#marrow musings

[thescarehoe]

Compilation of Helen Jordan being cute in The Spectre 2001

#she's so cute I love them so much #helen jordan #hal jordan #the spectre 2001 #dc #dc comics #marrow musings #the spectre

[konekochanxhisoka]

El novio de tu Amigo (Parte 2)

Los días pasaron y simplemente no te lo podías quitar de la cabeza.

Ese encuentro en el ascensor, fue tan jodidamente intimo, aunque no te beso ni nada, se sintió como si de alguna forma él quisiera algo contigo.

Aunque obviamente, todo apuntaba a que se estaba burlando de ti, mostrándote lo que realmente sería que ambos estuviesen en una situación comprometedora, aún con toda la lógica que emplearas, no entendías por qué tu mente insistía en volver una y otra vez al ascensor.

Mas días pasaron y prácticamente huías cada vez que veías a Hisoka.

Hasta que un día eso fue imposible.

Llegabas tarde a casa, como era tu costumbre recientemente, siempre pidiendo un Uber confiable que te dejara en la puerta de tu edificio.

Abriste la puerta del departamento y un armonioso conjunto de notas musicales te dieron la bienvenida. Pequeñas risas y murmullos le seguían, haciendo el ambiente aún mas acogedor.

Era obvio que Illumi no estaba solo. 

Y quien mas podría estar a estas horas mas que Hisoka?

Respiraste hondo para relajarte y no ser un atado de nervios a su alrededor.

Como era tu ritual hiciste tu camino al living, para dejar tus llaves, saludar y encerrarte en tu habitación con algo de comida.

— Hola! — saludas a ambos con una sonrisa.

Los hombres bebían y reían mientras jugaban a las cartas.

— Heeey! Yyyy/Nnnn!! pooor fiiin voeelvesss! — la falta de modulación en la voz de Illumi te indica claramente que está ebrio, no puedes evitar reír por la escena — Y/N heemosssa!... — hay solo una forma para que Illumi Zoldyck añada el adjetivo "hermosa" a tu nombre, significa que va a pedirte algo que su flojo trasero no puede manejar — ...Tinnngo haambre! — se queja — Poeedesss pedir pizzzzzasss??... voooy a morir sino lo haces! — él hace un puchero adorable y por supuesto le darás en el gusto.

— Claro! — respondes mientras dejas tus llaves y te dejas caer en un sillón individual — Entonces, desde cuando han estado bebiendo ustedes dos?! — preguntas con voz divertida.

— Hacen horas!! ~ dice Hisoka sin mirarte demasiado.

El mundo había vuelto a la normalidad.

Tus paranoias injustificadas sobre Hisoka, eran sólo eso, paranoias. Aunque en el fondo estabas decepcionada de que no te comiera con la mirada, también significaba que podías relajarte admirándolo como el hombre inalcanzable que siempre sería para ti y todo estaría en paz con Illumi.

Era lo mejor.

Sacaste tu móvil de la cartera y pediste pizzas, observaste que la botella de whisky que estaban bebiendo estaba a la mitad. Hisoka te ofreció, pero te rehusaste, no te sentías con ganas de beber, sin embargo tenías hambre así es que los acompañarías con una rebanada de pizza.

Caminaste a la cocina para hacer un té, mientras escuchabas las carcajadas de Illumi. Él de verdad se veía feliz alrededor de Hisoka.

Más feliz que en mucho tiempo.

Tus ojos se abrieron cuando en la encimera de la cocina viste tres botellas vacías del mismo whisky.

"Ellos se bebieron todo eso?"

No podías creerlo, cómo lo hacían para no estar noqueados?... era demasiado alcohol en la sangre.

La pizza no demoró en llegar.

Les serviste a los chicos. Illumi comió como tres bocados de su rebanada cuando cayó aturdido en el sillón.

— Creo que deberías llevarlo a su cama... — invitaste a Hisoka sonriéndole suavemente.

— Sí, pobrecillo... — dijo este ultimo con lástima en su voz — Es mejor que lo deje en un lugar cómodo ~

Hisoka tomó a Illumi y se lo puso casi sin esfuerzo sobre uno de sus hombros. Su movimiento fuerte y elegante te robó el aliento.

— No te molesta que me quede, verdad? ~ dijo mirándote de forma juguetona.

— P-por supuue-sto que no — tartamudeaste — Sólo ve... ya sabes cual es su dormitorio... - apartaste la mirada agarrando el control de la televisión para disimular un poco tu nerviosismo.

— Bien ~ él dijo y se alejó mientras seguías bebiendo té.

Después de dar como tres veces vuelta a los canales te diste cuenta que era inútil seguir pretendiendo que veías la televisión. Así es que te paraste y llevaste todas las cosas sucias a la cocina. Pusiste las cajas de pizza en el refrigerador y empezaste a lavar las cosas usadas.

— Veo que te haz encargado muy bien de todo por aquí... ~ su voz sonó con fuerza en la pequeña cocina haciendo que te sobresaltaras. Al girarte, viste la figura de Hisoka apoyada en el marco de la puerta mirándote con cierto brillo en sus ojos — Pensé en dejar a Illumi y venir a ayudar... después de todo era nuestro desorden ~

— Sí! tranquilo, igual no era tanto de que encargarse... ya terminé! — sonreíste, sin darle mucha importancia. Cerraste el grifo y te secaste las manos, aún preguntándote porque seguía aquí en vez de estar con su novio.

No sabes en que minuto él llegó detrás de ti, apoyó sus manos en la encimera del lavaplatos a cada lado de tu figura, enjaulándote y miró tu trabajo por encima de tu hombro.

Podías sentir su pecho presionar tu espalda y el aroma dulce de su perfume impregnó tu metro cuadrado.

- Hmmm es cierto... terminaste... ~ te tensaste inmediatamente - Que bien, así podemos conversar un momento... y ponernos al día, no crees? ~

Sus manos abrazan tu cintura y su mentón se ha enterrado en el hueco de tu hombro.

— Q-qué haces?! — preguntas temblando en tu posición. Te encanta, se siente bien pero tiemblas por el miedo de que Illumi los sorprenda.

— Oh... ~ exhaló cerca de tu oído — Que parece qué hago, cariño?! haz estado evitándome por tanto tiempo, cómo se supone que debería estar? ~ jadea mientras restriega su cadera contra ti y sus labios encuentran su camino por tu cuello. Sus palabras te confunden, pero entiendes que no puedes dejar que continúe.

Esto debe parar.

— Hisoka!!! basta!!! — tu voz es poco mas que un susurro, pero intentas zafarte de sus brazos y te giras para poder enfrentarlo. Pero solo descubres una nueva forma de estar atrapada por su gran estatura.

Miras sus ojos estrechos y en ese minuto entiendes que estas acabada. No es solo su determinación sino tu debilidad, jamás podrías negarle algo... no a él. No mirándote como lo hace.

— Sé que lo quieres tanto como yo Y/N... sólo... déjate llevar ... ~ Hisoka acaricia tu rostro, levantando tu mirada y tú estas sin habla.

Él lo sabía, él lo supo todo este tiempo, sabía que tú gustabas de él.

Miras el suelo, decidida a negarlo todo.

— Te equivocas, yo no l— en realidad no alcanzaste a decir tus líneas, cuando él bajó a tu altura y tomó suavemente tus labios entre los suyos, en un pequeño beso exploratorio. Su lengua se movía por tu boca con lentitud y tú no podías creer lo que estaba pasando.

Hisoka té estaba besando!!!

Hisoka, el novio de tu amigo te estaba... besando!!!

No podías hacer esto! no podías ser así! ... tan desleal!!

Sin embargo, a pesar de todo lo que gritaba tu mente con respecto a tu situación, allí estabas, abriendo tu boca para que la lengua resbaladiza del hombre pelirrojo te envolviera en un beso cada vez mas profundo.

Demonios! No podías negarlo ahora, no cuando contestaste su beso con tanta devoción.

Te tomó en sus brazos y te sentó en la encimera de la cocina, mientras te comía la boca a besos. Sus manos inquietas comenzaron a recorrer cada parte de ti, cada zona, hasta que tu ropa comenzó a ser un problema y Hisoka no encontró nada mejor que deshacerse de ésta de la forma mas salvaje, destruyendo todo a su paso. 

— Noo, qué haces?! Illumi podría despertar y... venir....y — entraste en pánico al ser despojada de la seguridad de tu ropa en un lugar abierto como la cocina.

— Shhh, preciosa — te arrulló — Illumi está noqueado, no despertará hasta mañana... Ahora no seas tímida y desnúdame ~

Tu corazón se derritió ante su voz sexy y su sensual demanda que de inmediato hiciste lo que te pidió. Enfocada en desabrochar cada botón y no distraerte por la sensación de sus labios en tu cuello. Hasta que lograste tu cometido y pudiste deslizar su camisa por sus hombros.

Te quedaste pegada mirando su cuerpo por un momento. Como si una verdad innegable te hubiese sido revelada justo entonces. Hisoka no sólo era lindo, él era divino, completamente fuera de este mundo y ya no podías esperar para ponerle las manos encima. Apretaste sus pectorales y chupaste su piel caliente, besando sus líneas definidas tanto como te fue posible. Ya que de un momento a otro, esto se convirtió en una batalla a muerte por el dominio y aunque él te dejó explorar un poco, no pasó mucho tiempo para que sujetara tus muñecas sobre tu cabeza y reclamara el derecho a zambullirse en tus pechos, hambriento por tu piel.

— Tienes un cuerpo hermoso Y/N ~ tarareó mientras agarraba el dobladillo de tus pantalones y tú gemías en respuesta — Pero con toda esta ropa es difícil apreciarlo ~ partió  la tela de tus jeans a la mitad y tu ropa interior no tuvo mejor suerte. Su mano se deslizó por tus muslos sintiéndose cálida y suave en busca de tu entrada. Ni siquiera protestaste cuando introdujo sus dedos, sino mas bien abriste mas tus piernas para dejarle mas fácil el acceso.

Hisoka sonrío con satisfacción, cuando producto de sus dedos agiles tu espalda se curvó y tu boca se abría para él. Eras una cosita tan distinta de sus otros amantes, que estaba disfrutando mucho tenerte así de expuesta y entregada. Pero tanta emoción estaba causando estragos dentro de sus pantalones.

Entonces paró, sacó sus dedos de tu interior mientras tu jadeabas por la repentina perdida. Él te miró anhelante por un momento y luego levantó una de tus piernas sumergiéndose de lleno en tu calor, besando y chupando con avidez.

Dios! este hombre te iba hacer perder la cabeza, sus labios presionaban de forma suave tus labios inferiores mientras su lengua dejaba pequeños toques intensos en tu clítoris. Te mordiste el reverso de la mano porque por mas que lo intentabas, no podías dejar de gemir y aunque el departamento era grande no dejaba de ser un departamento, sólo unas piezas mas allá dormía Illumi y si Hisoka seguía comiéndote así pronto te ibas a correr ruidosamente.

Pero nuevamente se detuvo, tan abrupto como antes. No pudiste evitar mirarlo confundida, él se levantó limpiándose con el reverso de su mano y volvió a su posición entre tus piernas, se bajó sus pantalones y sin decir nada se estrelló contra ti, tan duro que no sirvió de mucho la mano en tu boca, porque dejaste escapar un grito ahogado de igual manera. él se quedó un momento allí, enterrado profundo en ti, sin moverse, sólo disfrutando del calor que le daba tu interior.

— Hacía tanto tiempo que quería hacer esto... que ya no podía esperar por hacerte mía ~ él gimió contra tu cuello y el calor de la excitación abrasadora quemó en tu interior.

Ya no habían remordimientos.

Te dejaste follar entre besos y mordiscos de amor. Moviéndote rítmicamente en sus brazos mientras él con sus manos firmes en tus nalgas, te sujetaba para que no pudieses escapar, embiste tras embiste, hasta que ninguno de los dos podía escalar mas alto, hasta que las oleadas de placer culminarían pronto en un tsunami devastador, hasta que estabas justo allí y el novio de tu amigo golpeo tan fuerte tu interior que tu respiración se atascó en tus pulmones y te deshacías en un orgasmo delirante.

— Oooooh Y/N .... te estás viniendo en mi, cariño... ~ jadeó Hisoka, sintiéndote eclipsar. 

El no paró su movimiento, al contrario aceleró mas que nunca, tensándose de pies a cabeza, curvó su espalda agarrando con fuerza tus caderas, esperando encajarse aún mas adentro de lo que ya estaba, lo sentiste engrosarse en tu interior y esparcir su carga por tus paredes mientras su cabeza colgaba de sus hombros con la mirada completamente perdida en su propio éxtasis. 

Se quedaron pegados por un momento, inmóviles, cada uno recuperándose de su propio frenesí.

 Hasta que Hisoka salió de tu interior y tú sentiste como te desbordabas. Él subió sus pantalones y alcanzando el papel de cocina te ayudó a limpiar. 

El silencio se instauró entre ustedes. 

Ninguno de los dos estaba muy seguro sobre que decir. Nunca habían conversado a solas mas de unos minutos y ahora claramente se habían excedido con la cercanía. 

Hisoka podía oler tu pesar y por primera vez estaba sin palabras de aliento. Le hubiese gustado dejarte allí y volver a su casa después de haber conseguido lo que quería, pero no podía despegarse de tu lado... no quería que te sintieras mal.

Tú por otro lado estabas llena de arrepentimiento y aún así no querías que él se fuera, obviamente no ibas a retenerlo, pero morías por tenerlo otra vez. Había sido el sexo mas alucinante que habías tenido en tu vida, pero él era y seguía siendo el novio de tu mejor amigo y no sabías como cambiar la realidad, las cosas ya eran así.

Él te tomó en sus brazos, medio desnuda como estabas, tú no protestaste, sólo te acurrucaste en el hueco de su cuello mientras él te llevaba a tu habitación y se encerraba contigo.

— Gracias... ya deberías ir con Illumi... — le sonreíste con debilidad, por fin abriendo tu boca.

Él te depositó sobre la cama, acostándose a tu lado y poniendo un brazo protector te atrajo hacia su cuerpo cálido.

— Cómo estás? ~ su pregunta te tomó por sorpresa, no esperabas que de todas las cosas te preguntara por tu bienestar, fue amable.

— Bien... — respondiste genéricamente, por inercia, aunque estaba lejos de ser realidad.

Él tomó tu mentón para ver que tan ciertas eran tus palabras y cuando vió tus ojos manchados de culpa, no pudo mas que bajar a tu altura para besarte dulcemente.

— No sientas culpa Y/N... si alguien es culpable aquí... ese soy yo ~ te dijo mientras volvía a besarte.

Por primera vez quitaste tu boca y diste vuelta la cara.

— Hisoka... debes ir con Illumi... por favor... — le rogaste. 

No porque repentinamente fueras leal a tu amigo sino porque sabías que eras débil y si él no se iba de tu habitación y continuaba besándote de la forma en que lo hacía, tú no ibas a poder evitar deshacerte nuevamente entre sus brazos.

—  Cariño — él te miro a los ojos con seriedad — No estoy yendo a ninguna parte ~

#hisoka #hisoka imagine #hisoka morow #hxh hisoka #hisoka smut #hisoka x reader #hisoka x y/n #hisoka marrow #hisoka morrow #hisoka morrow x reader #hisoka is my muse #you need learn spanish and I need to improve my english #alway you can try with google translator #thank u for reading

[prestonmonterey]

the stars are empty tonight

hollow

like me

#marble musings #guys idk whats goin on with my brain today #i think the bone marrows altered me in some way #:P

[emmatriarchy]

Spider-Man / Marrow (2001)

#sarah rushman #sarah knuckey #marrow #sarah k. (muse) #uuuugh i have disliked shield for so long

[missallanea-archive]

"Good to see Atlas recruits just keep getting younger and younger."

Of course, she had hardly been much older than the latest additions to the Ace-Ops when she had joined the military, all those years ago. Still, she had to think she'd at least seemed a bit more worldly than the children Ironwood was pulling out these days. The woman wears no uniform now, no markings denoting who or what she allies herself to as she observes the pseudo-military police at work in Mantle. "You lost one, by the way."

