courtyard would bloom soon and he had not lived to see it.
That you had not said goodbye.
That you loved him.
That you loved him.
That you loved him.
The chamber received the words and kept them.
After a time—minutes, hours, you could not have said—you drew yourself upright enough to look at him properly. Your fingers moved reverently over the line of his jaw, the edge of his hairline, the hollow beneath his lower lip you had once kissed just to make him laugh because it startled him when you did.
“I remember everything,” you told him.
You remembered the first time he said your name as if it mattered more than his own.
You remembered the morning he brought you white violets in winter, triumphant as if he had conquered Dorne for finding them.
You remembered him after council, exhausted, kneeling at your feet to rest his head in your lap because with you he could set down the weight for a little while.
You remembered the look on his face the day a child in Flea Bottom offered him half a bruised pear with sticky hands and solemn generosity; Valarr had taken it with all the courtesy due a feast and afterward said the realm deserved better from the men who ruled it.
You remembered the way he watched you when you were angry, not with mockery but with fascination, as if your fire were a language he loved learning.
You remembered the night he told you he feared becoming hard. Not cruel, never that, but hard in the old princely way, polished smooth by duty until no true thing could cling to him. You had taken his face between your hands and said, “then come back to me when you feel it happening. I shall make certain you remain human”. He had laughed softly and kissed you like a prayer.
You remembered his hand over yours as you planned names for children who would never be born.
You remembered how every room altered when he entered it—not because he commanded attention, though he did, but because your body recognized him before your eyes did, some secret inward turning toward the sun.
Made for each other.
Perhaps it had only ever meant that once your souls had learned one another’s shape, no other shelter would do.
Slowly, your hand drifted to your waist.
The vial felt small in your palm.
You looked down at it, the pale liquid catching candlelight.
There should have been fear. There was some, perhaps, in a far chamber of yourself already closing. But grief had swallowed most other instincts. The thought of dawn, of waking tomorrow and the day after and all the awful empty years beyond, had become not merely unbearable but unintelligible. Those years no longer seemed to belong to you. They belonged to some woman less fortunate in love and more obedient to loss.
You were not equal to being her.
You leaned forward and rested your forehead against his chest.
“You are waiting nowhere,” you whispered. “I know that. The septons tell us stories, but none of them have ever held a dead man they loved.”
Your mouth twisted.
“I do not know where you have gone. I do not know whether there is any mercy in the gods, or any memory left in the soul once it leaves the flesh. I know only this; I will not let them take me into a life where you are absent from every hour.”
Your fingers shook as you uncorked the vial.
The scent was faintly bitter, almond and something metallic beneath.
You looked once more at his face.
Not prince, not heir, not realm’s bright promise.
Your Valarr.
The man who had loved you with attention so fierce it had made even ordinary days gleam.
“I am coming,” you whispered.
Then you drank.
It burned little. Only a bitter path over the tongue, a sharp coldness that slipped downward and left your mouth tasting of green wood and dust. You coughed once, hard, then swallowed again to be certain. The glass clicked against your teeth.
When the vial was empty, you set it carefully on the floor.
For a few breaths nothing changed.
You almost laughed at yourself then, some absurd rag of mortal instinct wondering if perhaps you had been sold colored water by a frightened old woman at court, if perhaps you had made a grand and terrible choice only to be left embarrassingly alive beside a dead prince.
Then the room shifted.
Not visibly at first. More in the body than the eye. A softness entering your limbs. A distant humming at the edge of hearing. The candles seemed to draw long, golden halos. The herb-thick air turned strangely sweet.
You wasted no time in doubting.
Climbing onto the bier would have scandalized every soul in King’s Landing, which would have pleased you under other circumstances. Now it felt simply necessary. You gathered the folds of the rough robe, rose with care, and eased yourself beside him.
The wood beneath the linens was hard. The space narrower than two living bodies would have allowed. But there was room enough if you turned to him, one arm over his waist, your face tucked into the hollow between shoulder and throat where you had so often slept before the dawn bells called him away.
He was cold.
You did not mind.
You arranged his hand over yours as best you could, fingers laced lightly. Then, after a moment’s thought, you drew the veil from your hair and let it fall away so nothing lay between you and him now except death itself, and that, soon enough, would loosen.
Already the heaviness was deepening. Your fingertips tingled. Your heartbeat seemed both too fast and very far away.
You smiled against his shoulder, or thought you did.
“Do you remember,” you murmured, words slurring at the edges, “the night in the rookery stairs when you kissed me for the first time?”
He had cornered you there not out of strategy but desperation, all courtly discipline frayed through by want. Rain had drummed overhead. Ravens shifted in their cages above. The narrow turn of the stairs had trapped you between cold wall and warm prince.
“I have been trying not to do this for weeks,” he had confessed.
“Trying?” you had managed, breathless though he had not yet touched you.
His laugh had been low and almost helpless. “Failing, evidently.”
Then his hand had lifted, not to seize, never that, but to touch one loose strand of your hair. To ask without words. To wait.
You had leaned first.
That had always secretly pleased him.
Now your lips moved weakly against the cloth at his chest. “I should like to think,” you whispered, “that I am still the one meeting you halfway.”
The numbness reached your knees, your elbows, the base of your throat. Your eyelids grew heavy. Each breath took more thought than the last.
Through the deepening haze, you heard the door open.
Footsteps. A basin set down. A gasp, sharp and startled enough to split the chamber’s hush.
Then another.
Voices rose. Not loud. No one shouted in the presence of royal dead. But the horror in those muffled cries was plain enough. The real septas had returned.
One came near. You sensed rather than saw her. There was a rustle of wool, the smell of cold night air briefly stirring the herb-thick chamber.
“My lady,” she whispered, shocked beyond protocol. “Mother have mercy.”
You tried to answer. Perhaps you did. You only meant to say no. Do not take me from him.
But you no longer knew whether the word left your mouth or merely your heart.
Hands touched your shoulder, then withdrew at once. Another voice, older, said through tears, “Leave them.”
A pause.
“But—”
“Leave them.”
Someone began to pray.
The words came from very far away. Mother above, have mercy. Father, judge justly. Stranger, guide them. The cadence rose and fell like waves against a shore you were already leaving.
You kept your face pressed to Valarr’s shoulder.
The cold no longer mattered.
Neither did the roughness of the robe, nor the hard bier beneath you, nor the way your fingers had begun to lose their feeling where they lay beneath his hand. Everything was drifting outward now, unmoored. The chamber had become candlelight and prayer and distant footsteps and the remembered warmth of another life.
In that life he had laughed.
In that life he had kissed the corner of your mouth because you claimed it was unlucky to kiss before battle and he said then he would settle for luck’s nearest neighbor.
In that life he had once fallen asleep in a chair by your bed with a petition still in hand, and when you woke him he blinked at you in confusion and said, with complete sincerity, “I dreamt we were old.”
You had smiled. “And?”
He had taken your hand and kissed it without embarrassment. “You were still beautiful.”
You clung to that now. Not the beauty. The old.
The life denied.
The world dimmed.
A great weariness opened beneath you, soft as water, dark as mercy.