@scareqrowbranwen for MARROW AMIN || sc

#❮ scareqrowbranwen / marrow amin ❯ ━━ ❝ too many people confuse loyalty with blind obedience . #❮ riza hawkeye / au.02 ❯ ━━ ❝ a tale of lullabies and stories told . #/ a couple different muses have rwby aus! but riza's is the most well fleshed out #/ she's an ex-atlas sniper who deserted under the old powers #/ but she and james stayed in touch so she comes 'round for weapons upgrades every so often

[oculusxcaro]

Khare doesn't know it yet but she doesn't have ocular growths just on the outside of her body, they're inside too. The progression of mutation has slowed down somewhat due to living in an environment with less injuries and stress but occasionally she'll be in pain as flare ups occur.

#🌈 || musings #🌈 || headcanons #illness tw #illness cw #So far her ocular growths aren't on any important organs of her body but they're there #Probably a few in her bone marrow #Anywhere where there's a lot of cellular activity and replenishment #Not sure how long her lifespan will be at this rate or if it'll eventually *stabilize* #Gotham's colder wetter environment helps keep progression at bay and soothes her aches and pains #She's gonna freak the day she feels something wiggling under her tongue and it's another goddamn eye

[remnxnts]

"I'm so glad Winter is okay."

#dash commentary #muse: marrow amin

[meatoticindex]

((  tag dump

#ooc || out of cartilage #ic || full trotter ahead #info || written in marrow #image || take a good look #aes || how nice... #musings || mumbling to myself

[ursidaem]

evelyn clawthorne tag dump !

#⸻ ✧ 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐘𝐍 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐖𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐄. : IN CHARACTER ‘ the dark doesn’t frighten me‚ i chose to close my eyes ’ #⸻ ✧ 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐘𝐍 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐖𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐄. : VISAGE ‘ fool in her wedding gown ’ #⸻ ✧ 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐘𝐍 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐖𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐄. : MUSINGS ‘ brick & mortar between my bones ’ #⸻ ✧ 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐘𝐍 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐖𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐄. : HEADCANONS ‘ no one gave up a rib for me and mine ’ #⸻ ✧ 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐘𝐍 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐖𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐄. : DASH COMM. ‘ how lucky we are ’ #⸻ ✧ 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐘𝐍 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐖𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐄. : VERSE: CANON ‘ marrow made a wife of eve ’ #⸻ ✧ 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐘𝐍 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐖𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐄. : VERSE: PRESENT ‘ all your ribs are still your own ’

[thescarehoe]

The Flash (2016) #24

SCREAMING

#Mr. Jordan??? #dc #dc comics #hal jordan #green lantern #barry allen #the flash #the flash 2016 #The Flash: Running Scared #marrow musings

[conjured-osteon]

{Used t'do this on one of my ol'RP blogs- Thought I'd keep it up here.}

#OOC {Mun} #Record Player {Music} #{Cavetown also helped muse up Marrow btw}

[xjoonchildx]

kanalia | jhs x reader | final chapter: because i couldn't stay away

banner by the amazing @kth1 💕

⚜️summary: secrets and uncertainty plague a young queen in her arranged marriage to a kind but distant king. the farther she drifts from her husband, the closer she gets to one of his most trusted men.

⚜️pairing: queen!reader x royalguard!hoseok

⚜️rating: mature, 18+

⚜️genre: royal AU, historical AU, smut

⚜️warnings: infidelity (it’s complicated, y’all) mentions of pregnancy, fertility issues. OC struggles with depressive thoughts and episodes. smut warnings in effect.

⚜️word count: 10.2K

⚜️author's note: happy birthday month to my forever muse, jung hoseok. i hope that i did this poor, tortured version of you some justice. and yes, it did take me years to finish this story (😭) , but i did. thank you to every single who has ever taken an interest in this story and cared enough to stick with me through long delays and rough writing spells. once again, i have to shout out the OG @hobi-gif who lent her eyes to part of this story. i appreciate you all so much and if you enjoyed it, i would very much appreciate a reblog as well as your feedback.

thank you guys so, so much 💕

previous chapter masterlist

Love doesn't discriminate Between the sinners and the saints It takes and it takes and it takes And we keep loving anyway We laugh and we cry and we break And we make our mistakes And if there's a reason I'm by her side When so many have tried Then I'm willing to wait for it I'm willing to wait for it

– “Wait for It”

Hamilton, An American Musical 

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

One perfect loop is followed by another. And another. And another.

You need not look back and check your work, not anymore. Now you know simply by the pull of the thread that each stitch you place is snug and uniform. You sit in your chair by the fire and repeat the motion over and over again, staring unseeing into the pattern in your lap. 

“It’s a beautiful day, Your Grace.”

Hyeri’s voice taps at the edges of your consciousness, muffled as though she’s standing outside the chamber door instead of seated right beside you. You ignore it and push another loop through the fabric.

“Not a cloud in the sky,” she persists, gentle. “Perfect conditions for a walk, if you feel up to it. I could even accompany you, if you wish?”

There was a time, not long ago, when Hyeri’s prodding would have set your teeth on edge. But you do not have the energy to muster any such emotion. And so you give Hyeri the same answer you’d given her the day before. And the day before that one. The same hushed words, spoken in the same decisive tone.

“I’m content to stay in today, Hyeri. Thank you.”

“Very well, Your Grace.”

She drops the matter with a quiet sigh.

It’s unlike her. The Hyeri you know would fret and fuss for as long as it took for you to relent; until you had no choice but to quit your chamber simply to enjoy a moment’s peace. The Hyeri you know would be shooing you away from the fire, prattling on about how one errant thread could catch and send your entire dress up in flames. 

But the Hyeri seated beside you does none of those things.

So you sink deeper into the plush chair perched in front of the hearth and watch the flames dance. The embers at the base of the fire glow deep red, putting off a heat blistering enough to scorch your bare feet. 

But you cannot feel it. You cannot feel anything.

You’ve surrendered to the weariness now; let it consume you. Allowed it to fuse itself to the very marrow of your bones. For days you’ve done little beyond sleep and spend your few waking hours seated by the fire, needle in hand. 

Twice you’ve left your chamber and neither time by choice, but rather because the King had insisted on your presence at dinner. To what end you still cannot be sure seeing as you’d taken both meals in stilted, awkward silence. Apparently His Grace is far less bold without a bit of ale in him.

“The hunting party leaves in three days' time,” Hyeri says. “There’s been quite a fuss in the kitchens over it. They’re taking enough supplies to travel for months, by the looks of it.”

You make a non-committal sound under your breath. Hyeri forges on, undeterred.

“There will be a send-off in the courtyard, of course. Will you – “ she pauses to choose her words carefully. “ – Well, I assume that you’ll want to see the King off.”

You do not want to see the King off. Were it not for his pigheaded adamance that you keep up appearances for the sake of this sham marriage, you’d be content to never see him again. But you’ll not tell Hyeri that. Not when she’s made it clear where her loyalties lie and not when she still holds on to the delusion that one day you’ll decide to embrace your role as the placeholder by the King’s side.

So you say nothing at all. The fire pops as one of the logs crumbles in the hearth.

Hyeri clears her throat. “Your Grace, I only want what’s best for you. Surely you know that by now? And I don’t want people casting aspersions, which they most certainly will do if you’re not there to see the King off. The staff is already asking questions about why you’ve not been seen in days.”

“Has he asked for me?”

Hyeri blinks. “The King?”

“Yes, Hyeri,” you say slowly. “The King. Has His Grace requested my presence at this send-off ceremony?”

The color seems to drain from her soft face as she admits, “No, Your Grace. He hasn’t.”

“Then I see no point in worrying yourself over the matter.”

You return your attention to your needlework and place another yellow thread in the center of your Mugunghwa flower’s pistil. The flames crackle in perfect, undisturbed silence. 

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

“It’s cold out there today,” Hyeri says. “But if you bundle up tight, it’s quite pleasant in the sunshine.”

“Thank you, Hyeri,” you reply evenly. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

It’s a lie, and you both know it. You have no intention of leaving this chamber today and much to your relief, the King did not require your presence at his evening meal the night prior. Hyeri had ordered your dinner sent up and then proceeded to dine with you herself. An insidious voice inside your mind whispers she’s afraid to leave you alone.

You ignore it.

Instead you try to focus on your Mugunghwa flower. You study it, blinking until the riot of colors before you has clear, defined boundaries – fiery crimson at the center which slowly bleeds into a subdued pink which in turn dissipates into a milky white. You pull fresh white thread through your needle and set to work on the flower’s edges.

“Your needlework is much improved, Your Grace,” Hyeri notes. “You’ll be finished with that pattern by the end of the day, as I see it.”

You thumb over the fabric and consider her assessment. She’s right, you’ll be done with this pattern in a matter of hours. And the only thing that awaits on the other side is another pattern. And another. On and on and on. 

“Perhaps when you’re done, you’ll consider mending this for me,” Hyeri says, gesturing towards her lap. “My eyesight is not what it used to be. I’m terrified of ruining the old man’s beautiful design.”

You set your embroidery down and turn to look at Hyeri, gaze falling to the opulent plum fabric in her hands. Slowly, the details sharpen into focus. The rich velvet trim. The gold threads glinting back at you in the firelight. The room begins to tilt.

“A footman found it in the woods last night,” Hyeri explains, her cadence slow and deliberate. “By the stables.”

You are keenly aware of the way she watches you in the weighty seconds that follow, one gray eyebrow lifted as she awaits a response. You do your best to appear calm despite the panic clawing its way up your throat.

You’d lost that shawl in your mad dash back to the castle. You’d been tearing through the dark, paying little heed to the branches that tugged at your dress and occasionally scraped at your hands and face. One of them had caught the shawl, but you’d been so desperate to reach the refuge of your chamber that you’d hardly noticed when it was wrenched away. You’d had, after all, your humiliation to keep you warm.

And you’d earned it, hadn’t you? With your drunkenness. With your recklessness. You’d let every one of your baser emotions take control. You’d risked every advantage of your carefully curated life just to throw yourself like a wanton at the feet of one of your husband’s closest confidantes. Like a fool. 

When Lord Jung turned on his heels that night and abandoned you in the woods, he’d done far more than just rebuff your clumsy advances. 

He’d finished you. 

“Your Grace?” Hyeri’s curiosity is evident. “Are you alright?”

Hardly. Your mouth waters as your stomach threatens to cast up what little you’ve eaten today. One glimpse of that garment had been enough to bring a torrent of memories rushing back; vivid, awful memories that you’ve worked hard to banish to the deepest recesses of your mind. You grip the arm of your chair hard enough to make your knuckles go white. 

“Your Grace?”

You don’t answer until you’re sure that you won’t retch the very moment you open your mouth. Hyeri studies you in the interminable silence, lips parted in an expression of concern. Your tongue is thick when you finally collect yourself enough to speak.

“Please do thank the footman for me, Hyeri. And I think it best to leave the more intricate needlework to you.”

Hyeri stares as you reach for your needle and thread with trembling hands, but you don’t dare look her way. You try to place a loop at the edge of your flower but the Mugunghwa’s colors have gone blurry again and you’re forced to back the needle out and start over.

Perhaps there was a time when the Mugunghwa was as vivid as a rose. With petals of rich orange-red, opaque from pistil to tip. But perhaps it was asked to weather too many storms. Too many droughts. Too many winters. 

Perhaps the Mugunghwa looks the way it does today not because of how it was made, but rather what it’s had to endure. 

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

The first snow of the season arrives early.

You stand at your window and watch it fall, noting how quickly the fields turn from green to white. You press your fingertips to the windowpane and the cold seeps through it, chilling you instantly.

In the courtyard below, the horses are draped in heavy blankets. Stablehands scurry around them; dusting snow off their muzzles and checking their shoes. Footmen work in teams, sharing the weight of the heavy trunks they load on to waiting carts. 

“I’ll wear the blue walking dress today, Hyeri. The one with the white flowers on the bodice.”

“Your Grace?” Hyeri is on her feet at once to join you at the window. “You’ll see the king off, then?”

“I’ll need the matching cape too,” you direct, brushing her question aside as you watch the newly-packed trunks take on a layer of white snow. “If the conditions are as awful as they look.”

“Yes of course,” Hyeri breathes, hurriedly whirling about the chamber behind you as she gathers your things. In a matter of minutes she has you dressed and seated, fingers twisting your hair into a plait at the base of your neck. She loops the plait and pins it into an elegant bun, fingers smoothing the hairs into place before her hands come to rest on your shoulders. She squeezes them gently.

“I’ll not ask you why you’ve changed your mind, Your Grace,” she says softly. “But I’m so glad for it. It’s important that people see you. For them, of course, but for you most of all. And besides, you look so lovely.” 

You don’t feel lovely. In fact, you don’t feel anything at all. And if Hyeri had pressed you as to why you’ve changed your mind, she’d not be satisfied with your answer. You’ve changed your mind because you cannot bear to cause more conflict with the King. Because you have no desire to create a scandal that you’ll somehow have to fix. You’ve changed your mind because you have no fight in you left. This is the path of least resistance.

You rise from your seat and Hyeri’s hands fall away. She clutches them to her chest, rheumy eyes soft with sadness as she watches you take your place at the window once again. Outside the snow falls harder, and you watch the footmen leave deep divots in it with their boots.

“Tell me when it’s time,” you say quietly.

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

You can scarcely recognize anyone in the throng of well-wishers gathered outside the castle.

They’re all bundled tight in winter coats and pelts; some wear hats and scarves. The snow doesn’t help either, and from the moment you enter the courtyard you’re grateful for your cape. Not only for the warmth of its thick lining, but for its hood, too. It affords you a bit of privacy in this otherwise very public affair.

You weave your way through the crowd and do your best not to make eye contact with anyone. Surely Boram is among those gathered with sweet Yeona in tow, here to see Lord Min off on his adventure. But you cannot bring yourself to seek her out – not when she’s already called on you twice without so much as an explanation for your disappearance. At any rate, you don’t think you could bear to look at her right now. To see the worry and concern you know you’ll find written all over her face. 

So you keep your hood pulled tight and your eyes down as you set off in search of the King. And you have no trouble finding him despite your reticence to make your presence known. It’s not just that he stands a head taller than most. It’s in his stature, in his stance – in that self-assured air that seems to come naturally to those born with power. He catches sight of you as he’s speaking to a footman and pauses, gaze locking on yours.

Your legs feel heavy. Your boots sink into the snow as you approach, each step more tiring than the last. When you are finally standing before the King you bow, dipping your head as you peer at him from beneath your hood.

“Your Grace,” he murmurs, lips twitching into a cautious half-smile. “I wasn’t sure you’d come down to say goodbye.”

“And yet I have,” you respond evenly. A snowflake lands on one of his long eyelashes and you resist the urge to reach out and sweep it away. “So I do very much hope that you are pleased.”

“I am pleased.”

The King reaches for your gloved hand. He waits a heartbeat before bringing it to his mouth and pressing a kiss to your leather-clad fingers. Beneath your hood, your cheeks burn. You withdraw your hand quickly and let it fall to your side. 

“Well. Then. I wish you a comfortable journey,” you say. “As well as a safe return.”

The two of you stand there for an awkward moment, the King’s expression expectant as though he’s waiting for you to say more. But you have no more to say. The words you’ve already offered him will do. They’re as empty as the vows you’d exchanged little more than a year ago.

“We ought to head out, Your Grace. We’re losing precious daylight and this weather will slow us as it is.”

The voice comes from somewhere in your periphery, but you need not see the man to know exactly who it is. Suddenly each breath you draw is painful, the frigid air pricking your lungs like a thousand tiny needles. You will yourself not to turn towards it, not to react in any way. 

“You’re right.” The King acknowledges Lord Jung with a brusque nod. “Have the stablehands check over the horses one more time.”

You won’t look at him. You can’t look at him. Not when the sound of his voice reverberates through every wounded place inside of you. Not when you can close your eyes and still feel the hot trickle of embarrassment that slid down your spine that night in the woods. But then he leaves you with no other choice.

“Your Grace.” 

The low timbre of Lord Jung’s greeting makes the fine hairs at the nape of your neck stand on end. You turn to him, slowly, and his dark eyes briefly connect with yours before he bends into a shallow bow. Your knees nearly give way when you return the gesture, along with a subdued, “My Lord.”

What must this man think of you now? What has he told the King? The nausea you’ve managed to stave off for days returns at once. 

You startle when a gloved hand wraps around your forearm and the King beckons you to face him. You flick your eyes up to meet his and find that they – along with his countenance – have darkened. By now Lord Jung is yards away, tending to his horse as the hunting party readies to embark. Your lungs ache with each deep pull of cold air.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, no. Not at all,” you insist, contriving a weak laugh. “I’m not accustomed to this kind of cold, is all. I’ll need to go back inside to get warm.”

The King’s brows furrow as he studies you. But you maintain your mild expression until his face relaxes and the disquiet subsides. He leans in to place a chaste kiss to your cheek. 

“Hyeri assures me you’ll be well taken care of in my absence.”

You lift the corners of your mouth in a gesture that you hope will pass for a smile.

“Thank you, Your Grace. Be well.”

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

Hyeri does not protest when you ask to undress upon your return to the chamber. Nor does she fuss when you climb into bed with the morning sun still high in the sky. She simply presses a soft kiss to your hair, draws the curtains tight and leaves you with a whispered rest well. 

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

Your chamber is dark when you wake but for the soft glow of a fire. 

As you come to, so does an ache in your temples, a quiet thud that pulses in time with your heartbeat. Your muscles protest as you roll onto your side to find Hyeri seated at the hearth. 

She’s yet to realize that you’ve roused and so you lie there for a while, studying her. She has a strange, far-away look in her eyes as she stares into the flames, her grip tight on a book in her lap. After a few minutes she opens the book and begins to thumb through it and you watch, curious, as she pulls a worn piece of vellum from between its pages.

She unfolds the missive and reads over it, face crumpling as she fights back a sob.

“Hyeri?”

The older woman nearly jumps out of her skin when you call out to her.  She hastily folds the vellum and slips it back into her book, smoothing down her dress as she stands at attention. “Your Grace,” she says, voice huskier than usual, “I hadn’t realized you were awake.”

“It’s alright,” you say absently, voice rough with sleep. You steal a look at the book left lying in Hyeri’s chair as she hurries over to bring you some water. Her countenance is that of someone who’s been caught doing something they shouldn’t have. You stare at the glass she offers you, watching the water slosh back and forth. 

Is she trembling?

“You ought to eat something,” she admonishes gently, waving a hand towards the food waiting on the table nearby. “You slept through the evening meal. I had my mind made up to wake you if you’d gone much longer, but thankfully I didn’t have to. So come,” she beckons, “Eat something. It will do you some good.”

Your stomach twinges at the mention of food. It’s been in upheaval for days now, and as such it’s been far too long since you had a proper meal. But whatever awaits in the dishes nearby smells enticing enough, so you allow Hyeri to help you out of bed. Your muscles are stiff with disuse and you grimace as you make your way to the table. Your eagle-eyed handmaid takes note.

“A long, hot bath will do you some good, too,” Hyeri remarks as you spoon lukewarm bulgogi onto your plate. You eat slowly as she busies herself with lighting the torches and stripping the linens from your bed. “I’ll have the maids bring up the water after you’ve had a chance to eat.”

You’ve only managed a few bites of the bulgogi before there’s an army of maids filing into the chamber, flitting about the room like a swarm of bees. You watch the entire affair in a daze as the maids make quick work of the tasks set before them: tidying and sweeping the chamber, draping your bed in fresh linens, filling the tub with steaming hot water. And when all the commotion is finally done, Hyeri dismisses them with strict orders not to return unless they are sent for. 

You are grateful at once for the silence that immediately falls over the chamber. Even Hyeri leaves you for a while, disappearing into the antechamber to prepare your toilette. But when you glance over at her chair, Hyeri’s book is gone. Along with whatever was written on the vellum inside.

“Come now, Your Grace,” Hyeri says, at last. “I’m ready for you.” 

She leads you into the bathing chamber, where the air is humid and sweet. Then she helps you out of your rumpled nightgown and holds out her hand. You accept it, leaning into her as you step over the tub’s steep rim. Slowly you ease yourself down, sucking in a breath as the heat blazes a path up your feet to your legs and thighs. The water is hot almost to the point of pain but you withstand it, sinking until it laps at your shoulders.

“I used rose oil tonight,” Hyeri says, kneeling behind you and cupping your head in her hands. “I thought you could do with a bit of pampering.” 

The delicate fragrance envelopes you, carried on the curls of steam that rise just above the water. You breathe in the soft, floral scent and close your eyes; try to clear your mind. Hyeri presses her thumbs to your temples and starts making firm, soothing circles. 

“I remember the very first moment I saw you,” Hyeri muses softly. “I’d been so impressed by your poise.” Her hands move to the column of your neck and she kneads at the tight muscles there, pulling the tension from them with each pass. “You were little more than a girl then, but I could still see that you were lovely, inside and out.”

Were you? You’re not sure that you would even recognize the girl that stepped out of that carriage so long ago. You’d been so idealistic – so certain of the comfortable life that you would find here. Of the affluence and status and yes, perhaps, even love that you’d enjoy once you’d ascended to the throne. But that girl had been a nitwit. The woman you are now will never entertain such foolish notions again.

“I know that so much of this has not been easy for you,” Hyeri continues, setting to work on your shoulders. “I know that there have been days when you’ve struggled to put one foot in front of the other. But you have. And that means something.”

It does mean something. It means that your mother’s great work is finally complete. She’d spent her entire life molding you into the polished, empty creature you are today. If only she could see you now; see how biddable and pathetic you’ve become. It would fill her to overflowing with joy.

“Anyhow, when you’ve lived as long as I have you realize that nothing is forever,” Hyeri says thoughtfully. “Same as what you’re going through right now, Your Grace. It won’t be forever.”

Nonsense. Hyeri cannot change the King’s heart. She cannot save you from a lifetime of awkward exchanges and forced smiles simply because she believes things can change. And she cannot will a child into your womb simply by decreeing that it should be so. The swell of emotion that surges inside you is more powerful than anything you’ve felt in days. And it’s anger. 

“Hyeri, stop,” you order tersely. “No more.”

Her face falls at that, features going slack with dismay. But she heeds you, holding back whatever she’d meant to say next. Then she reaches for the soap and begins to wash your hair in silence. You chase the beads of oil that float along the surface of the water with a fingertip, cheeks hot with embarrassment. You hadn’t meant to be ugly to Hyeri. 

But then you’ve done many things of late that you hadn’t meant to.

“I’m sorry,” you murmur.

“It’s alright, Your Grace. I know you meant no harm by it.” Hyeri dries her hands off and then rises to her feet, looking down at you with a kindness you do not deserve. “I’ll leave you to soak for a bit. You can have a few minutes of peace before I return.”

You’ve been unfair to her, haven’t you? The realization cuts you deep as you watch her retreat from the antechamber. She’s served you in so many ways since your arrival here: as caretaker and as advisor and as confidante. And how have you thanked her? By being cold and distant. By unleashing all the frustration and resentment you feel towards the King on her. And what of the tears you’d seen her hold back while she’d been sitting by the fire? Have you been so mired in your own anguish that you’ve neglected to see hers? 

The water has begun to cool and your skin has begun to pebble by the time Hyeri returns.

“Forgive me, Your Grace,” she says upon her return, helping you out of the water. “The time got away from me. You must be freezing.”

“Only a little,” you lie, teeth chattering. Hyeri sets to drying you, throwing the damp linens on the floor to catch the rivulets of water that fall from your hair. Her dark eyes dart from your shoulders to your neck to your ears, but they do not meet yours. 

“Is something wrong, Hyeri?”

“No, no. Not at all,” she answers quickly, “Just a bit tired.” Her reassurance rings hollow because she keeps her eyes trained on the floor as she bends to reach for the rose oil. When she straightens, you catch her hand with yours, stilling her. 

“What were you reading tonight?”

Hyeri’s mouth opens in surprise and then quickly closes.

“I saw you sitting by the fire,” you admit. “You were reading something that looked to upset you.”

“And here I thought you were sleeping,” Hyeri grumbles, taking her hand back. She pours the oil into one palm and then warms it before pressing it to your neck, letting a long moment pass before she speaks. 

“It didn’t upset me,” she explains. “Not in a sad way. Those were happy tears, I suppose.” She pours oil into your hands and begins to gently massage it into your fingers. “It was a letter from my Sanghun, back when he’d been courting me so many years ago. You might find this hard to believe, but I wasn’t always the old woman you see now. I had more than my fair share of suitors.”

It’s not hard to believe. Time has been kind to Hyeri. Her features, though soft with age, are still striking. She must have been quite fetching as a young woman. 

“What made you choose Sanghun?” you ask.

“I don’t know that I had a choice in the matter at all,” she laughs as she helps you slip into a nightgown. “The moment I saw Sanghun, no other man existed for me. It was him or no one.” Her eyes go soft with a faraway look as she recounts the memory. “The other girls thought him too practical, too serious. But I saw a side of him that no one else saw. A part of him that was just for me.”

“You must miss him,” you say gently.

“Every day,” Hyeri admits. “Ten years he’s been gone and I think of him every day. Those letters remind me of what it’s like to be young and so in love that you’ll not see rhyme or reason. But –” she trails off and waves a hand as if fending off fresh tears. “Never mind that. Come sit.”

It’s unclear which of you she’s sparing from the memory. But as Hyeri begins working her comb through the lengths of your hair, you’re struck by how shortsighted you’ve been. There is suffering in never having the chance to love and be loved, certainly. But there is a different kind of suffering that comes with having that kind of love and then losing it. The thought humbles you.

Hyeri comes to stand behind you and begins working your wet hair into a loose plait.

“I’m sorry, Hyeri,” you say softly, gaze dropping to your hands. “I’m sorry that I haven’t thought to ask you about Sanghun. I haven’t been myself and I’ve just – “

Hyeri silences you with a soft hush. She secures your braid with a piece of linen and then drops to her knees to look her in the eye. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” she says softly, stroking a hand down the side of your face. “Nor do you owe anyone an explanation for feeling the things you feel.”

Her warmth thaws the frozen places inside you. It causes tears to spring to your eyes. And when she takes your hand in hers, you squeeze it gently — hoping that the gesture can convey the feelings you can’t put into words.

“Now put all of that behind you,” she says, smiling through her own unshed tears. “And come sit with me for a while.”

Hyeri leads the way into the chamber and you follow, only to stop short when the hearth comes into view.

When your gaze falls on the silhouetted figure near the fire, you nearly scream. You try to scream. But fear seizes your body, inch by inch – rooting your feet to the floor and closing around your throat like a shackle. You have no choice but stand there, staring in horrified silence as the figure begins to emerge from the shadows. In the span of one frantic heartbeat, the figure has a shape. In the next, it has a face. 

And in the next, it has a name.

“H-Hyeri?” you stammer, swaying on your feet as your legs threaten to give way. Your handmaid doesn’t answer and so you call out again, voice quivering. “Hyeri?”

You cannot take your eyes off the man standing before you. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, and so you stare as the firelight flickers over his stark, beautiful features. Shadows dance across his clenched jaw and knit brow. And his eyes – those dark eyes you know so well are fathomless, inscrutable – smoldering coal set in unblemished, unforgiving stone.

“Hyeri!“ you call out to her again, desperate – reluctantly tearing your gaze from the man to look for her. And when your eyes finally land on Hyeri, you find your handmaid standing near the chamber door, hands clasped together tightly. Streaks of color running up the thin skin of her neck and into her soft cheeks.

But she’s not surprised, is she? Not flummoxed in any way by finding Lord Jung lying in wait inside your private rooms. The realization comes over you slowly, wholly, until a strangle tingle runs from your scalp to the tips of your fingers. She’s arranged this, hasn’t she? 

“W-What is this?” The words leave you as more air than sound, but they ring out clear enough in the silence of your chamber. Lord Jung and Hyeri exchange a long look, but neither utters a sound.

“Someone speak!” you cry, wincing at the hysteria in your voice. 

Hyeri finally clears her throat, her face now fully aflame. “I believe the two of you – “ she pauses, swallowing hard. “Well, I believe the two of you have some things you need to discuss.”

Discuss? You and Lord Jung? Suddenly the panic you feel metastasizes, growing into something much darker. Has he come to admonish you, then? To punish you for your disloyalty? Has he come to lay bare every humiliating detail of that horrible night at the stables for Hyeri to hear? 

“No,” you whisper. You do your best to appear composed, despite the way your knees tremble. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Hyeri. I have nothing to discuss with Lord Jung.”

“Yes, you do.” The man in question speaks for the first time, his voice little more than a low rasp. “And we will.”

“No,” you repeat your refusal, shaking your head as though the movement will help sort your jumbled thoughts. “No. You have no right to turn up here and say what I will and will not do. And where did you come from? I saw you leave. I saw you mount your horse and ride off with – “

You stop yourself before you can finish the thought, flushing fiercely at the unspoken mention of the King. Your tedious, disinterested husband would be anything but if he had any inkling of this clandestine encounter.

“I was called back to the castle,” Lord Jung explains evenly. “A palace rider came bearing a missive bidding that I return at once to address an issue at the stables. I was but an hour’s ride away at the time.” Once again, he looks to Hyeri and they exchange another one of those maddening looks.

“But there was no issue at the stables,” you deduce quietly, the pieces falling into place, one by one. “Was there, Hyeri?” Your handmaid seems to shrink beneath the weight of the accusation in your eyes. 

“No, Your Grace,” she confesses weakly, “There was not.”

Oh, but your head is truly spinning now – each new revelation more disorienting than the last. How long have these two been conspiring together? What does Hyeri know about what’s transpired between you and Lord Jung? What does he know about the many private things you’ve shared with Hyeri? Both thoughts cause the bile in your stomach to rise.

“You can leave us now, Hyeri,” Lord Jung says. “Thank you.”  

Leave you? Has the man lost all good sense? You open your mouth to protest, but when met with the intensity in his glittering dark eyes, words fail you. You just stand there, mouth agape, rendered mute and immobile with shock. You look over at Hyeri, who has fixed her pleading eyes to your wide ones, her expression urging you to comply. And though you cannot make sense of a single thing that you’ve witnessed tonight, you do.

“Very well, My Lord,” she says quietly. “Rest well, Your Grace. The staff rouses at dawn.”

And with that Hyeri takes her leave, the chamber door closing behind her with a heavy thud that echoes the one in your chest.

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

Once you are alone with Lord Jung, you realize how truly vulnerable you are.

With little more than a thin nightgown to cover you, he can see far more of you than would ever be considered proper. All it would take was one shout from the man to bring the guards running, to compromise you both to the point of expulsion. Perhaps worse.

But the situation is far weightier than that. 

You’ve been vulnerable to this man from nearly the first moment you saw him. You’d been weak to his attention and charms. You’d allowed him to see you in ways that no one else has: not Chaehee, not Hyeri and certainly not the King. And the only time in your life that you’d thrown caution to the wind – and acted with abandon, not restraint – he’d mortified you. The memory of that night is a wound that’s just barely begun to heal, and now here Lord Jung stands, poised to pour salt on it. 

You’ll not allow him to devastate you again. 

“Go on then,” you say, lifting your chin and speaking with feigned bravado. “You’ve gone to great lengths to speak to me, so speak. I assume you’ll enlighten me as to which matter is so pressing that you felt the need to steal into my chamber and risk ruin for us both.”

“I know what I’m risking,” he growls. Then he stops to collect himself, exhaling deeply as he shoves a hand through his hair. “I know what we both stand to lose. But I could not come to you any other way.”

“Why have you come to me at all?” you demand. “You made your feelings quite clear the night of the festival, did you not?” You can no longer contain your bitterness and it drips from your every word. “You should go back to your sovereign, My Lord. Back to your King.”