Your last clear sensation was not the poison, nor the cold, nor the murmur of prayers, but the memory of his living arms around you beneath summer sheets, and the strange, blessed certainty that if there was nothing beyond this, still you had arranged your ending rightly.
Not alone.
//
When dawn broke, the castle knew.
No court in history had ever kept such news contained. It moved faster than fire through dry brushes. From servant stair to guard post, from sept to kitchens, from queen’s chambers to stables and back again, it traveled with the horror and tenderness only love-deaths ever inspire.
They found her in his arms.
She found her way to him.
She died beside him.
By the time the bells began again, lower now and more terrible for ringing twice in one span of days, the whole of King’s Landing had taken up the grief as its own. Women lit candles in the street. Men bared their heads. Smallfolk who had never seen you wept for you both because there is something in the sight of love denied its long future that wounds even strangers.
In the queen’s chambers, silk handkerchiefs were ruined.
In the king’s solar, old men sat in silence and discovered no counsel fit for sorrow.
Princesses who had envied you now trembled at the price of being beloved.
The king himself gave the order none would have dared request.
Do not separate them.
So when the time came for the rites, the pyre upon the hill beyond the city walls was built broad and high, as befitted a dragon prince. Sandalwood and cedar. Pitch and dry oak. Bundles of herbs. Black-draped standards snapping in the river wind. Nobles in mourning velvet. Septons in crystal crowns. Gold cloaks holding back the press of common folk who had climbed the rise to witness from afar.
The sky was hard blue overhead.
The morning should have been beautiful.
It was not.
They bore him first, as law and custom required, on a bier carved with dragons whose wings seemed half spread in grief. And with him they bore you, veiled in pale cloth, your body still curved toward his as much as death’s settling stiffness allowed. Someone—perhaps one of the silent sisters, perhaps the queen herself—had changed your rough novice’s robe for a gown of soft cream silk, the one Valarr once said made you look as if candlelight belonged to you. Your hair had been brushed loose over your shoulders. His hand still lay over yours.
They did not pry your fingers apart.
At the sight of you together, a sound went through the gathered crowd like wind through winter branches. Not one cry, but many. Held-in sobs. Sharp breaths. The raw ache of witnesses suddenly made intimate with loss.
You looked, those who saw later would say, as if sleep had merely taken you both too deep for waking.
The queen nearly fell when she looked upon you. The princesses held her up between them. Ser Willem turned his face away altogether. Even the king’s mouth trembled once before he mastered it.
The rites were said.
The incense swung.
The seven oils were poured.
The High Septon’s voice climbed and fell in solemn cadence, speaking of return, of mercy, of the wheel turning toward the gods. Few heard him. Fewer believed him. All eyes remained upon the pyre.
The dragonlords of old were said to wed flame.
Valarr, in the end, wed it with you in his arms.
At the last, when torch met pitch, the fire took slowly. A hiss. A curl of dark smoke. Then the dry wood caught in earnest, and orange light climbed the stacked timbers, brightening, spreading, devouring. Heat struck outward. The standards snapped harder. A murmur rose from the gathered thousands and then broke into weeping.
Within the flames your bodies became first shadowed, then gold, then almost impossible to distinguish from the brilliance surrounding them.
Yet still, for a few aching moments, the shape of the embrace held.
The prince and his bride.
His arm seeming to cradle you.
Your face turned toward him.
Together.
Not even the fire hurried that apart.
Later the singers would ruin it, as singers ruin all things. They would make you star-crossed, saintly, foolish, legendary. They would speak of destiny and the cruelty of gods and lovers truer than life. They would turn your grief into verses for harps and feast halls and moonsick girls.
But those who had truly seen it remembered something simpler and worse.
Not legend.
Love.
Love, and the ruin of it.
When at last the pyre sank in upon itself and the great beams collapsed inward, sparks rose into the wind like a storm of burning stars. They wheeled over the hill and out above Blackwater Bay, where gulls cried against the bright vault of morning and ships far below turned their white sails toward the open sea.
Ash drifted after.
Pale gray. Silver-gray. Soft as dust, soft as old parchment, soft as the inside of a mourning glove.
It lifted in the wind and mingled.
No hand could have parted one from the other then.
No eye could have named which fragments had once been prince and which beloved.
They rose together over the city that had crowned one and caged the other, over the towers of the Red Keep, over the sept bells and the markets and the walls, over all the stone works of men that believed themselves enduring. Out above the bay they turned bright in the sun for one last instant, then thinned and vanished into the high clean air.
And in King’s Landing, for many years after, when the wind came off the water at evening carrying the faint smell of smoke though no hearth nearby burned, old women would cross themselves and say the prince had gone walking with his lady again.
In the Red Keep, the pomegranate tree in the eastern courtyard flowered that spring more thickly than anyone remembered. Its blossoms were a fierce, impossible red.
No one had the heart to cut them.
In your chamber, Gweneth kept the book of Nymeria’s voyages beside the hearth long after there was no lady to read it. No one moved the glove behind the carved box. No one touched the faded ribbon.
In Valarr’s old rooms, his writing desk remained as he left it for half a year. Upon the topmost page, unfinished, the court found only a few lines in his hand, abandoned before illness took him too deeply for work.
Send to her the—
Nothing more.
The line stopped there.
The queen wept when she saw it and folded the page away herself.
Some said it should have been burned with him. Some said it should have been sealed in the royal archives. In the end it vanished, as many tender relics do, not into history but into the keeping hands of grief.
And somewhere beyond record, beyond song, beyond all the clumsy language of courts and septs, perhaps there was this:
A boy in the rain with a cloak over his arm.
A girl in a rose garden with a thorn in her sleeve.
A prince who looked and did not look away.
A woman who met him halfway.
A life too brief to satisfy the love within it.
A death that would not suffer separation.
The world kept turning because worlds do. Kings still ruled badly and wisely by turns. Harvests failed and flourished. Children were born. Wars sharpened in distant keeps. New brides smiled beneath old crowns. New princes learned how to hold themselves beneath the gaze of a realm.
Yet in quiet moments, the memory remained.
Not because you had died.
People die daily.
Not because he had been a prince.
Princes die too.
But because, for one rare and ruinous little span of years, two souls had found in one another a home so exact that when one was cast out of life, the other chose not to dwell in the ruin left behind.
That was the tragedy.
That was the beauty.
That was why, long after the pyre cooled and the ashes vanished over Blackwater Bay, people still lowered their voices when speaking your names.
Valarr.
And you.
As though saying one without the other had become, somehow, a kind of lie.
//
Oh god, I really did it this time. I think I crushed my own heart with this one. I saw a prompt for this and I really wanted to try my hand at writing it. I hope you enjoyed.
Pairing: Valarr Targaryen x Reader (Modern AU)
Word Count: 9.4K
Synopsis: After a long day, Valarr goes home to his wife and lets her take care of him.
When Valarr came home after midnight, the penthouse was quiet in the way only homes built around power ever truly were.
Not empty. Never empty. Quiet.
There was a difference.
Empty meant absence. A vacancy too clean, too hollow, too polished to mistake for peace. Valarr had lived in places like that for most of his life—glass towers, private floors, inherited estates overlooking black water and old money, every room perfectly appointed and not one of them warm.