Lord Jung looks stricken when you use his own words against him. There is a despair in his dark eyes that might have pained you once, but not now. Not anymore.

“You have every right to be angry with me, Your Grace,” he acknowledges. “And if you bid me to leave, then I will do so. But not without telling you the truth. You deserve to hear the truth.”

“Everything here is a lie. Perhaps you, most of all.”

He looks at you for a long moment before turning towards the hearth to gaze into the fire. Orange-red light illuminates his profile, sweeping across his smooth brow, over the elegant slope of his nose and down to his strong jaw. He is still the most beautiful – and most terrible man you’ve ever known.

“The King said he would give her up,” he says woodenly, staring into the flames. “When your marriage was announced, he swore it. And I believed him.”

Every muscle in your body pulls tight.

“I knew that he loved her. We all did. But he vowed that he would respect his father’s wishes and I’ve never known him to be a duplicitous man. I’ve never known him to say one thing and do another. And when I realized that he’d been deceiving you, deceiving us all, I – “ he stops and shakes his head at the memory. “ – I wasn’t thinking clearly. I confronted him at once and demanded that he explain himself.”

The argument in the courtyard. The memories come back to you in an instant. The way they’d both looked so irate, the way their voices would rise and then fall. Lord Jung turning his back on the King and stalking away into the dark. 

The tightness in your chest is unbearable now, viselike. 

“I was so damned angry,” he whispers, more to himself than to you. “Never once in my life have I imagined putting my hands on the King, but in that moment – I don’t know. I don’t know what I might have done had I not walked away. But I confronted him because I had to know why.”

He rips his gaze from the fire and turns to you, eyes flashing.

“And do you know what he told me? Do you know what he said when I asked him why he would insult you by keeping a lover? He told me that he couldn’t stay away. That he’d tried to do the honorable thing but he couldn’t stay away.”

“Why are you telling me this?” The tremor in your voice belies your pathetic attempt at composure. “If you mean to cause me pain, it’s too late. I’ve known about the King’s lover since the early days of this marriage, and I’ve accepted it. Just as I’ve accepted that I’ll never amount to more than a trinket he dusts off to show to his people.”

Lord Jung takes a step towards you, his beautiful face hard in the firelight. There’s a maelstrom behind his eyes, a polite violence that sets you to shiver.

“I’m telling you this because I need you to understand,” he says. “I want to hate him. I have tried to hate him. But I cannot. I have no position of honor to stand on. No rightful claim to virtue. I have no right to condemn the King for his sins when I have so many of my own to account for.”

“I – I don’t understand,” you say weakly.

“I have no right – “ his voice breaks, thick with emotion, “-- I have no right to denounce the King for coveting another woman.” He drags a hand down his face, distraught. “Not when I have spent every single day since you stepped out of that carriage coveting you.”

You stop breathing entirely.

“So no,” he continues, voice graveled. “I cannot bring myself to hate the King. And you were right to think me a liar. I’ve pretended that my nearness to you was benign, nothing more than an act of service. I’ve tried to make myself look honorable to you, when I have been anything but. I’ve been a liar since the moment I met you.”

You are trembling now, head to toe. Rendered speechless by Lord Jung’s confession. Slowly, the maelstrom in his eyes starts to recede. He looks as vulnerable now as you feel. 

“You deserved to know the truth,” he says quietly. “If from no one else, than from me.” 

There is a heavy silence in the seconds it takes you to find your voice.

“My Lord, I – “

“Don’t call me that,” he pleads. “Please. Not now. Not when I’ve come to you like this.”

“Very well, Hoseok. But you sent me away. In the woods that night, I’d asked you to – “ you stop, not wanting to say the words aloud. “What’s changed? Why are you telling me this now?”

“I have tried to leave you alone.” His voice is ragged now, anguished. “I thought if I could just put some distance between us – if I rose earlier and worked harder and retired later – that I could exhaust this need out of me. But I can’t.” Torment is etched into every line of his beautiful face. It makes you want to reach out and touch him but you resist, uncertainty keeping your hands pinned to your sides.

“I cannot war with myself any longer,” he says hoarsely. “I cannot continue to lie to you or myself. And if he is not willing to give you the things you desire, then I will.”

Heat rushes to your cheeks, your neck. It gathers in your belly, too.

“So if you’re asking me why now?” he says, taking another step towards you, closing what little distance remains. “It’s because I couldn’t stay away.”

He touches you then, takes your face into one warm hand and strokes his fingers down your temple, smooths the pad of his thumb over your lips. The featherlight touch raises goosebumps all over your skin. It’s more intimate than anything you’ve ever experienced with the King. 

“Do you still want me to kiss you?” he murmurs. 

“No,” you breathe. “I want so much more than that.”

He looks at you with such heat that the warmth in your belly goes molten. Then he presses his mouth to yours and slowly coaxes it open with gentle strokes of his tongue. He tastes of whiskey and smells of fine, heady soap and he does not relent until you are panting. Moisture gathers at the juncture of your thighs, beneath your thin nightgown.

But suddenly you are apprehensive. You’ve no idea how to kiss a man properly, much less satisfy him as a lover. And you’re not sure that you could ever live down the shame of disappointing him. When he finally pulls away to look down at you with heavy-lidded eyes, you have no choice but to confess.

“There’s something you should know, Hoseok,” you say, the sound of his given name still foreign in your mouth. “It’s just that – well, I am by no means a maiden but in some respects, I might as well be. I know almost nothing about how to please you.”

Anger flashes in his eyes, and for one terrifying moment you fear it’s for you.

“That is through no fault of your own,” he says darkly. “And if he’s been too much of a fool to see to your needs, then so be it.” He dips his head to press a kiss to your ear, then whispers, “Your pleasure will be mine and mine alone.”

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

Hoseok spends an inordinate amount of time tending to the fire. 

You sit on the edge of your bed and watch him, feverish with anticipation as he moves the weakest logs and adds fresh ones. Once he’s satisfied, once the chamber is glowing with fresh flames and warmth, he cleans his hands and comes to you.

Your heart rattles harder with each step he takes towards your bed. 

When he’s finally standing at the foot of your bed, he takes off his belt. And then reaches behind his head to pull his tunic away. The sight of his bare chest is enough to make your mouth go dry. His body is lithe and sleek and strong, his muscles rippling as he puts his hands down on either side of you and lowers his mouth to yours for a kiss.

“Tonight is about you, pretty bird,” he murmurs, trailing more kisses across your cheek, down your neck. “So I want you to tell me everything you want.”

“I want to see you.” The words leave you in a rush an account of the way his mouth moves from the juncture of your neck and to the hollow of your collarbone. “All of you.”

Hoseok wastes no time in straightening to his full height to remove his breeches, and then his smallclothes. And try as you might not to stare, it cannot be helped. You’ve never been able to study a man like this. Not even the King.

“Can I touch you?” 

“Please,” he groans.

And then you are cautiously reaching for him, wrapping a hand around the length of him, marveling at the way he pulses in your palm. You run your fingertips down the skin of his shaft, awestruck by how silky and warm he is. But when your fingers reach the blunt head of him, he flinches.

“I don’t – I’m sorry,” you say quickly. “Did I hurt you?

“No, no. You didn’t hurt me,” he assures you, his voice sounding a bit strangled. “I’m just sensitive there, is all.”

“Will you show me, then?” you ask, curiosity far stronger than any self-consciousness you might feel. “Show me how to touch you.”

“Of course.”

He sits down on the bed beside you, taking hold of your hand. And then you watch with a heady mix of confusion and excitement as he takes your fingers into his mouth one, by one. He finishes the unfamiliar preparation by licking a long stripe up the palm of your hand. The stroke of his tongue sends a bolt of desire racing through you.

“It’s easier like this,” he explains, guiding your hand back to his length. You take hold of him again and this time he wraps his hand around yours. He moves your hand for you, up and down the length of him, until you can feel him growing hotter and harder in your hand. You’re fascinated by it all – by how firmly he wants to be touched, by how labored his breathing becomes, by the way the muscle and sinew in his legs seem to twitch at your command.

He leans over to capture your mouth as he begins to buck into your hand in earnest. And after a while his own hand falls away, leaving you to take control of his pleasure. And what an intoxicating power he’s given you – taut muscles in his abdomen flexing with each of his strained breaths.

“That feels so good, pretty bird,” he groans, taking your bottom lip between his teeth. “Just right. Your hand feels so good around me like this.” 

The wetness you’d felt between your thighs when he’d kissed you the first time returns, and each sound of pleasure he rewards you with makes you wetter and warmer. He is rock hard in your hand now, the dusky head of his manhood shiny with moisture. You watch a bead of it appear at the tip and you slide your fingertips over it, transfixed by how smooth it feels. Beside you, Hoseok shudders.

“I think that’s enough for now,” he says, breathless. “I’ll be of no use to you if you keep that up for much longer.”

You have half a mind to protest, but then his hands are sliding over the thin material of your nightgown, cupping your breasts through the gauzy fabric. He takes one of your nipples between his fingers and teases it until it’s standing at attention. You sigh.

“Can I take this off?” he whispers, pulling at the nightgown. 

You hesitate. Not even the King has seen you nude. Not once has he ever asked you to remove your nightgown and so for a long time, that is what you’d assumed he preferred. That is, until you’d caught him in bed with his lover. 

“Look at me,” Hoseok says, sensing your anxiety. He tips your chin up until your gaze meets his own. “I’ll not ask you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with. But I would be lying if I said that I didn’t want to use my mouth and hands on you. On all of you.”

You inhale deeply, flustered by the way he speaks so plainly about his desires. But that’s what you want, isn’t it? What you’ve longed for all this time. And that’s what he’s promised you, isn’t it? Pleasure. Pleasure that will be his and his alone. 

You draw your nightgown up to your thighs and then raise up to pull it even higher. When you’ve finally discarded it, when there is nothing left between you and Hoseok you flush, looking away.

“You have nothing to hide,” he rasps. “You’re beautiful. Believe me, pretty bird – you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

Emboldened by the praise, you draw nearer to him and trace the outline of his heart-shaped mouth with one finger. And then it is your lips that find his; your tongue that moves past the seam of his lips and your teeth that find the shell of his ear. You thread your fingers in his hair, and he groans, gathering you close.

“You can’t imagine how many nights I’ve dreamed of you like this,” he says, gently laying you back on the bed. “You can’t imagine how many nights I’ve taken myself in hand to these fantasies.”

Oh, but you can imagine, can’t you? The few times you’d dared to try and seek your own pleasure, it had been him in your mind’s eye as your hand was between your legs. It had always been him. 

Hoseok’s mouth leaves yours and when it  finds the tip of one aching breast, you gasp.

“Do you like that?” he goads, laving your nipple with his tongue, taking it between his teeth. The pang of pleasure he incites in you is so sharp, you cry out. “Your body is so responsive,” he murmurs. “So damned responsive.”

There is only so much of that particular torture you can take, and so when his mouth finally leaves your breasts you exhale a sigh of relief. But then his mouth is on your sternum, and then your stomach, and then –

You freeze.

“I want to kiss you here,” Hoseok explains, cupping your mound with one large hand. “I promised you pleasure and this is the surest way to it. Will you let me?”

He looks up at you from the edge of the bed, his dark hair wild and his dark eyes glossy with desire, his mouth hovering over your most secret place. Your pulse skitters, heart pounding erratically at the thought of him kissing you there.

“Is it – is it proper?” you ask, chiding yourself at once for asking such a stupid question. Your face flames when Hoseok raises a brow. “I don’t know that I’ve ever thought to consider the … propriety of such an act,” he says slowly. “But I know that you’ll enjoy it if you allow me to show you. And if you don’t enjoy it, I’ll stop.”

In the seconds that follow, you think about the way he’d let you take him in hand. How he’d showed you how to bring him pleasure, without reserve. How powerful you’d felt when he’d been shuddering under your touch. He’d trusted you, hadn’t he? Just as you now must trust him.

“Alright,” you whisper, nodding your assent. “I trust you.”

He grins at you then, wickedly, before lowering his mouth to your mons. And then he is kissing you there, softly, each brush of his lips moving lower and lower still. Until you feel the heat of his breath at your entrance. You tense.

“Relax for me,” he instructs, licking a long, wet stripe up the length of you. The touch sends a frisson of sensation shooting through your limbs. “Close your eyes and try to think of nothing but this.”

And then he sets his tongue to the tiny pearl at your entrance. 

And at once, you see stars.

“H-Hoseok!” you gasp, your hips flying off the bed at the contact. The urge to snap your legs shut is almost as strong as the urge to push deeper into the pleasing press of his tongue. Almost.

But he pins your legs down with his arms and continues the onslaught, stroking and licking at you with his tongue, nipping at you with his teeth. You grab fistfulls of the duvet as though it might ground you somehow, keep you from bursting into flame.

And then he slides one long finger into you.

You are incoherent now, moaning and begging in broken sentences that do not make sense. But your body is responding in ways that your words cannot, hips moving in time with his mouth. Each pass of his tongue sends sharp spikes of pleasure to your core. You’d thought you’d known what this pleasure felt like, that perhaps you’d be able to reach it on your own someday, but never once had it been like this. 

And then you can feel it – the coil turning inside you, the desperate ascent to the one place you’ve never been able to reach. And it’s so close, so so close – the promise of whatever awaits on the other side strong enough to sate this nameless craving that you’ve felt for so long. It’s within your reach now, if only you can just hold on.

And then it stops.

He takes his mouth and tongue away and the pleasure vanishes. “Hoseok, no,” you cry, sapped of all energy, robbed once again of the relief you so desperately seek. “Please,” you beg weakly, “please.”

But he’s at your side now, the length of his body resting against yours, his manhood hard and hot against your leg. “Come now, pretty bird,” he soothes, “I didn’t bring you this high just to let you fall.”

He presses his lips to your ear at the same time he presses his fingers back to the aching bud between your thighs. “Go on then,” he whispers. “Fly.”

He brings every sensation he’d wrought from you rushing back with his fingers. His mouth hovers at your ear, whispering his encouragement until the coil inside you snaps. He must have known that you’d not be able to contain yourself when you came apart because he covers your mouth with his own, swallowing the sobs he wrenches from you, bringing you down slowly as you come apart.

And when you finally come to your senses again, when your breathing has evened and your heart has slowed and every part of you feels liquid and languid, he smiles.

“I couldn’t risk you waking the entire castle,” he explains apologetically, pressing a kiss to your temple. “Forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” you shudder through your quiet laughter, aftershocks of sensation rippling through you. “Quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve never – never experienced anything like that.”

“That’s mine,” he murmurs, going up on one elbow. “Just as I told you it would be.”

Indeed. But what about his pleasure? The firm reminder of it remains pressed against you, the rigid length of it leaking onto your duvet. You reach for it and he draws a sharp breath through his clenched teeth.

“I want to feel you inside me,” you say softly, noting the way a muscle tics in his jaw. You wrap your hand around him and squeeze, astounded by how feverishly hot he feels. “Please.”

Hoseok nods, climbing over you and settling his hips between your thighs. He takes himself in hand and when you feel the blunt head of him at your entrance, you tense again. But he doesn’t enter you right away. Instead he looks down at you, his dark eyes brimming with emotion.

“Are you certain,” he breathes, his brow dotted with a fine sheen of sweat. “I need to hear you say it.”

You lift up to kiss him, pressing your lips to his. “Take me, Hoseok,” you whisper. “Now.”

And in one sure stroke, he’s buried to the hilt inside you. 

Bodies sealed, fates sealed.

The force of his entry steals the breath from your lungs. And though you’ve been breached before, it’s never felt like this. You’re still sensitive from the pleasure he’d given you only moments before and each of his thrusts only heightens the sensation. 

You cling to him as he rocks against you, closing your eyes to revel in the fullness. He buries his head in your neck and thrusts harder, the sound of his skin meeting yours just as gratifying as it is lurid. And when he reaches between you to press his fingers to your pearl once again, impossibly you feel fresh pleasure begin to bloom.

Broken phrases fall from his lips, a string of curses and blessings and everything in between. And his coarse language doesn’t scandalize you; in fact it only causes you to hurtle towards the peak faster. And then you’re flying again – flying apart, scattering into a million pieces. Crying into his mouth as your release explodes into color and tiny wisps of fire slowly drift back to the earth.

But you come back to yourself just as his rhythm has started to falter, just as the steady cant of his hips becomes so frenetic that you know his own release is near. You have only a moment to mourn the loss of his weight and his warmth before he’s on his knees before you.

You’ve never seen anything more erotic. Firelight flickers over him as he throws his head back, the cords in his neck clenching as he takes himself in hand. And then he is groaning, long and low, as his release spills on to the duvet.

Then he collapses onto you, wrapping you up in his arms, turning you both until he’s on his back and your head rests upon his chest. And then you both lie there for a while, skin to skin,  watching the flames cast shadows on the stone.

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

Neither one of you sleep, the threat of dawn too near to indulge in any such luxury. 

“What happens now, Hoseok?”

You ask the question after he’s made love to you a second time, both of you too exhausted to move. Hoseok inhales and exhales deeply. “I don’t know. I have no control over the world outside of that chamber door, pretty bird.”

You map the lines of his chest with one finger, thoughtful.

“You told me earlier that if the King would not give me the things I desire, you would. Did you mean that?”

“I did,” Hoseok says, pressing a kiss to your hair. “If it’s within my power, then I will. I will give you anything I can.”

“Thank you,” you whisper, closing your eyes and breathing deeply. “Thank you.”

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

You sit by the window and take in the afternoon sunlight, eyes drooping as you fight to stay awake.

You cannot ever remember being so tired. You sleep in fits and starts now, two or three hours at a time. And your body is too fatigued to talk up walking again, though the fresh air and exercise would do you some good. But you will walk again, soon. It won’t be long before you’re sitting with your birds and reading in the gentle Spring breeze.

Hyeri charges into the room like a bull, the tea tray in her hand clattering loudly. You narrow her eyes at her as she approaches and she fixes you with a sardonic look.“Oh, hush you,” she grumbles, setting the tray down on the table and walking over to you. “I wasn’t that loud.”

But her scowl falls away as her gaze locks on the baby at your breast, her muted eyes glowing with admiration. 

“That’s a fine Prince you have there, Your Grace,” she says softly. Then she looks up at you and her scowl returns. “Though at the rate you’re going, I’ll never get to hold him, will I? You’ve an entire staff to help you with him, and still you refuse. You’re going to make that boy rotten.”

You chuckle under your breath as you stroke your hand over the tuft of downy hair at your son’s crown. He blinks up at you with his huge dark eyes, and your heart is filled to overflowing with a love that you once you thought you’d never know. 

⚜️⚜️⚜️⚜️

y,all i finished it! hahah okay so listen. if you'd like to talk to me, i'd love to hear from you. please consider reblogging and dropping me an ask 💕

#hoseok smut #hoseok x reader #j-hope smut #j-hope x reader #bts smut #bts fic #bts x reader

[thegnomelord]

"you know what happens to dogs that bite, right?"

"they get put down."

but hound!reader. i love hound!reader, he's such a pretty muse who'd eat the heart of a pomegranate just to feel the juices of the fruit drip down his chin to accommodate the feeling of blood dripping down his chin post-healing - that is, if he gets better. i love him.

OH MY FUCKING GOD this hit me like a truck! I love the symbolism with the pomegranates so much <3.

But also like, a violent part of Hound still remaining even when he's better, that need to fight and bite and kill so deeply rooted in your bones you couldn't destroy it without killing yourself.

So just simulating the blood pouring down your chin when you bite out a throat by eating a juicy fruit, and then having one of the 141 gently wipe off your chin or maybe lick off the juice, softly kissing you to silence the violence simmering in your marrow just HIGHIUSDHCWF

#gnome's tea break #gnome correspondence #cod mw2 #male reader #good dog fic #Hound-reader

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

When The World Is Crashing Down [Chapter 9: We’re Friends When You’re On Your Knees]

Series summary: Your family is House Celtigar, one of Rhaenyra’s wealthiest allies. In the aftermath of Rook’s Rest, Aemond unknowingly conscripts you to save his brother’s life. Now you are in the liar of the enemy, but your loyalties are quickly shifting…

Chapter warnings: Y'all, you are not ready for this one. Language, warfare, violence, serious injury, alcoholism/addiction, sexual content (18+), murder, Aemond "there are other Targaryens" Targaryen having feelings again (good ones?? not good ones?? both?? who knows bestie, not me!), an unexpected family reunion, must be the season of the witch... 👀

Series title is a lyrics from: "7 Minutes In Heaven" by Fall Out Boy.

Chapter title is a lyric from: "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued" by Fall Out Boy.

Word count: 8.4k.

Link to chapter list: HERE.

Taglist (more in comments): @tinykryptonitewerewolf @lauraneedstochill @not-a-glad-gladiator @daenysx @babyblue711 @arcielee @at-a-rax-ia @bhanclegane @jvpit3rs @padfooteyes @marvelescvpe @travelingmypassion @darkenchantress @yeahright0h @poohxlove @trifoliumviridi @bloodyflowerrr @fan-goddess @devynsficrecs @flowerpotmage @thelittleswanao3 @seabasscevans @hiraethrhapsody @libroparaiso @echos-muses @st-eve-barnes @chattylurker @lm-txles @vagharnaur @moonlightfoxx @storiumemporium @insabecs @heliosscribbles @beautifulsweetschaos @namelesslosers @partnerincrime0 @burningcoffeetimetravel-fics @yawneneytiri @marbles-posts @imsolence @maidmerrymint @backyardfolklore @nimaharchive @anxiousdaemon @under-the-aspen-tree @amiraisgoingthruit @dd122004dd @randomdragonfires @jetblack4real @joliettes

Let me know if you’d like to be tagged! 🥰💜

You watch her from the shadows of the dungeons, rusted iron, phantom echoes of falling water, chilling drafts that come from nowhere and everywhere. She has not yet noticed you. She is beautiful, regal, arrogant, even as she sits gnawing on crusts of bread and the gristle of chicken bones, scraps that Lord Larys throws to her like she’s a pig nosing its way through a trough, an animal that is clever and yet condemned. And if she is livestock, then what are you? A creature of darkness, of nightfall, lethal and treacherous, a wolf or a bat or a spider. You step forward and into a ray of light that cuts across the stones like the path of a comet.

Baela gasps and drops the tibia she’d been working on, cracking it in two, sucking out the dead-blood marrow. Her wide-set, almond-shaped eyes catch on you. She is not afraid; you have never known Daemon Targaryen’s eldest daughter to be afraid of anything. She is fascinated.

“I’m sorry,” she says, crawling across the floor of her cell. She grips the metal bars and peers out at you, kneeling there like she’s praying. You suspect Baela has never prayed to anyone or anything. “I didn’t mean to almost burn you. I didn’t realize you were standing on the steps with him until after I’d given Moondancer the order. It all happened so quickly.”

You cannot appear to be angry. You have no reason to be angry if you are Aegon’s captive. “I take no offense. I wasn’t harmed.”

“No one had any idea the Usurper was here,” Baela says. Still her eyes are bright, entranced. “We believed Dragonstone to be vacant.”

Good. You give her a dismal smirk. “No. Not so vacant after all.”

“Are you with child yet?”

A bolt shoots down your spine like cold lightning. “What?”

“That’s what he’s trying to do, isn’t it?” Baela says. “He wants an heir from you. His wife is dead, his sons are dead. He couldn’t get his claws on me or Rhaena. But you can give him a Valyrian-blooded prince.”

Aegon has never mentioned having children with you. You don’t know if this means he doesn’t want them, or if he does not wish to place demands upon you, or if he is indifferent, or if he believes it to be impossible. “I have nothing to show for his efforts.”

“Has it been unspeakably awful?” And if Baela seeks to console, this is secondary to her personal interest; she is curious, she is absorbed. Her fingers close more tightly around the iron bars. “He’s a drunk, a degenerate. He’s vile. He’s deformed. Has he tortured you? Has he violated you in a hundred different ways? Does he tie you down, does he strike you, does he cut and bruise you?”

And this is the Blacks’ story, one they could never begin to suspect might be fiction: that you are a martyr, that Aegon is a monster. In place of an answer, you give Baela the treasures you have brought her. You pass them through the gaps between the bars: a bottle of ink, parchment, a quill with a point like a blade.

Baela takes these objects, amazed. “You can help me send a letter back to Harrenhal?”

“I don’t know if I will be able to get to the rookery. But I’ll try.”

“The Usurper allows you this much free rein?”

He trusts me. He loves me. He’s bedbound and in agony. “He’s rather distracted at the moment.”

“He’s dying, hopefully,” Baela says. She has already begun to write. And there’s a reptilian sort of coldness that is snaking deeper into you, constricting around your bones, gliding through the blood-slick chambers of your heart, too much a part of you to ever rip out. But now Baela’s face softens. She looks up dolefully. “Moondancer, she’s…she’s gone, isn’t she?”

You bow your head as if this is something tragic. “She did not survive Sunfyre’s attack.”

“Fucking beasts,” she seethes, resuming her writing. “When my father learns of this, he and Caraxes will come to rescue us. And he will burn the Usurper alive.” She finishes her letter, rolls up the parchment, and hands it back to you.

“How will Daemon know that you authored this and under no duress?”

“My signature,” Baela says, grinning. “I end all of my correspondence to him with Your ever-obedient daughter. It is a joke between us. If it was absent, he would notice. His suspicions would be aroused. That is how I would signal if I was ever forced to write to him against my will.”

There is dark satisfaction like a spell shimmering in your arteries, nerves, the void-black pupils of your eyes. You return her smile. “Perfect.”

“Don’t fear,” Baela tells you, and reaches through the rusted iron bars to clasp your hand. You fight the reflex to tear away from her, this woman who certainly maimed Aegon and might have killed him. You find yourself studying her, measuring her height and weight, calculating how much milk of the poppy it would take to end her life. “Cregan Stark is south of the Neck now. He will move heaven and earth to possess you, everyone knows that. Soon we will have Northmen marching through the Riverlands with Caraxes and Sheepstealer safeguarding them from above. And after the Riverlands they will be in the Reach, and then finally King’s Landing to stabilize the capital. The Usurper and Sunfyre cannot fight. Daeron is scarcely more than a boy. The Betrayers are avaricious, overconfident drunks. The Greens will be vanquished before winter.”

“And what about Vhagar?”

“Together, Caraxes and Sheepstealer can bring her down.” But there is doubt in Baela’s voice, yes, a vacillation that is rarely heard from her.

“I hope so,” you reply, one of countless lies.

You take Baela’s letter to the rookery, open it, examine it carefully for the subtleties of her handwriting: slopes and dots and lines. Then you get a fresh piece of parchment and painstakingly draft a very different message. Not a plea for help, but an assurance that all is well; not a summons to Dragonstone, but a confirmation that the castle was found to be unoccupied and is now held firmly by Baela and Moondancer.

And you end the letter before tying it to a leg of the raven trained to fly to Harrenhal:

Your ever-obedient daughter, Baela Targaryen

~~~~~~~~~~

“Please eat something, Your Grace. I beg you.” Lord Larys Strong’s face is creased with servile, attentive worry. On the plate before you is fresh, warm bread and a dish of salted butter. In your bowl is a crab soup thick with vegetables, the broth tomato-based and red like Autumn’s hair, like blood.

“I can’t.”

“Would you like me to bring you something else? I could have the chefs prepare roast chicken, or duck, or boar…”

“No.” You push the bowl of soup away. You and Larys are alone in the Great Hall, seated at the high table which presides over a silent, vacuous chamber. The room was built to resemble a dragon lying on its belly; the entranceway is its mouth, two massive doors edged with stone teeth. There are dragons everywhere, these talismans of Aegon’s house, these creatures that are monsters to some and saviors to others.

Larys studies you closely. His voice is tender. “Your Grace, please. Can I do anything for you?”

You consider him, an enigma that is useful and subtle and dogged in his loyalty. “What is it that binds you so faithfully to Alicent and her children, Lord Larys? House Strong was so favored by Rhaenyra. Her heirs were your blood, no matter how much she tried to deny it. You could have risen high in the Black Council. Make no mistake, I am very thankful for your service to the Greens. I am glad to count you among the greatest of our fortunes. But what inspired you to turn your coat?”

Larys smiles at you. He has eyes like rain, the wavy abundant brown hair of his spurned family. His hands rest on the handle of his cane. “Your eldest brother is an acclaimed swordsman.”

“Yes,” you agree, caught off-guard.

“And so was mine,” Larys says. “House Strong, is it any wonder what we valued most? My father loved Harwin. He was so fiercely proud of him. He was interested in him, he understood him. They would whisper to each other all through feasts, all through tourneys, conspiring, chortling, enmeshed in this synergy that left no air for anyone else to breathe.”

“And your father never understood you.” Just like Bartimos Celtigar overlooks Everett, a son gifted with books and quills instead of horses and swords. “Never even tried to.”

“It is a terrible thing to be in the midst of your family and yet feel alone.”

“It is,” you say, remembering the Blacks’ festivities in King’s Landing.

“Now Lyonel and Harwin Strong whisper to no one,” Larys says, his smile widening into a dark, victorious grin. “And I am the Master of Whisperers.”

You remember the words that Otto Hightower spoke to you as he waited for his execution in the dungeons of the Red Keep: These dark, contagious facets of life change us all. They ruins us. Time, heartache, violence. You become capable of inconceivable things. You would scheme and deceive. You would murder. “Do you ever regret it?” you ask Larys softly. Becoming a sinner, a killer, a kinslayer.

“Never,” he replies. “Dowager Queen Alicent was the first person to ever truly listen to me. To make me feel worth something. Worth anything. To advance her interests in every way possible…that cannot be an injustice. It is the cleanest kind of loyalty. And I have no doubt my sacrifices will be repaid. If the Greens triumph, that is. When this war is over, Alicent’s son must sit the Iron Throne.”

“You mean Aegon.”

“Yes, of course.” But something mournful passes over Larys’ face like a shadow; he peers down at his hands to hide this from you.

He doubts Aegon will live. He foresees Aemond or Daeron inheriting the throne instead. You stand from the table, your chair squealing shrilly against the stone floor. “We should bring the king his supper,” you tell Larys. “He needs his strength.”

Aegon does not like you to be there when the maesters prod at him, scrub his wounds, rebandage his shattered legs. You were once his healer, yes, but now he believes you to be his wife. He does not want to be your patient. He does not want you to see him as a wounded man writhing in bed, as someone helpless, pathetic, weak, doomed.

The maesters are just finishing when you arrive with a tray of buttered bread and fresh soup, steam rising from the bowl of red like entrails that litter the earth once a battle has ended. The maesters are gathering up bloody strips of linen to be burned. Aegon is sobbing; his silver hair hangs in chaotic waves, both hands cover his face.

Your voice is hushed and heartbroken. “Aegon…”

“No, I’m okay,” he says, sniffling, mopping the tears from his cheeks with his bare palms. Then he reaches out to you. “Come here, come here, come here.”

You go to him, sliding the tray onto his bedside table until it clinks against the glass bottles there: rose oil, red wine, milk of the poppy. You climb onto the bed and Aegon’s arms circle around your waist, pulling you in closer as he buries his face in the warmth of your chest, your throat, covering you in hurried, imprecise kisses. Dimly, you wonder what he tastes when he breathes you in; you wonder what colors bloom in the sunless passages of his lungs.

“I missed you,” he murmurs. You can feel the dampness of his tears on your bare skin, the roughness of his scars.

“I was only gone for a few hours.”

“Too long,” he says. “Far too long. How’s Sunfyre?”

“He’s down on the beach, Your Grace,” Larys answers from the doorway where he has materialized like stars at dusk.

“Is he eating? Ambulatory? Wading in the water?”

“He’s…” Lord Larys hesitates. “He seems to be in a great deal of discomfort.” And yes, you know this to be true: Sunfyre the Golden’s wings hang in shreds, his wounds are inflamed with infection, and there is something wrong with him inside as well, a wheezing when he inhales, blood that seeps from his nostrils and his jaws. There’s nothing anybody can do for him. No one can touch him but Aegon, and Aegon can’t leave his bed.

Aegon says to Larys, low and sinister: “I want Baela dead. I want her burned.”

“She is far more valuable to you alive, Your Grace.”

“I am the king and I wish her to die.”

“Corlys Velaryon is her grandsire,” Larys implores. “If he discovers you executed Baela, he may recommit himself to Rhaenyra’s side. He may launch his own rebellion even after Rhaenyra is defeated. If you wish to win and keep the Iron Throne, I advise you to spare her.”

Aegon sighs and glares out the window that overlooks the Narrow Sea, his arms still linked around your waist. You begin to weave his braid for him. “Aegon,” you say gently. “We’ve brought you supper. Please eat it.”

“I’m afraid I’m too nauseated by my own inadequacy. Perhaps later.”

“You want to be well again. And you will be. But you have to eat.”

“I really don’t think I can.”

“Aegon, please.”

“Well…” He glances over at the bowl of soup and then gives you a mischievous smirk. “I suppose nothing tastes better than a crab, does it? Particularly when it is served in bed.”

“Or on the floor of a library.” You smile and kiss him: his pale face, his trembling lips. You finish his tiny braid like a silver chain and tuck it behind his ear. Then you pour him a cup of milk of the poppy, just one pearl-white splash, just enough to sand the serrated edges off his anguish.

“No.” He stops you, a hand on your wrist. “I don’t want to be useless again. I don’t want to be swimming in dreams. I want to be here with you.”

You shake your head. There are tears stinging in your eyes. “But you’re in pain.”

He grins, brushing your hair back from your face. “I’ve been in pain my whole life, Angel.”

And he manages to force down half the soup and two brimming goblets of wine before he sinks beneath the sea of his consciousness, while outside waves crack open against the rocks and Sunfyre leaks viscous threads the color of crimson, roses, flames.  