Quiet, on the other hand, meant something else entirely. It meant waiting. It meant the lights in the sitting room had been left dim because you liked the house softer at night. It meant a blanket folded over the arm of the couch because you always forgot it there after reading. It meant fresh tea cooling in the kitchen because one of the staff knew you sometimes stayed up when you were worried for him. It meant the soft scent of your perfume lingering faintly in the corridor outside the bedroom.
It meant you were here.
And that changed everything.
The private lift opened directly into the entry hall with a muted chime. Valarr stepped out still in his suit, one hand loosening the knot of his tie, his expression cut from the same severe composure he wore into every boardroom in the city.
He looked immaculate.
He looked exhausted.
A long dark coat hung over one arm, his phone in the other hand still lit by messages he had not yet answered. His white shirt was crisp but slightly rumpled at the cuffs. His jaw was tight. There was a faint shadow beneath his eyes, a tiredness worn too deep to be erased by posture or expensive tailoring.
Any paper in King’s Landing would have called him devastating.
Any investor in Westeros would have said he looked exactly like a Targaryen heir should.
Only you would have looked at him and thought, he has had too hard of a day.
You appeared at the end of the hall before he could call for anyone.
Barefoot. Soft silk robe wrapped around you. Sleepy-eyed and beautiful in a way that had never once felt performative. Your hair loose from where you had clearly been lying down. The sight of you standing in the warm spill of light from the bedroom doorway expelled something in him instantly.
Valarr stopped.
Just stopped.
It was such a small thing, the way the hard line of his shoulders lowered, the way his grip loosened around the phone, the way his face changed from cold restraint to something almost boyishly relieved. It was not a transformation anyone else would have noticed. Most of the world only knew how to read obvious expressions in ordinary men. But you had long ago learned how to read every fine shift in him. The loosening of his mouth. The quiet in his eyes. The breath he let go only when he saw you.
“You’re still awake,” he said.
His voice was lower than usual, roughened by fatigue and too many conversations he had not wanted to have.
Meetings. Negotiations. Too many people wanting too much. Heir to the richest family in Westeros, de facto ruler of half the corporate arteries that kept the continent breathing, eldest son of a dynasty that had made empires out of airlines, shipping lines, media conglomerates, defense contracts, hotels, finance, tech—Valarr lived most of his life being demanded of. Claimed from. Reached for.
You smiled and came toward him. “I was waiting.”
His gaze lingered on you. It always did. For a man who could become so still that board members twice his age stumbled over themselves in the silence, Valarr looked at you with an almost unbearable intensity. Not greedy. Not casual. Devotional. As if he had not yet learned how to take the miracle of you for granted.
“For me?”
You stopped in front of him and reached up to untie his tie completely. “No,” you said, with deliberate seriousness. “For the very thrilling possibility of hearing what the board of Targaryen Global Logistics has done to offend you this time.”
His mouth almost smiled.
Almost.
It was enough to make your heart pull.
You slid the tie free from his collar and draped it over your wrist. “Long day?”
He made a sound under his breath—something dry and humorless, too tired to be called a laugh. “Long enough.”
You touched his face then, your palm resting lightly against the line of his jaw.
Valarr closed his eyes.
The movement was brief. Barely a second. But the trust in it was enormous.
All day he was watched.
His grandfather’s directors watched him for weakness. The market watched him for mistakes. Rivals watched him for missteps. Political families watched him to see where the richest heir in Westeros would place his power next. Even the cameras watched him, hungry for his indifference, his precision, his beauty, his name.
You were the only one who looked at him and asked nothing except, ‘How tired are you, my love?’
“I’ll have the bath drawn,” you said softly.
His eyes opened again. There was something there at once familiar and endlessly moving—something that never failed to undo you. Surprise, still. After all this time. As though part of him still could not quite believe he had come home to a wife who would smooth the hardest edges of his day with her own two hands simply because she loved him.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“I know.”
He looked at you for a long moment.
That look of his had changed since marriage.
When you had first met him, Valarr looked at the world as if all things needed weighing. Evaluating. Containing. His gaze had been sharp, cool, unreadable. He had seemed born with restraint in his bones and coldness at the back of his throat.
Now, when he looked at you, there was too much feeling in it to ever be mistaken for coldness.
His hand rose and slid around the back of your neck, thumb resting just under your ear. “You should be asleep.”
“And you should not come home looking like you have personally declared war on the entire world.”
That won a real, faint smile.
“A little dramatic.”
“A little?” you repeated. “Valarr, you look one clipped answer away from ruining a man’s life.”
He leaned down and kissed your forehead.
“Perhaps I already did.”
You laughed softly, though part of you believed him.
It was easy to forget, within the quiet safety of your marriage, exactly who your husband was outside these walls.
Valarr Targaryen had been born into the sort of wealth that stopped being countable and became myth instead. His family’s name was stitched into airlines, ports, shipping empires, media conglomerates, defense contracts, energy grids, luxury hotels, private banks, old real estate, new technology. Half the kingdom owed his family money and the other half feared they might one day need to. The Targaryens of modern Westeros did not rule from a throne. They ruled from boardrooms, from private islands, from foundations and funds and carefully brokered alliances. Their dragons were not beasts of fire and scale anymore. They were assets, acquisitions, leverage, and reach.
And Valarr, eldest grandson of the most feared patriarch still living, had once seemed carved to inherit it all with the same glacial perfection as the men before him.
Before you.
You touched his wrist and tilted your head toward the bedroom. “Go change. I’ll have everything ready.”
He caught your hand before you could leave. “No staff.”
You blinked. “What?”
“No staff tonight.” His thumb brushed the inside of your wrist. “Just you.”
That soft, aching warmth spread through you at once.
It still did that. Even after vows. Even after rings. Even after nights in his arms and mornings with his face buried in your neck as if he could not stand the day beginning before he had kissed you awake.
There remained something in Valarr’s wanting that could make you feel chosen all over again.
You smiled. “All right.”
His gaze dropped briefly to your mouth, lingered there, then lifted again. “Thank you.”
“For drawing a bath?”
“For being here when I came home.”
Your chest tightened.
You leaned up and kissed him once. Slow. Gentle. The sort of kiss given in greeting, in comfort, in promise.
His hand tightened at your nape like it cost him something not to deepen it.
When you pulled back, you whispered, “Always.”
//
By the time he came into the master bath, the room had already filled with steam.
The bath itself was almost absurdly large, more a carved stone basin than a tub, set against a wall of smart glass overlooking the black glitter of the city. Tonight the glass had turned opaque at a touch, blurring the skyline into muted silver and gold. Recessed lights cast everything in warmth. Towels waited on the heated rack. Bath salts dissolved beneath the surface in pale swirls. You had added a little cedarwood oil because it grounded him, and lavender because he never admitted it soothed him but always slept more deeply after.
The staff had helped with the water and then vanished at your instruction. You preferred the rest to be yours.
A glass of water sat on the marble ledge. Another with ice. A tray with sliced fruit. A comb. Fresh pajamas. Everything prepared with quiet attention.
You were leaning over the bath, testing the water with your fingers one last time, when you sensed him in the doorway and turned.
He had changed into nothing at all.
For a breath your heart stuttered.
You were married. You had seen him like this countless times. You knew every line of his body by touch and memory, by dark and dawn and sleepy morning light. But your husband had always possessed the unfair beauty of old Valyrian stories given modern form. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Hard muscle hidden under fine suits all day long. Skin warm and golden under the low lights. A steak of silver-gold hair fallen loose and slightly damp where he must have splashed water over his face first. No watch. No shoes. No tie. None of the armor the world associated with him.
Only Valarr.
Only your husband.
And tiredness, unmistakable now, written across his features like the truth it always was.
He watched you watching him.
A little softness came into his mouth. “You’re staring.”
“Yes,” you said. “Because you are very pretty.”
His brows lifted faintly.
You straightened and held his gaze with all the innocence you did not feel. “Would you prefer I lie?”
“Never.”
He stepped closer. His eyes moved slowly over you then, taking in your robe, your bare legs below the silk hem, the fact that you were not yet dressed for sleep at all. Something darkened in his expression, though the tiredness stayed.
“You’re one to talk about pretty.”
You smiled, feeling warmth rise beneath your skin. “Was that your great compliment for the evening?”
“It is midnight. My poetry improves after sleep.”
“Liar. Your poetry is much worse after sleep.”
That drew a short, real laugh from him, brief enough to be precious.
You stepped into him and slid your hands up his chest. He was warm already, but tense. Too tense. His muscles still held the day in them like iron.
You looked up into his face. “Tell me.”
He exhaled through his nose. “Does it matter?”
“It matters because it matters to you.”
His gaze changed then, deepened, always that tiny visible fracture whenever you spoke to the part of him no one else had the patience to wait for.
He set his hands lightly on your waist. “There was a vote this afternoon. My grandfather wanted the Braavos deal rushed through before quarter close. I said no.”
You nodded. “You hate being rushed.”
“I hate stupidity urgency without a plan.” His mouth flattened. “Then dinner with the family. My uncle on one side, my mother trying not to look tired, my grandfather deciding the occasion required him to remind everyone that a man in my position should not let marriage interfere with discipline.”
A flash of anger went through you. “Meaning?”
His eyes dropped briefly, then returned to your face. “Meaning he believes I have become… softer than is useful.”
The word sat sour in the room.
You did not speak at first. You simply touched him. One hand on his chest. One at the side of his neck. Because with Valarr, sometimes anger needed gentleness first, so it would not become something sharper.
“And what did you say?” you asked quietly.
A pause.
Then, “That if he considered respect for my wife an indulgence, he could die offended by it.”
You stared at him.
Then you laughed once in disbelief, helpless and fond all at once. “Valarr.”
He looked almost apologetic. “I was already tired.”
“Oh, that poor table.”
His thumb stroked slowly over the side of your waist. “I’m serious.”
“I know.” Your expression softened. “Thank you.”
Something in his face shifted at once. More than gratitude moved through him—something wounded and tender and a little fierce. He bent his head slightly until his forehead nearly brushed yours.
“No one speaks of you like that in front of me.”
The words were quiet.
They were also absolute.
That was one of the first things you had learned about being loved by Valarr, the softness in him belonged wholly to you, but the ferocity did too.
The realm had once liked to describe him as cold because coldness was easier for ordinary people to understand than restraint. They had written about his reserve, his calculation, the way he ended negotiations with terrifying calm. They had mistaken his stillness for absence.
It was not absence. It was control.
And there was nothing colder than a man who had taught himself never to need.
Before you, Valarr had perfected that version of himself with frightening success.
There had been women, of course.
Beautiful women. Polished women. Women from families who knew how to maneuver near power without seeming obvious about it. Heiresses, socialites, actresses, the daughter of a Reach media titan, a Lannister cousin once photographed leaving his apartment after some gala season. The gossip columns loved him in those years because he gave them just enough. A dark coat. A hand at the small of a woman’s back. Jewelry after a holiday. Flowers after an opening night. Perfect civility. Perfect control.
Never love.
Never this.
You had looked up those old photographs only once, long before your wedding, in one of those private moments of insecurity you later laughed at and hated yourself for in equal measure. He had looked beautiful in them.
And hollow.
His mouth never reached the smile his companions wore for the cameras. His eyes never warmed. His body angled away almost imperceptibly even while playing the part of attentive escort. The women looked delighted. Triumphant, sometimes. But he looked like a man performing a duty too neat to be called boredom.
When he had found you staring at one of those old articles on your tablet months later, he had taken it from your hands, turned off the screen, crawled into bed beside you, and said with such calm certainty it still made your throat ache to remember, “There is no version of my life before you that you should envy.”
Now, standing in the warm steam of your bath while his grandfather called him soft for defending you, you believed that truth more deeply than ever.
You touched his cheek. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think your grandfather is a miserable old man who mistakes tenderness for weakness because no one ever loved him enough to teach him the difference.”
Something close to astonishment flashed in Valarr’s eyes. Then amusement. Then something fonder than either.
“Who is this woman,” he murmured.
“Who?”
“My terrifying wife.”
You smiled. “Get in the bath.”
His hands tightened briefly at your waist, like he was tempted to pull you against him and keep you there, but he obeyed. He always did, in these little domestic things. It amused you endlessly that a man who could reduce ministers and magnates to silence took your orders in the bath as if he had been born for it.
He stepped into the water and sank down with a slow exhale, head tipping back against the stone.
Some of the tightness left him instantly.
Not all of it. But enough that you saw the shift.
You knelt by the side of the bath and let your fingers skim through the water, then looked at him. “Better?”
His eyes opened and found you.
“Come closer,” he said.
“You didn’t answer.”
“Come closer and I’ll answer.”
You laughed softly and stood. His gaze followed you the entire time, heavy and warm and unmistakably hungry in the way it always became when you were near. It had never mattered how tired he was. Exhaustion could hollow him out, anger could sharpen him, work could drag every last ounce of patience from his bones, and still the sight of you would strike through him like longing remembered.
You loosened the tie of your robe.
His breathing changed.
It was very slight.
You still heard it.
You slipped the robe from your shoulders and let it fall. Underneath, you wore only a thin silk slip, pale and nearly translucent in the steam-soft light. Valarr’s eyes darkened at once.
There was no embarrassment in the way he looked at you. He had never made your body feel like something consumed. He looked at you as if beauty in all its forms had become unbearably personal to him.
“You’re still staring,” you said softly.
“I intend to keep doing so.”
You stepped into the bath. Warm water climbed your calves, your thighs. You gathered the slip at your hips, then drew it over your head and laid it over the towel rack before lowering yourself into the water with him.
Valarr watched every movement.
The heat of his attention was almost as palpable as the bath itself.
When you settled between his legs, his hands came to you at once.
Not possessive.
Instinctive.
He rested them at your waist, then slid them around your middle and pulled you gently back until your spine met his chest. His chin lowered to your shoulder. You felt the deep breath he took there, like some part of him had finally reached the one place in the world it could unclench completely.
You covered one of his hands with yours.
For a little while, neither of you said anything.
This silence was one of the great secret luxuries of your marriage. The world spoke at Valarr all day. Desired things of him. Demanded things. Negotiated. Appealed. Threatened. Praised. Performed. The world did not often know how to simply be quiet with him.
You did.