~~~~~~~~~~

“You sent that raven a week ago,” Baela tells you when you bring her your offering, your clandestine kindness: apple cake, black tea. “More than enough time has passed for it to be received at Harrenhal and acted upon.”

You fill a porcelain cup with tea from the kettle and give it to her through the iron bars of her cell. “Perhaps the raven went astray.”

Baela ponders this as she alternates between unladylike chomps on a wedge of apple cake and slurps from the cup. “Maybe my father has been away from the castle. Maybe he’s out on the battlefield with the Stark men.”

Or maybe he believes you and Moondancer to be perfectly well and presiding unopposed over Dragonstone, and therefore not in need of his attention. What a welcome delusion to live under. I’m sure he’d rather be fucking Nettles anyway. You take the empty cup when Baela has drained it and refill it with tea. Baela accepts the nearly overflowing cup gratefully. She has had nothing to drink since she was taken captive except muddy rainwater that pools in one corner of each cell, guided by stone gutters that run along the outside of the castle. The tea is cloudy with cream and laced with sugar; still, her nose wrinkles a bit when she swallows it down.

“Bitter,” she notes distractedly.

“It’s made from leaves grown here on Dragonstone. Formidable, but not very sweet.”

Baela cackles; it echoes through the dungeon. This is the same voice that commanded Moondancer to brutalize Sunfyre, to send Aegon plummeting to the sand. Are her eyes already losing their viperish sharpness, is her heartbeat slowing? “Just like me!” She finishes her cup of tea and eagerly holds it out to you through the bars. You pour it full of the earth-colored brew once again.

You ask her as she licks apple cake crumbs from her fingers: “Why is Cregan Stark so determined to wed me?”

“He wants you. He considers you worthy of him.”

“But he doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t really know who I am.”

Baela shrugs indifferently. “None of us love anyone because of who they are. We love them because of who they make us believe we are.” She sips her tea and blinks groggily. “In any case, he will be your honorable savior, and you will be his illustrious damsel, and when the traitor dragons are dead he will spirit you away to Winterfell to bear his wolf pups. It’s not so bad a fate, I think. Not for someone like you. You aren’t ill-suited to matrimony. You are docile enough. A caretaker, a healer. You seem like the sort of woman who would be content with just one man.”

Yes. If he was Aegon. As you watch her kneeling on the stone floor of her cell, Baela sways and almost nods off, seemingly unaware that she is doing it.

“Burning might be too swift a death for the Usurper,” Baela says, smiling dazedly. “Cregan should have some of the Boltons flay him. They can all take turns wearing his hideous scars.”

“Yes. Skins shed, skins regrown, some of us change them over and over again.”

Baela stares at you inanely. She is beyond comprehension. Then she collapses to the stone floor, the porcelain tea cup spilling from her grasp and breaking into jagged white shards.

You take the key to the cell off the hook out in the corridor and unlock the door of iron bars. You step inside, still holding the tea kettle in one hand. You set the kettle down and drag Baela until she is propped upright against a wall. Her pulse is slow, but still present; she moans feebly as you position her. But it is all for a good cause; you must ensure she drinks the rest of the tea, the witches’ brew of leaves and cream and sugar and a fatal dose of milk of the poppy. Outside you hear a deep, prehistoric rumble as Vhagar flies over Dragonstone and scouts for a landing spot large enough to host her. Aemond is back again.

You angle the spout of the tea kettle between Baela’s paling lips and ply her with a small amount, less than a mouthful, then you rub her throat in just the right place to trigger her reflex to swallow. You know this trick well; you have used it on grievously wounded soldiers. You used it on Aegon after he was burned. You repeat the steps until the kettle is empty. Then you lay Baela flat again and watch her chest rise and fall slower, slower, slower until it stops. But still, you leave nothing to chance. You nick Baela’s wrist with a paring knife from the castle kitchens, until now tucked away in a pocket of your gown, emerald green silk to match the side of this war that you are pledged to. Her blood, unpropelled by the rhythm of a heart, dribbles sluggishly rather than spurts. She’s gone; she’s with her mother and Luke and Jace and the young sickly Viserys and Rhaenys, Otto and Helaena and Jaehaerys and Maelor and Autumn’s silver-haired son that she never had the chance to name. You wonder if the struggle goes on in the afterlife. Perhaps presently Otto and Baela are scratching and yowling at each other in a castle made of clouds.

Upstairs, Aemond is already in Aegon’s bedchamber. They are speaking in whispers when you enter, and you catch only pieces of the exchange: capital, Cregan, marriage, Daemon, crown. Larys stands in the corner of the room, his hands laced atop the handle of his cane. He gives you a reverent bow in greeting. He might not be so pleased to see you once he learns what you’ve done.

Aegon stops talking abruptly when he spots you and gestures for Aemond to go quiet as well, a commanding sweep of his hand. Aemond follows his brother’s gaze to the doorway. His lone blue eye climbs up and down you like a man on the rungs of a ladder. His hair is in one thick braid from his flight; stray white-blond strands that have been ripped free hang in disarray around his stoic, unreadable face. Aemond does not bow to you and never will. He only leers, a silver-haired wolf, a hawk with unhollow bones.

“Hello, Angel,” Aegon says, beaming or at least attempting to. He is frail and pallid and too thin and dripping sweat. There are indigo rings around his eyes like bruises. His legs are swollen, grotesque mountain ranges beneath the blankets. You rush to him and sit on the edge of the bed, feeling his forehead for fever and combing your fingers fondly through his hair.

Aemond sighs irritably. “Anyway, I’d like to torture her.”

“My prince…” Larys urges.

Aegon holds up a palm. “Now now, Lord Larys, let’s hear his proposal. Exactly how much do you intend to torture Baela?”

“Quite a bit,” Aemond says.

“To death?” Aegon asks hopefully.

“I don’t see why not.”

“My prince!” Larys says again. “Please, consider the possible ramifications, she is a prisoner of substantial strategic value, if your mother was here she would caution—”

“I’m afraid that Baela can no longer be interrogated,” you confess, and they all turn to you. There is a long, laden pause.

“And why is that?” Aemond says.

“Because she is dead of poisoning.”

“What?!”

“In her cell. Her body is there now. Feed her to Vhagar or Sunfyre, throw her in the sea, do whatever you wish with her. But she has paid her debt for the harm she inflicted upon us.”

Slowly, a grin splits across Aemond’s face. Larys shakes off his shock and resigns himself to it. But Aegon is neither proud nor reconciled. “You did that?” he says softly.

“You wanted Baela dead.”

“Yes, I did. But you don’t take life,” Aegon says, remembering what you once told him in King’s Landing. His oceanic eyes are stunned and fearful; not because Baela is was murdered, but because you were the one to end her. Because until now he was still able to tell himself that you could somehow escape this war unscarred, unruined. “You preserve it.”

“I preserve yours,” you reply. And when you offer him milk of the poppy—with no fear, for you know precisely how much it takes to kill a man—Aegon refuses it again, taking his suffering pure and sharp like the glass of a mirror.

~~~~~~~~~~

“What will happen to him?” Aemond asks you. You’re sitting on the stone staircase together under overcast midday skies, sipping wine and watching Sunfyre amble lethargically up and down the beach. You aren’t sure what’s made him so restless: his own dire injuries, Aegon in torment within the castle walls, something else entirely, some premonition that only beasts of ancient magic know. At last, Sunfyre seems to have exhausted himself and crumples onto the sand.

“I think Aegon will walk again. Eventually.”

“But he won’t be able to fight.”

You shake your head. “No.”

“Fuck,” Aemond hisses caustically, glowering out over the ocean.

You look at Aemond, needing to ask but terrified of the answer. “Can you win without him?”

“Can we win, you mean?” He smiles faintly, then sobers again. “I think so. Just before I left the Riverlands to come here, I received reports that Daemon had sent his lowborn little child bride away with Sheepstealer. He is trying to protect her from Rhaenyra’s assassins. My bitch of a half-sister has thus done us a remarkable favor. If Daemon is alone, I have no doubt that Vhagar can slay Caraxes. They say Daemon has fled Harrenhal. He’s hiding from me. I will find him, and I will burn him. I will end this war.”

“You need to be with Criston when his army faces the Northmen.”

“Of course,” Aemond says; but something in his face worries you.

There is a high-pitched shriek overhead, a glimmering flash of vivid gemstone blue. You startle and Aemond’s hand juts out, grabs you by the forearm, yanks you closer to him; then he relaxes when he recognizes who it is.

Aemond sighs loudly. “Why the fuck can’t he stay where he’s supposed to be?!” Then he stands, helps you to your feet while he’s at it, and heads down to the shoreline to meet Daeron and Tessarion.

The Blue Queen circles the beach several times, Daeron peering down as if struggling to understand something, his long white-blond hair whipping in the wind. At last Tessarion lands, her claws sinking into the wet sand, ocean froth bubbling around legs. Her long, swanlike neck stretches out towards Sunfyre, soft inquisitive squeals emanating from her jaws. Daeron leaps down from the saddle and strides to where Sunfyre is sprawled helplessly on the beach.

Alicent’s youngest child is clad in mint green—including a cape that billows out behind him in the seaside breeze—and glinting gold accents everywhere, buckles on his boots and the clasp of his cape and even a freckling of studs in his ears. He props both hands on his waist as he scrutinizes the crippled dragon. “Well, you’re not Moondancer.”

“He ripped Moondancer’s throat out,” Aemond says. “And then he ate her.”

Daeron whistles and gazes at Sunfyre admiringly. “I heard that Baela and Moondancer had taken possession of Dragonstone. I came to murder them. But now I see my services are unnecessary.”

“Baela is dead.” Then Aemond adds, nodding to you: “Here is the executioner.”

Daeron considers you, then laughs and assails you with a spirited embrace that nearly knocks you off your feet. “Welcome to the family, Lady Celtigar.”

“She’s the queen now.”

“Is she?” Daeron asks, eyebrows raised. “I was not under the impression that our brother was in any particular hurry to marry again.”

“His priorities seem to have shifted,” Aemond says.

“Can I see him?” Daeron looks around the beach and then up at the castle, shielding his eyes from the greyscale daylight. “Is he not outside with you? What is he doing in there? Not reciting prayers and composing poetry, I’d imagine.”

In Aegon’s bedchamber, Daeron cannot conceal his shock, his dismay; he gawks at the king like he is a three-legged dog, a blinded orphan. He stands thunderstruck at the end of the bed, taking in the vague yet horrifying outlines of Aegon’s shattered legs, the gauntness of his face, the fact that he is incapable of playing any meaningful role in the war for the foreseeable future. You sit on the bed beside Aegon, Aemond lurks by a window, Larys observes intently from a respectful distance, his eyes following every word as they flit through the air.

When Daeron recovers somewhat, he says: “I need to know what to do about Hammer and Ulf.”

“Why?” Aegon replies wearily. “What’s wrong with them?”

“Apparently, Mother once offered them the seats of House Costayne and House Merryweather as compensation for their efforts on behalf of the Greens, and they accepted. But now that’s suddenly not good enough. They’re asking me for the Riverlands and the Vale.”

Aegon turns to Aemond. “Is there anything left of the Riverlands these days? Should we find a new name for them? The Smolderlands, perhaps? The Everything-Is-Dead-Here-Now-Lands?”

“This is serious,” Aemond says flatly.

“I’m entirely serious.”

“Should I just tell them they can have whatever they want?” Daeron asks. “And then when the war is over and we’ve won…you know…pretend not to remember that conversation?”

“They can’t be given territory of any importance,” Aemond says. “They aren’t nobility.”

Daeron amends: “More relevantly, they are devoid of accountability and self-discipline. They drink all day and whore all night, and…oh, I mean no offense, Your Grace.”

“Fine,” Aegon says, preoccupied. There are fat beads of sweat on his bloodless face, glistening misery in his eyes. He gazes sorrowfully down at his left hand where he once wore his golden dragon ring before he lost it the same day he destroyed his legs. You pour him a cup of red wine and he drains it in seconds. You fill another.

“My point is that Hammer and Ulf are increasingly unreliable. I am only halfway convinced they could even show up for a battle before it was over. And yet we need them. Especially if Sunfyre cannot fight.”

“Agree to their requests,” Aemond says. “And if they survive the war, we will deal with them then. Rhaenyra’s faction is the greater enemy. We cannot risk the Dragonseeds racing back into her arms.”

“Lord Larys?” Aegon prompts dimly

“I could not agree more, Your Grace.”

“And on the subject of Rhaenyra,” Daeron continues. “Tessarion and I can take King’s Landing. Syrax is the only dragon in the city now, and Rhaenyra has never ridden her into combat.”

“No,” Aegon says. “We cannot risk setting the capital ablaze and turning the people against us. And Mother is there. Everett is there.”

“Everett?” Daeron looks around, baffled. “Who the fuck is Everett?”

“Angel’s brother. Not the firstborn son. The other one.” And as Aegon explains this, his chest is heaving and his eyes are glazed over. He tries to reposition himself in bed and has to bite down on his lower lip to keep from crying out, hard enough to draw blood.

“Is there anything else?” you ask Daeron and Aemond, a warning in your face. He needs rest. He needs to sleep, to heal.

“No,” Aemond says. He paces towards the door and snatches Daeron’s cape as he passes by him, hauling him out into the hallway. You follow after them.

As soon as he is out of earshot of Aegon’s room, Daeron tells Aemond: “He doesn’t look good.”

“He’ll be fine.”

“Aemond, I think you should prepare to—”

“He’ll be fine!” Aemond snaps.

“You don’t think I’m losing something too?” Daeron demands furiously. “You don’t think I want him to be well again? Of course I want that. But if wishing people to live made it possible, the world would be a very different place.”

“You are needed in the Reach,” Aemond says, and that’s all.

Daeron glares up at him, incredulous, defiant. “This will be over soon. I hope you’re ready for what comes next.”

Then he storms out of the castle, soars down the long stone staircase, meets Tessarion on the windswept beach and takes flight into the southwest where the earth is green but the nights are an inescapable, dreamless black.