Steam rose around you in gentle curls. Water lapped faintly when either of you shifted. His skin was warm and slick against yours. You could hear the city faintly beyond the glass, only a distant murmur now.
His thumb moved slowly over your stomach.
Once.
Twice.
Then again.
That small movement alone could have destroyed you.
It always startled you, how careful he remained even now. How deliberate. Even married, even adored, even long since known to each other in the privacy of a shared life, Valarr touched you with the same reverence he had touched you with at the beginning—only now it had deepened into confidence, into intimacy so complete it no longer needed caution to be profound.
You turned your head slightly. “Do you want me to wash your hair?”
“Yes.”
The answer came so immediately that you smiled.
“Such a commanding husband.”
“You asked.”
“You said it like you’ve been deprived of basic rights.”
His mouth brushed the curve of your neck. “I have had a difficult evening.”
“A tragic one, clearly.”
He made a low sound against your skin that felt suspiciously like a laugh.
You reached for the bottle of shampoo from the bath ledge and wet your hands. “Tilt your head back for me.”
He did.
You began to work your fingers through his hair.
Valarr went still in that particular way he only did when pleasure met fatigue. Not sensual pleasure, not yet. Something quieter. The relief of being cared for. The relief of hands in his hair, of warm water, of your body tucked back against his. Your fingers massaged his scalp slowly, carefully, until the tension at the base of his neck began to ease.
A breath left him.
Then another.
“That good?” you murmured.
“Yes.”
“That sounded pained.”
“It is painful,” he said, eyes still closed. “Because now I will never allow anyone else near my hair again.”
You laughed softly. “You were not exactly letting footmen wash you before.”
“No. But in theory I might have.”
“You are hopeless.”
“I am right.”
You rinsed his hair with the small silver pitcher, letting warm water spill over the pale strands until they shone darker with moisture. Then you began again, slower this time, your nails lightly scratching the places you knew soothed him most.
He breathed your name under his breath.
Just that.
Your name.
It sent a pulse of warmth through you so sudden that you had to bite back a smile.
There was something deeply moving about Valarr when he was tired. Not because he was weakened—he was never that, not even near sleep—but because exhaustion wore away the final polished edges of his self-command. The public man would never let desire sound needy. He would never let love sound vulnerable. He would never let tenderness sound like hunger.
Your husband did.
Only with you.
You turned a little in his hold. “My turn.”
His eyes opened at once.
There was affection in them now. That sleepy, warm kind that still made him look too beautiful to be entirely real.
He shifted, keeping one arm around you while the other reached for the bottle in your hand. “Come here.”
“I am here.”
“Closer.”
You smiled and turned fully in the bath so your knees bracketed his thighs, facing him now. His hands moved naturally to your waist. There was barely any room between your bodies in the large tub suddenly, though perhaps that was only the effect of his gaze.
He tipped your chin back very gently and wet your hair with slow handfuls of bathwater, smoothing the strands away from your face. Then he poured a little shampoo into his palm and began to work it through your hair.
A shiver ran down your spine.
His fingers were large, deft, impossibly gentle. He massaged your scalp with the care of a man handling something precious and breakable. You closed your eyes and let him do it, let him wash the day from you too, let him turn something as simple as bathing into tenderness so intimate it felt almost like prayer.
“You are beautiful like this,” he said quietly after a moment.
You opened your eyes. “Like what?”
“In my hands.”
He kept working through the length of your hair. “In water. In steam. Looking at me like that.” His thumb brushed behind your ear. “At home.”
Heat gathered low and deep in you, not sharp but aching.
“You always say the most unfair things when I can’t escape,” you murmured.
His mouth curved. “Would you want to?”
“No.”
The answer was so honest that his smile deepened.
It was not often anyone saw Valarr smile without reservation. The public smiles were elegant and sparse. The family smiles were strategic. The social smiles were dangerous because they meant he was about to let someone underestimate him.
The smiles he gave you belonged to no one else.
They looked younger on him. Softer. Sometimes almost boyish, as though the man he had been before responsibility swallowed him whole still existed somewhere underneath all the steel and winter and expectation.
You touched his face. “Tell me about before.”
His expression shifted. “Before what?”
“Before me.”
He paused.
His hands remained in your hair, slower now.
“You know about before.”
“I know the public version.”
“That should be enough to bore you.”
“It isn’t.” You held his gaze. “Tell me anyway.”
A long silence.
Not resistant. Only thoughtful.
Then he said, “Before you, I lived the life expected of me.”
You waited.
He rinsed the shampoo from your hair carefully, one hand supporting the back of your head so no water ran too quickly over your face.
“I worked,” he continued. “I learned the business. I outperformed every expectation they gave me and still found they had more. I attended dinners I hated. I sat across from men three times my age while they tried to decide whether I was ruthless enough to inherit properly. I dated women my family approved of, or at least didn’t disapprove of. I slept badly. I ate because meals were placed in front of me. I drank more than I should some years. I pretended not to notice loneliness because it offended my pride to call it by name.”
Your chest ached.
Valarr never dramatized himself. That was one of the reasons his truths landed so hard when he did speak them. He never embroidered pain. He simply set it down in front of you and trusted you to recognize it.
“And were you happy?” you asked softly.
He looked at you for a long time.
“No.”
The simplicity of it nearly broke you.
“No,” he repeated, quieter now. “I was admired. Respected. Envied. Useful. Feared, sometimes.” His thumb rested at the corner of your mouth. “Not happy.”
You leaned into his touch instinctively.
His gaze dropped to the movement, then lifted again. “I did not know there was a difference between being wanted and being loved until you.”
The room seemed to still around the sentence.
Your throat tightened.
Valarr’s hand slid from your mouth to your cheek and held there, warm and certain. “Women wanted the Targaryen name. My mother wanted me married. My grandfather wanted me sharper. Investors wanted access. Politicians wanted alliances. Everyone wanted something. I thought that was normal. I thought that was what a life like mine would always be.”
“And then?”
“And then you looked at me,” he said, “as though none of it mattered.”
Emotion swelled up so quickly in you that it felt almost painful.
You remembered that first season very clearly. The fund-raiser at the museum. The room full of old names and careful ambition. Valarr in black, impossible and severe and devastating beneath chandeliers. You had known who he was, of course. Everyone did. But you had not known how to approach him, nor wished to. Men like him did not belong to ordinary desire. They belonged to headlines.
And yet, late in the evening, when you had slipped out to the terrace for air, he had followed—not like a hunter, not like a man entitled to your attention, but like someone drawn by the first honest thing he had seen all night.
You had thought him beautiful then.
Cold too.
You had been wrong about one of those things.
“I was afraid of you,” you admitted quietly.
His expression changed at once. “You were?”
“At first.” You smiled faintly at the memory. “You seemed carved out of fire. I thought if I touched you, you might burn me.”
A soft exhale left him, something between hurt and rueful amusement. “That bad?”
“That bad.”
His thumb stroked once over your cheek. “And now?”
You looked at him. Really looked.
At the tiredness still there beneath the warmth. At the tenderness he offered you so instinctively now. At the man who had once belonged wholly to power and now came home wanting nothing more elaborate than his wife’s hands in his hair and her body leaning into his in a bath made warm for him.