~~~~~~~~~~

Aegon is weeping again; you hear him from the hallway. It is after nightfall, and the castle is illuminated only by firelight. Candles flicker; the hearth crackles and pops. In the shadows, Aegon lies with his dragonfire scars and his fractured legs and his useless hereditary magic, tears streaming down his face. You have a vision of what he will look like when he’s dead; you imagine the Stranger reaching up from underneath the bed to seize him with claws like a raven’s talons and drag him out of existence.

“I need it,” Aegon sobs when he sees you, grasping for the glass bottle of milk of the poppy. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to need it, but I do.”

“I’m here, Aegon. It’s alright. Let me help.” You pour him a cup of the bitter remedy, a strange gleaming white like pearl, opal, moonstone. Then you tilt the cup against his lips. Aegon gulps down the milk of the poppy and then falls back into his sea of pillows.

He murmurs, eyes closed as you graze the backs of your fingers feather-lightly over his unmarred cheek: “I wanted to start over with you.”

“You’ll still get the chance.”

“No,” he whimpers miserably. “I ruin everyone. Everyone I’m given, everyone I touch. Helaena, Jaehaerys, Maelor. We don’t even know where Jaehaera is, in Storm’s End, lost on the road, taken captive, dead. Otto, Autumn, Aemond, Mother, Sunfyre. And now I’m ruining you too.”

“You’re not,” you plead with him in a whisper. And not for the first time, you think: What do you require from me, Aegon? Wrath, compassion, healing, children? What can I do to give you hope again? Tell me and it’s yours. I’d do anything. I’d become anyone. “Aegon?” you begin, trying to ask him; but he is already unconscious. He’ll likely be out until sunrise.

You drink cup after cup of red wine and sit in the flame-lit shadows with him, in the quiet, in the liminal space between decisions, envisioned sins and prospective virtues. Then you leave the bedchamber like a ghost, a creak here and a tap there and no other trace. You wander down long, twisting corridors framed by dragons of iron and stone. And at the other end of the castle beyond a door you’ve never opened before is the lair of a very different breed of dragon: tall and lean and ambitious, his eyepatch removed and stowed away for the evening, his long silver hair hanging freely to his waist.

He is wearing cotton sleeping trousers but nothing else. He is seated at his writing desk and scrawling something onto parchment in black ink, a list or a diagram or a design for a new crown upon his ascension to the throne, you don’t know and you have no intention of asking. You have far too many things on your mind already. You feel nauseous and unsteady, you feel like you can’t possibly go through with this. You can’t imagine it. You can’t fathom what he would feel like, taste like.

Aemond steals a nonchalant glimpse of you, having no sense of your inner turmoil. “Can I assist you with something?”

“Yes,” you say simply, sipping your wine under the stone arch of the doorway.

He looks up at you again, his quill suddenly still in his hand. His two eyes are on you, one wide and river-blue, the other a soulless glittering sapphire in a tangle of ruined flesh. And now he understands. There are other Targaryens, he had said. “Take off your clothes. Sit down on the bed.”

You step inside his bedchamber and close the door behind you, setting your empty cup on the edge of his writing desk. You walk to his bed—dark green blankets, gold thread—and shed each piece of clothing you have on, a black gown and everything under it, not looking to see if Aemond is watching you, too anxious, trembling wildly. But you know his gaze is on you when you—standing naked and shivering in the firelight—begin to pull back the blankets and hear the sharp reprove in his voice.

“I did not tell you to hide yourself from me,” Aemond says. “Sit at the edge. Yes, there. Good.”

You perch on the bed and wait for him, your ankles linked, legs swinging restlessly, arms crossed over your chest. Aemond is staring at you from the opposite end of the room. You can’t look at him; you look elsewhere, at the tapestries of dragons hanging from the drafty stone walls, at the thick candles that drip white wax. And this won’t be like lying with a stranger, but it won’t be like lying with someone you want either, because you are profoundly uneasy and monstrously ashamed and perhaps even afraid.

Aemond is approaching now, firelight skating over his smooth, unsinged skin. He is undoing the tie at the waist of his trousers. He yanks them off, revealing himself to you. He is already hard, and he is massive, vast in length and width. The panic hits you like a breaking wave.

“Oh,” you gasp in alarm, unable to stop yourself. Then you explain so he won’t be offended: “I’m not going to be able to take you if I’m not ready.” You rest a hand on your bare thigh, slip it between your legs, begin to stroke yourself the way Aegon does, trying to relax, trying to think of him…

“No,” Aemond says, moving your hand aside. “Let me.”

Obediently, you rest your palms just behind you on the mattress, open your thighs for him, inhale sharpy as Aemond’s long, artful fingers touch you somewhere only one other man ever has. And you’re a traitor, the worst kind of traitor, because it’s working: you can feel yourself opening for him, hungering for him, coating his hand in slick warm wetness.

Aemond isn’t looking at your face. His eye is fixed on the place where his fingers are circling, where he is now pushing two inside of you, and while it happens abruptly and roughly enough to startle you it is not quite painful, or maybe it is, just the tiniest bit, but the pleasure eclipses the pain, the pleasure is a current you are powerless to swim against.

“You can tell me to stop,” Aemond says as he strokes you from the inside with his fingers buried to the knuckles, his breathing labored. “I don’t want you to. But if you tell me to stop, I’ll listen. Okay?”

You nod, and instead of an answer you give him a moan, stifled but unmistakable, dark treasonous forbidden ecstasy. And this snaps something in Aemond, it unleashes a part of him he’d been keeping tied up like an untrustworthy animal, one that could maul or maim or kill. He drops to his knees, hooks his arms beneath your thighs, drags you to him until his lips and tongue are on you with dizzyingly blissful pressure. You fall back onto the bed, one hand twisting into the blankets, the other in his waterfall of unruly silver hair, pushing him even harder against you as he licks ravenously. Aemond doesn’t seem to mind; with each roll of your hips and bitten-back plea his enthusiasm blooms, hums and triumphant chuckles spilling from his mouth as he swallows down the proof of your desire. It’s starting, that swift climb towards a high like nothing else on earth, something Aegon once taught you was possible. You are a betrayer, but with the very best of intentions; you are making a sacrifice, but it feels so much like a gift.

“Aemond, I’m ready,” you pant, your fingers hopelessly knotted in his hair. “You can do it now, you can…” And then you lose your words because instead of rising to his feet, Aemond stays right where he is, his tongue insatiable, his face drenched in your wetness.

He’s going to make me…I’m so close…

“Aemond, what are you waiting for…?”

His lips close around the spot where you are most sensitive and he sucks forcefully, and that feeling like a shuddering, irresistible unravelling strikes you harder and faster than it ever has before, so intense it is almost painful, sharp and commanding, not something he is doing with you but to you, and you know even in the golden haze of the climax that this is not about love but about power, pride, control, worthiness.

He doesn’t stop. He is licking you again, opening your folds with one hand, thrusting two fingers inside of you with the other. You are still feeling the pulsing, involuntary aftershocks of one high when the next begins building, building, building, and when you close your eyes all you can see are waves on the ocean in a storm, swelling to impossible heights and ungoverned by anything except the dubious mercy of nature.

“Aemond please,” you beg in a frayed whisper, bathed in sweat and guilt and frenzied lust. “I’m ready. Just do it, please…”

And then he wrenches you into another vortex and it takes everything in you not to scream, not to jolt awake the skeleton crew that tends to Dragonstone and its surreptitious guests. You are beyond complete thoughts, beyond sentences. You are boneless, your muscles have turned to mist and air, you are entirely under Aemond’s control and that’s where he has wanted you all along.

“Aemond, please, please, please…”

Unable to resist any longer, he stands—wiping the glistening, dripping sheen from his face with the back of one hand—and forces his cock inside you to the hilt. He does not slow down when he meets resistance, and you don’t tell him to. You moan in shock at the disorienting fullness, you cannot help it; it is a feeling on the knife’s edge between ripping agony and euphoric pleasure. It is something you would gratefully die of. He moves within you, deep and quick, his hands clasping your hips. Emotionally, you feel nothing but a razored, perilous, impersonal intensity; in your body, it is paradise.

Again? Again…?!

“Are you going to come for me one more time, Angel?” Aemond taunts you as he thrusts; and that’s Aegon’s name for you that he’s using, and it’s wrong, and Aemond knows that, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to break the spell he’s got you under, you can’t tell him to stop, you don’t have the will to, and if this is about power then you know who’s won out of the three of you, you know who has steel in his bones and lightning cracking in his veins.

It’s different this time, pleasure rising like the tide in your whole body, a peak that is not concentrated so clearly between your legs but everywhere: fingertips, spine, belly, heart.

“Come for me, Angel. I know you can do it.” And then for the first time Aemond leans in close to you, his pristine scarless chest pressed to yours, his lips traveling from your throat to the curve of your jaw, his tongue darting into your mouth before you can turn away, and he tastes like pure, mineral lust, and maybe that’s not just because of what he’s done to you, maybe that’s all he is all the way down, hunger that is never satisfied, a need to consume like fire burns flesh.

You whimper, a desperate vulnerable sound, a pleading for him to finish what he’s started and give you this one last high, just one more, just one, please, please, you’ll do anything.

“I’m better than him, aren’t I?” Aemond demands as he fucks you, and there’s no other word for it. This isn’t making love, this isn’t a meeting of souls, it is using someone else’s body to patch up all your hollows, all the pinprick voids you’ve been walking around with for years, losing yourself one blooddrop at a time until you pass by a mirror one day and think who the hell is that? “I know how to take care of you. I know what you want. I can do things Aegon never could. I’ll make you come again. I’ll give you a prince.”

And he coaxes it out of you like the memory of a dream, more like an ether than something you could name: a shimmering elation all over, a cry you can only muffle by biting down on Aemond’s neck as he pounds into you, and then he at last he surrenders what you came here for, but only after all the rest of it. He fills you with himself, so much of it that you can feel it pouring out onto the blankets, immense flooding wet warmth that gives you no satisfaction whatsoever.

I’m a traitor, you think, and for all the times you’ve changed your skin this is the very worst of them. I shouldn’t have done this. I wish I hadn’t done this.

Aemond lifts himself off of you and rolls onto his back, panting alongside you as you both stare up at the ceiling, drenched in each other’s salt and knowing things that were once so unthinkable. Aemond is gazing over at you. His clear blue eye is tracing your lips, your breasts, your hips, your folds that are soaked with his sweat and seed. You don’t want him watching you. You feel sick knowing he’s watching you. You get up from the bed and begin putting on your gown.

Aemond says: “We should probably try again tomorrow.”

You shake your head. “I can’t,” you reply quietly.

He sits up on the bed, his lone eye narrowed and suspicious. His hair is damp and now flows over his shoulders in disheveled silvery waves. “What?”

“I can’t do this again. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“So that’s it,” Aemond flings. “Just this once and never again. Never again in our whole goddamn lives.”

“It feels like betraying him. It is betraying him.”

“And what if he can’t father any more children?!”

“Then I’ll be barren.”

Aemond glares, petulant, affronted. “I thought you wanted to help this family.”

“You didn’t do this for your family. You did it for you.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m a fucking monster.” He tears off the bed, tugs on his trousers, ties the knot with swift furious hands.

“Aemond, I didn’t say that, I don’t think—”

“You’ve done enough,” he seethes, pawing through a chest of clothing. He finds a shirt and pulls it on, gathers up his things, rages to the bedchamber door. He whips it open and disappears into the nightscape corridor.

“Aemond!” you call after him in a fierce whisper, as loudly as you dare to. “Aemond, where are you going?!”

“To take Harrenhal,” he pitches over his shoulder. And then he’s gone, and maybe it’s your fault, and maybe it isn’t, but either way you are wholly convinced that it is.

You bathe in one of the massive tubs heated by the lava that runs deep beneath the rocky earth of the island, scouring away every trace of Aemond, lathering yourself with soap scented with pine, rinsing, lathering again. Still, you can feel the way he moved inside you with such battering, rapturous force. Still, you miss him, you miss being able to talk to him and look to him and trust that he will protect Aegon in every way he can, for no matter how much envy Aemond is built of you believe his love for his king is stronger.

You return to Aegon’s bed, always so careful now not to jostle his legs, his shattered bones that are only just beginning to mend. You are petrified that he will know somehow—that he will see it on your face, smell it sweating from your pores—but Aegon has nothing for you but seeking hands and contented, drowsy sighs.

“Where’d you go?” he mumbles, still half-asleep, drawing you in closer. “I missed you. I keep dreaming that everyone’s gone. I watch you walk through the doorway and I’m left here in bed all alone.”

“Aegon?”

“Yes, wife.”

“Do you need children with me to be happy?”

He waits a long time before he answers. When at last he does, he chooses each word carefully. “I have never felt a calling to be a father. I’ve never been any good at it. Jaehaerys, Jaehaera, Maelor…they were mine, but they also weren’t, and I can’t explain it. I felt nothing for them except a vague sort of sympathy that they had the misfortune of being born to me. Now, did a lot of that have to do with my relationship with Helaena? Probably. And do I think things would be different if I had children with you? Yes, I believe they would be, to some extent at least. But I don’t need children to be happy. I just need you.”

You say with tears in your eyes and your voice splintering: “I’m so sorry, Aegon.”

He is mystified. “For what?”

“For not being a better person for you. For not being able to cure or protect you. For not being able to end the war.”