“Now,” you said, “I think there is no one softer with what he loves.”
Something in him went very still.
The hand at your cheek tightened just slightly.
You had learned this too—that praise affected him more deeply than criticism, because criticism was familiar and praise, when true, still startled him. Especially praise aimed not at his mind or strategy or usefulness, but at his heart.
He said your name under his breath like it hurt.
Then he leaned forward and kissed you.
Not hard.
Not hungry.
Not at first.
It was a kiss full of too much feeling pressed into one place because language had failed to hold it. His mouth moved over yours slowly, almost reverently, and you tasted the ache in him at once. The gratitude. The fatigue. The love. The old loneliness still startled by gentleness. You made a soft sound and his hand left your cheek only to slide to the back of your neck, holding you with exquisite care.
When he drew back, his forehead rested against yours.
“I was not soft before you,” he said.
You smiled faintly. “No?”
“No.” His nose brushed yours. “I was not kind either, not in the ways that matter most. Efficient, yes. Protective, sometimes. Generous in the expensive ways men are taught make up for being absent.” His fingers moved through your damp hair. “But I did not know how to be warm.”
You swallowed.
“And now?”
His eyes lifted fully to yours.
“Now I come home and look for you first,” he said. “Now I leave dinners when someone insults you. Now I know which tea helps when you can’t sleep. Now I remember your mother’s birthday without being reminded. Now I sit through films in black and white and pretend I do not enjoy them. Now I have opinions about bath oils.” A breath of a smile touched his mouth. “Now I would burn half the city down if it hurt you and still worry whether I’d frightened you with the smoke.”
You laughed, though your eyes had gone hot.
He kissed your forehead. “You made me human.”
“No,” you whispered. “You always were.”
He looked at you like he could not bear how much he loved you.
It made the air between you feel thinner.
Warmer.
The steam seemed to gather more thickly around your skin.
You did not notice at first how his hands had changed. They were still gentle—always gentle—but slower now. More aware. One at the nape of your neck, the other slipping from your waist to the curve of your side just beneath the water. His thumb moved in idle strokes there that were not remotely idle.
Desire rarely struck between you like lightning.
It gathered.
That was always the more dangerous thing.
With Valarr, longing arrived as accumulation. A look. A brush of fingers. The way his mouth touched the inside of your wrist while passing you a glass. The patience with which he undressed you at the end of difficult days. The roughness in his voice when he called you his wife in private, as though the title still astonished him. The worship in him had always been sensual because he loved you with his whole body as much as with his heart.
Now it began to unfurl in earnest.
He kissed you again, deeper this time.
You shifted closer without thinking.
Your knees spread slightly on either side of him in the warm water. His breath caught against your mouth. One of his hands tightened at your waist.
You kissed him once more, and then another time, as though there could be no end to it. His mouth parted under yours with increasing heat, though even that heat was threaded through with tenderness. He was always so careful not to devour what he adored. He wanted, yes—wanted with frightening depth when it came to you—but he wanted like a man kneeling at an altar, not a man taking by right.
A low sound escaped you when his lips found the place beneath your ear.
The noise undid him instantly.
His mouth paused there.
Then again.
“Say that again,” he murmured.
“What?”
“That little sound.”
You laughed softly, breathless. “I don’t know how.”
“Cruel girl.”
“Your wife,” you corrected.
He pressed a kiss to the side of your neck. “Worse.”
His hands slid up your back, wet and warm, spanning your shoulder blades. You felt how hard he was working to stay slow. How much control sat coiled beneath every measured touch.
It made heat spread through you in aching waves.
You drew back just far enough to look at him.
Valarr’s hair was damp and loose around his face. His lashes were wet. His mouth had gone softer from kissing. There was color high in his cheeks from the bath and the heat between you both. He looked younger like this. Less like the man financial kingdoms bowed to, more like the man who sometimes came into the kitchen in the morning without a shirt on and stood behind you while you made coffee just because he liked being near you.
“I love you,” you said, sudden and helpless with it.
His eyes darkened immediately.
It was unfair, the effect those words still had on him.
Perhaps because he never heard them casually. Never heard them as filler. Every time you said them, he seemed to take them into himself like a man who could not quite believe he had been given something the rest of his life taught him not to expect.
He slid one hand into your hair, cradling the back of your head. “Say it again.”
A smile touched your mouth. “Valarr—”
“Please.”
The plea in him was so soft it nearly shattered you.
“I love you,” you whispered.
His eyes closed.
For one brief second, he looked almost stricken by feeling.
Then he opened them and said, in a voice low and reverent and rough all at once, “I love you beyond dignity.”
You laughed under your breath, teary and warm. “That sounds inconvenient.”
“It is. I was once a very composed man.”
“Were you?”
“No.” His thumb stroked your lower lip. “I was lonely. It only looked like composure from the outside.”
The truth of that settled over you like silk.
You moved before thinking, shifting fully over him in the bath until you were straddling his lap.
The change in position made you both inhale.
Valarr’s hands went to your hips at once.
He looked up at you with such open hunger that a tremor ran through you. Not crude hunger. Not thoughtless. Something deeper and more terrible in its own way. Love lit by desire until both had become indistinguishable.
Water lapped softly around your bodies. Steam curled past your skin. His hands stayed on your hips as if he were restraining himself from far more than that.
You could feel the control in him like a living thing.
You looked down at him.
He looked up at you as though the entire old world had burned away and left only this.
“You are too beautiful,” he said quietly, almost to himself.
You smiled, though your pulse was beating high and hard now. “I think you say that whenever I’m not wearing clothes.”
“I also say it when you are.” His thumbs moved once over your hips. “But I will admit the circumstances improve my eloquence.”
You laughed.
His gaze followed the movement of your mouth like he wanted to kiss you again immediately and was barely keeping himself still enough to keep looking.
That looking was half the seduction with him.
You had never been more seen than in Valarr’s hands. Never more wanted than under his gaze. He did not merely admire you; he studied you with devotion. The little expressions. The way you bit the inside of your lip when flustered. The way you melted when his hand settled low at your back. The way your breath changed when he kissed your throat. He knew you now in the way only a person who pays reverent attention can know another.
His palms spread more fully over your hips. “Tell me to stop.”
You blinked.
His voice had gone quieter. More serious.
“Tell me to stop,” he repeated. “Or tell me to keep looking at you like this.”
Emotion swelled through you so fast it felt like heat.
“You can look,” you whispered.
His expression changed.
Not triumph. Never that.
Relief. Want. Something like gratitude.
He kissed the center of your chest, just above your heart.
Not once.
Several times.
Each kiss slow enough to feel intentional. The kind of touch that said mine and holy in the same breath. Your hand went automatically into his hair. His mouth moved over your skin with unbearable tenderness, and when he rested his forehead there for a moment, against your heartbeat, the intimacy of it nearly brought tears to your eyes.
“Valarr,” you whispered.
“My wife,” he murmured against your skin.
The two words sounded like worship.
Your fingers tightened in his damp hair. “You make me feel—”
He lifted his head. “What?”
You swallowed. “Precious.”
The look on his face then would have ruined anyone.
“Good,” he said softly. “That is how you are to me.”
You could barely breathe.
He kissed you again—mouth this time, deep and slow, his hands sliding over your back and up to your shoulders and down again, learning you all over with every touch. Desire thickened between you. Your body responded with increasing honesty, leaning into him, shifting on his lap, needing him closer. A low sound broke from his throat when you moved like that.
His forehead fell to your shoulder for one helpless second.
You smiled, flushed and breathless. “That affected you.”
“Yes.”
“That sounded very grave.”
“It is grave.”
You laughed softly. “Poor thing.”
He pulled back just enough to look at you properly, eyes dark and helplessly intent. “You are on my lap in a bath after telling me you love me. I assure you I am suffering.”
The sound you made then turned into another shiver when his hands tightened.
“You are not suffering very nobly,” you observed.
“No.” He leaned in and kissed the corner of your mouth. “You have ruined my nobility.”
You touched his face with both hands.
And because the truth in you had become too full to keep quiet, you said, “I like this version of you best.”
His breath slowed.
“This one?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
He searched your face as if worried he had misunderstood.
You stroked your thumbs over his cheekbones. “Not the heir in the papers. Not the man everyone fears in a dark suit. Not the son at family dinners. This one. The one who comes home tired and asks me to wash his hair. The one who knows which flowers I miss from the market. The one who leaves meetings early because I’ve had a bad day. The one who looks at me as if I am something precious.”
His hands flexed at your waist.
The bath had gone very still around you.
“I have never,” he said slowly, “wanted to be known the way I want to be known by you.”
Your throat tightened.
“You are known by me,” you whispered.
His gaze dropped to your mouth. Lifted again. “Too well.”
“No,” you said, smiling faintly. “Not well enough. There is always more.”
Something almost like pain crossed his face then—too much love, too much relief, too much aching gratitude all at once.
He kissed you because he could not answer it.
You felt the force of his restraint in every measured movement. The way he held your waist instead of dragging you closer. The way his mouth opened on yours with hunger but never roughness. The way his hands caressed rather than claimed. Desire had deepened now into something nearly dizzying, but he still touched you like care was the first law he had ever learned.
Eventually you broke the kiss only to breathe.
His lips brushed yours once more, lingering.
Then he said, very low, “Come to bed with me.”
The plea in the words was soft enough to be devastating.
You smiled against his mouth. “You’re asking very nicely for a man who usually issues orders.”
“With you, I prefer requests.”
The answer moved through you like silk.
You kissed him once more in place of words.
Then you slid carefully from his lap.
The loss of your weight made him breathe out sharply, and you could not help the tiny, pleased smile it drew from you. Valarr looked openly offended by the absence for exactly one second before he stood from the bath as well, all wet skin and far too much beauty for the hour.
Water streamed down him.
He stepped out first and reached immediately for the nearest towel—not for himself, but for you.
Always.
He wrapped it around your shoulders, then another around your hair, rubbing gently at the ends before draping the larger one more securely around your body. His concentration on the task was so sincere that your chest ached with love.
He glanced up and caught you watching.
“What?”
“You always dry me first.”
He looked faintly puzzled by the observation. “Naturally.”
“As if there were no other option.”
“There isn’t.”
You laughed softly.
But emotion stayed lodged in your throat all the same.
He took your face in both hands. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” Your voice came out too soft. “I just love you.”
The words transformed him.
No matter how many times it happened, it still astonished you. The way love lit his face from within. Not showily. Not dramatically. Just enough to reveal the man beneath the iron control—a man still a little overwhelmed that tenderness had found him and stayed.
He bent and kissed your temple. “Come here.”
You stepped into him and he drew you close, the towel bunching between your bodies.
He smelled of cedarwood and clean skin and the faint expensive trace of his cologne not yet fully washed away. One of his hands moved slowly up and down your back. The other cradled the back of your head.
For a while, he only held you.
Then, very quietly, he said, “Do you know what the house felt like before you?”
You looked up. “What?”
“Like a hotel.” His mouth curved without humor. “Impeccable. Silent. Useful. Not mine, despite being mine.”
Something in you softened all over again.
“And now?”
He glanced toward the doorway, toward the dim bedroom beyond, then back to you.
“Now it feels like the place where my life begins again every night.”
Your eyes stung.
He saw it instantly. “No,” he murmured, thumb brushing beneath one eye before any tear could gather. “None of that. I was trying to say something tender, not make you cry.”
“You did.”
“I see.”
His expression turned faintly smug despite the warmth in it. “Then I succeeded.”
You gave him a watery, laughing smile. “Terrible man.”
“Yes.” He kissed your forehead again. “But yours.”
The simplicity of it undid you more than anything else could have.
You rose onto your toes and kissed him—slow, lingering, full of all the love that had been building all night and all the wanting wound through it. He answered immediately, one hand leaving your back to settle low at your waist. Your towel loosened. His fingers brushed the bare skin there and both of you breathed a little differently.
When the kiss broke, he pressed his forehead to yours.
“There is something dangerous about you,” he murmured.
You smiled. “Only now?”
“No. But I notice it most when I am tired.” His thumb traced the line of your waist once. “You make me want softness so badly that it feels like a vice.”
The confession sent heat through you.
You whispered, “Then take it.”
His eyes lifted sharply to yours.
The room changed around the sentence.
You saw it happen.
The depth in his gaze. The catch in his breathing. The way tenderness did not disappear under want, but sharpened around it instead. Like light gathering through cut crystal.
He kissed you then with a hunger that was still careful, still loving, but no longer pretending not to be hunger. One hand slid to the small of your back and drew you against him. The other cupped your jaw with exquisite care, as if even now he could not separate desire from reverence.
You kissed him back with equal need.
Your towel slipped entirely.
He caught it before it could fall all the way, not from modesty but from habit, as though some part of him had made protecting your comfort into instinct so deeply rooted he could not stop even in the middle of wanting you.
That gesture alone nearly ruined you.
You drew back just enough to smile at him. “You are impossibly dear.”
He stared at you, slightly dazed from kissing. “Do not say that to me right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because I already want to put you in my chest and keep you there.”
The words were so absurdly earnest that you laughed, warm and helpless and breathless.
He looked at your mouth as you laughed and his expression softened into something almost reverent again.
“You do that,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“You laugh, and I forget every argument I had before I walked through the door.”
Your fingers slid into his damp hair. “Then I shall have to laugh more often.”
“Yes.” He kissed the corner of your mouth. “For corporate governance reasons.”
That made you laugh harder, and his smile widened in answer.
It struck you then, in one of those quiet lightning moments marriage sometimes gives you, how impossible this would have once seemed.
The old Valarr—the one the papers called cold-hearted, the one his family praised for discipline and feared for severity—would not have stood half-dry in the bath’s doorway teasing his wife while her towel slipped and laughter warmed the room. He would not have said the word dear without irony. He would not have admitted to loneliness, much less spoken of wanting softness like salvation.
He would not have known how to.
You touched his face as the laughter faded. “You really did change.”
His eyes searched yours. “Do you miss the old version?”
The question was so quiet you nearly missed the vulnerability in it.
Your chest ached at once.
“No,” you said.
He held still.
“Not for a second,” you whispered. “I would choose this you in every lifetime.”
Something broke open in his expression. Not visibly enough for anyone else to name it. But you saw it. Love too deep to bear elegantly. Relief. Astonishment. The old wound of being valued for usefulness rather than self soothed by one honest sentence.
He kissed you once. Then again. Then pressed his forehead to yours and stayed there.
“Come to bed,” he said again, voice rough now. “Before I lose what remains of my manners in this doorway.”
You smiled. “You still have manners?”
“Barely.”
You took his hand.
That too had become a private language between you. The simple joining of hands. Your smaller one in his. The way his fingers closed around yours with both gentleness and certainty. Not possession. Belonging.
He led you into the bedroom.
The room was dim and warm, lit only by bedside lamps and the soft glow from the city filtering around the edges of the curtains. The bed had already been turned down. Sheets smooth. Pillows waiting. Somewhere on the nightstand your book lay facedown beside his reading glasses—because yes, your terrifying husband now required glasses sometimes late at night, and yes, the discovery of this had nearly ended you from tenderness the first week of marriage.
Valarr released your hand only to sit on the edge of the bed and draw you between his knees.
He looked up at you.
There was still desire in his face. Plenty of it. But there was also that same familiar awe, as though proximity to you remained a miracle he had not yet become arrogant enough to expect.
His palms slid slowly up the backs of your thighs, not to hurry, only to feel. To worship through touch the way some men worshipped through prayer.
“You should know,” he said softly, “that every man at that table tonight bored me. I thought about coming home to you through half the conversation.”
Your lips curved. “Only half?”
“The other half I spent deciding whether I could ruin my uncle without it becoming tedious.”
“That seems productive.”
“Yes. But you were far more pleasant to imagine.”
You laughed softly and combed your fingers through his damp hair. “What exactly were you imagining?”
His eyes darkened. “You should be careful with questions like that.”
“You have already called me dangerous.”
“You are.”
“But?”
He drew a slow breath and pressed his face briefly into the softness of your stomach, arms wrapping around your waist. The position was so unexpectedly tender that your hand stilled in his hair.
When he spoke, his voice was muffled and warm against your skin.
“I imagined this.”
Your heart squeezed.
“Coming home,” he continued. “You awake. Your hands on me. That look you get when I’ve had a hard day and you’ve already decided to be gentle about it.” His cheek shifted against you. “You in my bath. In my arms. Here.”
A trembling breath left you.
He lifted his head. “I imagined peace.”
It was such a simple word.
And somehow it was the most intimate thing he had said all night.
You cupped his face. “Then have it.”
His eyes closed for one fleeting moment as he leaned into your hands.
When he opened them again, he kissed the inside of your wrist, then your palm, then rested his cheek there as if even your touch carried rest in it.
“I never knew,” he said quietly, “that love could feel this much like relief.”
You felt tears threaten again and laughed softly at yourself.
He noticed at once. “Don't cry, my love.”
“I can’t help it.”
“No.” His mouth softened. “You can’t.”
He rose from the bed and drew you down with him into the sheets.
The rest of the night deepened around the two of you in the way certain nights only ever do for the deeply married—slowly, tenderly, with no need to hurry toward anything because the sweetness was in the unspooling itself.
He kissed you until your thoughts turned molten and soft.
He touched you like every inch of your skin had been entrusted to him personally.
You lay under him, then against him, then over him again, and each position became some new form of closeness, some new confession in touch. He kissed the place where your shoulder met your throat because he knew it made you shiver. You smoothed your hands over his back and felt him go quiet with pleasure. He buried his face in your hair and breathed you in like a man who had come home from war. You kissed the stern line from his mouth whenever worry tried to return to it. He whispered your name against your lips until it became part of the night itself.
There was desire, yes.
There was longing thick and aching and sweet enough to make your body hum with it.
But even then, what defined the night was not urgency. It was worship.
The way he held your face as if it were beloved scripture. The way he paused to brush your hair back whenever it stuck to your cheek. The way he kept asking softly, “Here?” and “Like this?” not because he did not know you by now, but because pleasing you still mattered to him with the intensity of a vow.
And you, in turn, loved him with your whole body and your whole heart. Loved the tiredness still not quite gone from him. Loved the remnants of coldness that only made his warmth more precious. Loved the way he softened when you praised him. Loved the way his mouth went helpless when you kissed his jaw. Loved even his old hardness for the path it had made toward this gentleness.
At some point, later, when the room had gone quieter and your breathing had slowed and the city outside felt very far away indeed, Valarr lay on his back with you half over him, your cheek resting above his heart.
His fingers moved lazily through your hair.
Neither of you had spoken for some time.
Then he said into the dark, “You know they still think you made me weak.”
You tilted your head just enough to look up at him.
He was staring at the ceiling, one arm around you, the other beneath his head.
“Who?”
“My family. Some of the board. Men who liked me better when I looked as though I could love nothing.”
You were quiet for a moment.
Then you pushed up slightly and kissed the center of his chest.
“They are fools,” you said.
A small smile touched his mouth. “I know.”
“No,” you murmured, settling back over him. “I mean it. The world only understands one kind of strength because that is the kind that frightens easiest. Hardness. Cruelty. Distance. Men admire those things because they are simple.” Your fingers traced a line over his ribs. “But to stay gentle when you have every excuse not to? To love tenderly when your whole life trained you for coldness?” You looked up at him again. “That is harder. That is rarer.”
He was quiet for so long that you thought perhaps he would not answer.
Then his arm tightened around you.
Finally he said, voice very low, “You speak of me as if I am better than I know myself to be.”
You smiled faintly. “Someone has to.”
He looked down at you then. The room was dark, but not so dark you could not see his face—the softened edges of it, the eyes still too full when he looked at you like this.
“Stay with me forever,” he said.
The request was so simple.
So unguarded.
Like something from much younger than the man beneath you.
You answered the only way such a thing could ever be answered.
“Yes.”
His hand came to your face at once. He kissed you slowly, deeply, with all the relieved devotion of a man who had built his whole life around surviving and had suddenly discovered he might also be allowed to keep what he loved.
When the kiss ended, he rested his forehead to yours.
“My wife,” he whispered.
“My husband.”
He shut his eyes as if the words were almost too much pleasure to bear.
Outside, King’s Landing kept glittering. The city moved through its night of money and ambition and noise. Somewhere, people still talked about Valarr Targaryen as if they understood him. As if they knew the cold heir, the ruthless successor, the untouchable son of the richest family in Westeros.
Let them.
They did not know the man who came home after midnight and laid his weariness in your hands.
They did not know the way he softened when you touched his face.
They did not know the way he sat in bathwater and let you wash his hair like he had never been cared for properly before.
They did not know the look in his eyes when you straddled his lap and he held your hips like something sacred had descended into his arms.
They did not know that the same man who could ruin lives before lunch would dry you first, every time, because there had never been another possible order of things in his mind.
They did not know that the cold-hearted heir had not vanished at all.
He had simply come home and fallen so completely in love that the warmth in him finally had somewhere to live.
And held against him in the dark, his heartbeat slow beneath your cheek, his hand still buried gently in your hair, you thought there could be no greater power in all the realm than this; to be loved by a man the world mistook for winter, and to know, with perfect certainty, that for you he had become fire.