“Angel, nobody can,” Aegon says, fingers snarled in your hair, lips to your forehead. Then he smiles; you can feel the warm, playful curl of it against your skin. “Well, except Aemond, of course.”

~~~~~~~~~~

She is there to greet him when he arrives. She creeps out of the shadows like a spider, long limbs and volcanic-glass eyes, whispers like wind in brittle fall leaves and flesh that will never refuse him. She wears black, not for one night like you did but always; she has long dark hair that she never cuts or braids or ties back. Sometimes there are raven feathers in it, sometimes herbs or powders from spells, sometimes twigs and petals, sometimes blood. It all washes out in the cold cryptic currents of the Gods Eye. Once Daemon Targaryen was here, but he did not have a wound in the shape that she could fill, could walk into like a doorway and stitch herself into the velvet-gore lining of his lungs, his liver, his heart. But now Daemon is gone. And Harrenhal has a new king to reign over the city of bones and ashes.

She meets him under the starlight that trickles in through the ruins of Harrenhal, less a castle than an architectural graveyard, less a place of beginnings than of calamitous ends. Her fingernails trace his scar and she tells him it is the mark of a hero. She touches her lips to his sapphire eye and tells him it reminds her of a god. And thus the doorway opens, and Alys drifts through it, silent and resistless like smoke, like a plague.

Perpetual Resurrection, Aemond thinks. He knows they are the words of House Celtigar. He has studied the mottos of every noble house in Westeros; but none speak to him more than these.

She touches him and he sees everything he could be. He tastes her lips and drinks down the smooth intoxicating fire that burns the boy he once was away.

#aegon ii targaryen #aegon targaryen #aegon ii #aegon targaryen ii #aegon targaryen x reader #aegon x reader

[sprout-fics]

for a little Thursday night Thots ♡♡

maybe some werewolf!simon? anything is ok dkshsk

but maybe some "I missed you" bites and breeding 🥰🥰

I love your writing frfr!! rorororo!!! 🐩🫂🩷

OOC Simon, Rough sex, Breeding kink, Werewolf Simon

Ghost is…different after missions gone wrong.

There’s a venom to him that is summoned only by failure, by blood and bones and lost comrades under a hail of gunfire. It burrows deep into his marrow, sets a rampant, feral shadow bursting from his veins, drunk on adrenaline. You know by now it comes from a place of fear, that as furious as he is he’s terrified.

Terrified at the thought of losing you. 

A hand presses you down into the sheets, and you feel the tell-tale pinprick of claws at the tips of his fingers and he pins you there, forces you to arch and present to him. There’s a growl building in his throat as you fist the sheets, plant your face sideways and drag a shuddering breath in with each retreat of his cock inside you, only for the air to be punched from your lungs as he surges forward once more. He sets a punishing rhythm against you, one you submit to openly, one that drags you under from the realm of clarity and into something esoteric, arcane just like the blood of the ancient that pulses searing through his veins. 

It’s severe enough to almost hurt, the pace and near brutality of his hips slapping against your ass, and you know that in the aftermath of broken bones and bloodied comrades the rage inside him bubbles up into something feral, untamed, his voice a wild snarl as you gasp out his name under his grasp. 

“Simon!”

He bends over you, smothers you from behind, and you can feel the trace of coarse hair rising along a veiny arm as he begins to lose control of his shift. The girth inside you swells, and you choke on the sudden stretch, forcing you wider around on him, voice crying out in a wordless moan as he doesn’t pause, burying himself inside you with that same unflinching pace. 

“Could have lost you.” He growls in your ear, and the deep tremor of his voice vibrates through you, forces your limbs pliant against him in submission like you’re rolling on your back begging for his mercy. The dire wolf in him seems pleased at the sound, because he hums low in his throat, reaches a hand down to graze against your hooded clit.

“S-Simon-” You choke, face burning, skin damp with sweat, lungs searing with hot air as the clawed tips of his pads circle against it, force pleasure to tighten in your core. 

“You could have died.” He snarls, pressing with a sudden severity that makes you shout.

He’s right. You know he’s right. If he hadn’t shifted, hadn’t dwarfed you with his superhuman size, the towering massive stature of his wolf, that you’d be dead.

You can still remember it, can still feel the heat of his shift rolling across your form, as large as a tank, fur coal-dark, nearly iridescent, eyes bright yellow and gleaming as bright as his fangs bared in a deadly, imminent threat.

“You can’t keep making mistakes.” He tells you a little softer now, thumb stroking over your wet cheek- when had you started crying? “I can’t keep you out there if you won’t listen.”

You nod, and there’s an apology caught halfway in your throat he seems to hear, huffs with something vaguely displeased because it isn't enough. Isn’t enough to bring back the dead, isn’t enough to heal the wound in your arm, isn’t enough to assuage his frantic worry shielded by anger.

He pauses for a moment, and you hear a shift of fabric as he rucks up the mask to his nose, leaning down and seizing the flesh of your shoulder between his poking fangs hard enough to make you scramble forward, only for him to drag you back against him, flush with his hips. 

“I should breed you.” He muses as he licks the wound clean- evidence of his claim on you. The words don’t register at first, not until he snaps his hips forward and alertness runs through you. “Should pump you full of my pups so you can stay here, safe.”

You can’t help it, you tighten around him reflexively, and you force air into your lungs long enough to look over your shoulder at him, eyes wet and pleading as you ask him in a voice that speaks of utter ruin:

“Please.”

#Oh boy #werewolf simon ghost riley #simon ghost riley x you #simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley x you #simon ghost riley #x reader #thursday night thots #minors dni

[tadpolesonalgae]

Vampire!Poly-batboys x reader: Mercy, Devil - Part 2

A/N: The poly part two to the vampire fic is here! Hope you enjoy!!

Warning: Vampirism, poly!batboys, blood, biting

Word Count: 4,154

-Part 1-

——————————————————————————————————————————————

Thunder rolls across the perpetually stormy sky, his castle seemingly gifted with its own unique weather system. Rain lashes at the windows, criss-crossed with diamond-shaped indentations upon the glass, streaked with icy water. Lightning cracks across the dark, heavy clouds, flashing with startling light, briefly illuminating the chambers you’ve been returned to.

You swallow heavily, rousing from an empty sleep, fatigue weighing on bone marrow as you push up from the bed. The pearls have gone, replaced by a pale blue nightgown and memories of the evening you stumbled into the castle return. Right into the beast’s jaws.

Fingers trace over your throat, pockmarked with tiny puncture wounds, skin aching around the slightly swollen marks. Memories of the fear and alarm upon feeling those gleaming incisors skating across your neck rush in, the overpowering strength of his hands on your body, shoving your head to the side so he could drink deeper. The hot spill of blood as it dripped down over collar bones, the mad frenzy in previously sharp and clear eyes. He’d seemed utterly undone, at the mercy of his own hunger as he’d fed.

Your pulse spikes in your chest, fear diluting in your lifestream, breathing deepening as you hastily peer around the room. Searching for something that could possibly help keep the beast off of you. It’s a stupid thought, you know that—why would he have the means to his demise so readily available? In his own home, no less. That would be idiotic.

“Sleep well?” A low, silken voice asks, making you scream, flinching back as you snap your head to the doorway. He’d entered on completely silent feet—the door hadn’t even made a sound. “Now, now. There’s no need for that,” he chides soothingly, “you’re alive and well. No need for theatrics.” But your nails are practically tearing at the sheets with how tight you’re gripping them. Something like him—something that drinks the blood of women, relishing in draining away their youth—can be nothing but pure evil. Hell incarnate.

“Stay away from me,” you grit out lowly, back pressed against the plush cushioning of the headboard. “You have no power over me. Let me leave.”

He’s quiet for a moment, watching you intently, before lowering his head, a mix between a sigh and a laugh huffing from his lips. Raises gleaming violet to pierce into you, as if able to pin you to the bed with a glance alone. “I’m afraid I won’t be doing that,” he says amicably, still in that velvety voice of his, like satin brushing teasingly across your skin. “You see, little devil, I have lived centuries in this world. Travelled far and wide, sampled a number of women and men alike, and yet I’ve never once come across a taste quite as exquisite as yours.” Protectively, you raise your palm to your throat, as if blocking the skin from his view may serve a chance for freedom—or undo what he’s already found.

“Because of that,” he continues leisurely, as if he hasn’t turned your life upside down within the span of a breath. “I will be keeping you for myself, here, in my castle. Is everything clear?” You blink, dread sluicing through your veins.

“I’m not— You can’t do that.” You splutter quietly, incredulity and fear drenching your tone in horror. “I’m a living person. You can’t just lock me up. That’s— That’s wrong.” You manage to whisper, too shocked to bellow.

“You don’t have a choice here. Well, not one you’d like,” he muses idly, hands sliding into the pockets of his dark, tailored trousers. “What is it?” You grit out anyway, attempting to conceal your trembling fingers.

The charming smile fades from his elegant mouth, slipping into something blank and unreadable. “Either, you can agree to my generous offer and remain mine in this castle,” he says, voice turning to freezing silk, prowling toward you in the low thunderous light. “Or, I can take my final drink now, and let you pass on into the next world—or rather, into the next half world.” He reaches the edge of the bed, but you’re too terrified to move.

Even as he pulls his hand from the neatly stitched pocket of his dark trousers, you remain still. Petrified, until his icy hand settles on your throat, thumb and index finger pressing to the soft sides beneath your jaw, tilting your head to him. “You should know: I would not be kind if you forced me to turn you,” he murmurs tenderly, leaning over the bed, bracing his forearm against the headboard. “You are quite to my tastes,” he says softly, lowly, “I would hate to see you become a servant, instead of what you could be.”

“And what is that?” You manage to ask shakily, forcefully pushing yourself as deep into the headboard as you can.

Glittering violet briefly scans your features, then the edges of his mouth are curving, dipping down to nose at your throat. Sharp, piercing teeth graze the shell of your ear. “Cared for,” he answers, cold lips brushing the erogenous skin, fingers flexing around your neck. “Desired,” he murmurs softly, dipping lower, skimming the erratic pulse of your life force. “Cherished.”

Incisors scrape, and you flinch, muscles contracting with fear.

He pulls back, staring down at you from not even a breath away.

“So, my dear,” he muses, “what will it be?”

You stare at him, eyes widened, pupils no-doubt dilated with fear. You swallow thickly, overwhelmed by the intensity of him, the heaviness of his presence, the dominating sense of self rolling from his powerful figure. Pulse spikes with the thought him ending your life—would the rightness of thwarting him be worth an eternity of obeying his word? At the mercy of his absolute power?

“You wouldn’t ever taste my blood again if you turned me,” you rasp, trying to force the tremors from your voice. “You’d lose the exact thing you’re trying to gain.” Sharp eyes flash, his jaw working at your brazen answer. “Are you sure you want to test that, little devil?” He asks, voice rougher than before, anger and hunger kindling in his eyes. “I’m offering you a life of comfort and care in exchange for your compliance. Anyone can see you’re gaining much more than I am out of this agreement.”

“Which is exactly why I know you won’t turn me,” you return shakily. “Why give so much for something so unimportant, right?”

A muscle feathers in his jaw, then he’s pushing away from you roughly. “You’re being foolish,” he warns, eyes glittering with hunger. “Maybe I won’t turn you, but I believe you’re somehow forgetting I don’t need your permission to take what I want.” His fingers flex at his sides, shoulders rolling subtly before he’s sliding hands into his pockets. As if to calm the urge to pin you down and drink.

You stiffen in your place. Reconsidering his offer. If you refuse, but he decides to take anyway, where will you be kept? In some subterranean dungeon, left to lie and rot on a damp pallet of hay? Locked in some long-forgotten room, only allowed out when he wants to feed?

Rhysand senses your doubt, honing in on it like the beast he is, able to smell the indecision. “Think about it,” he says calmly, earlier hunger banished, not a trace to be found. “I have some visitors to see to, but will be back this evening for your answer,” he smiles politely, turning for the door but pausing at the threshold. “If you need a reminder of what it feels like…” You could swear his eyes darken with glee at the way your muscles contract, legs pressing together as you remain huddled to the head of the bed.

“Until tonight, then,” he grins, gleaming white teeth glittering in the low light. The door sweeps to a close behind him, leaving you alone with a choice to make. A sense of impending doom weighing in your blood.

————

You have to get out. It’s the only viable solution.

You don’t want to be stuck as a glorified chicken for the rest of your life—used until you’ve grown too old, then devoured entirely. You have no preferable choice, so you’ll have to make your own, and escaping seems like a pretty good idea.

Easing down a breath, you swing your legs over the edge of the bed, the pale blue cotton of your nightgown swishing softly at bare ankles. Peering around the room, you search for anything that could be used as a weapon against a…whatever he is. Some blood-sucking devil.

The neatly preserved figure of gleaming armour catches your gaze—if a weapon is to be lying about somewhere, surely it would be here? With a spark of hope in your chest, you creep forward on what you hope are quiet feet. Not that you should be too concerned. Despite how silently he can move, the castle seemed intimidating in size, and you doubt he’d be able to pick up footsteps from so much as a corridor away.

Your pulse spikes as you eye the short scabbard wrapped over the waist of the armour, slightly shaky fingers pulling on the string to move it around. There’s a handle poking from it’s top, and your heart stumbles in your chest. With trembling hands, you pull the string loose, tying it instead around your own waist, thumbing the blade free experimentally. It’s so clear you can make out the gleaming wetness to wide, frightened eyes.

Breathing deeply, you return the blade to its new home at your hip, tip-toeing for the door, hoping he will have left it unlocked. Underestimating your drive to keep your own pathing. You will not have choice taken away from you.

The handle turns, and the door swings open on well-oiled hinges.

A cool wave of relief sweeps over you, pulling it open to peer down the long, stretching hallways either side. Nothing out-of-the-ordinary to be found. Except maybe the blood-red carpeting. You should have realised how strange it was, how macabre the whole setup is. Maybe it’s a lovely colour, but not one you slather your entire house in, let alone a whole castle.

Shaking your head, you slip out over the threshold, silently bringing the door to a close at your back, before making your way down the stretching hallway. You move silently, keeping to the edges of the carpeted floor—as if you’d be able to hide from him. In the pale gown, you stick out like freezing blue lips in a rose garden.

Following the path he had taken you to dinner, you manage to relocate the entrance hall, heart beating wildly in your chest, eyes darting left and right frenetically, searching for movement. It’s an open stretch. Once you’re out there, you’ll have to go straight for the door. There’s nowhere to hide yourself once you step out into the hallway.

You take in a steady breath, then step out into the open.

Silently, you make your way as swiftly as possible down the curving case, feet padding softly along the well-polished boards, trying to keep sound to a minimum. The heavy-looking door looms before you, menacingly staring as you approach. Hairs raise at the nape of your neck, but you push away the apprehension, hands shaking as you reach for the knob.

It doesn’t shift.

You try pulling, but nothing.

You twist it harder, using both your hands, but to no avail.

Mentally you curse—you’d hoped it would be unlocked like last time. He’s seemingly taken some precautions, then. You’ll need to find another way out, or maybe the keys… Where would keys be?

They could be anywhere, you realise despairingly, and in a castle this large, you don’t have the time to spend painstakingly searching for them. You’ll have to find another exit. Every home has a backdoor, there must at least be one for the servants he mentioned—there’s no way they’d be allowed entrance through this hall.

“Who are you?”

You scream, jolting away from the voice, turning to find a man at your side—he’d been completely silent, just like Rhysand. You stumble back, hands shaking at your sides as you take in his towering figure. Wearing dark leather, surrounded by the glowing red of the castle, he cuts a terrifying silhouette. With black hair that come to his shoulders, and the eyes that feel like they can pierce straight through bone, you can feel in your blood he’s the same creature as the Lord.

The blade at your hip weighs heavily, but you know from a single look there’s no way you’d be able to do anything with it. You’re more likely to end up slicing yourself open, dripping over the blood-red carpet.

His lips part in an almost wolfish grin as he takes you in properly. “Oh, I see,” he drawls, stepping closer. “You’re one of Rhys’, aren’t you?”

“Please…” you breathe, heat building behind your eyes. “I don’t—…I just want to leave…” Lungs spasm with fear, and his nostrils flare delicately, before taking a step back. The man raises his arms placatingly, exposing his palms in a sign of peace. “I’m not stopping you,” he says lowly, still baring his teeth in a smile.

Your tongue swipes out to wet your lips, staggering a step back hesitantly, then another. Never taking your eyes from his hulking figure.

Your muscles involuntarily contract with soul-deep fear as a blood-curdling snarl rips through the castle’s interiors. A wave of bone-crushing terror smacks into you, like a flash of lightening followed by the roll of thunder as something dark pulses through the building. The man’s smile widens at the sound, turning a little feral. “Better be on your way,” he warns roughly, voice like gravel. “Before the beast catches you.”

Heart pounding, you spin on your feet and run.

You could swear his low chuckle follows on your heels as you sprint from the room, nearly stumbling over your own toes as you pass over carpets and rugs, running through doorways and dodging around rich, plush armchairs and large, heavy instruments. Fire crackles in one room but you have no time for pause, feeling that power closing in no matter how far you run.

Feet slam on the polished wood of floorboards, and you spot an open door down the stretching corridor. Without care for noise, you dart inside, snapping the door to a close, hurriedly taking in your surroundings—it’s a frighteningly large library. Cases of books tower on wide-set shelves, neatly stacked but tightly packed, perfect to hide within.

Not giving it a second thought, you make for the towering furniture, darting between the aisles as quickly and as quietly as possible, keeping your eyes wide for any sign of movement. If you can just wait until you feel this cloying power pass, you can try venturing out again.

You think back over the conversation which must have been in the morning if he said he would return at night. He’d said he’d had guests to see to—that man must have been one of them, but how many are there? Are they all like him? They must be. Unless they bring humans along with them? What if there are more beasts prowling the halls for you now that signal has practically shot lightening into anything capable of breathing within the castle?

“You aren’t supposed to be in here.”

Muscles go taut, stomach tightening as cold dread ices your skin.

You turn rigidly on your heel, coming to face another man, wreathed in darkness. Silky hair gleamed in the low library light, his sharp hazel eyes pinning you to the spot with a single look. You shake your head, managing a single wobbly steps back, before he’s slowly prowling forward, gaze trained on you like he’s finally locked in on his prey.

Turning, you stumble away, running back through the tall cases, now understanding their disadvantage. He can’t see you, but you also can’t see him. Fighting your growing terror, you break from the shelves, running toward a door that will no doubt only lead you deeper into the castle, separate from the one you came in from. But he appears before you in a blur of shadow, and you smack into the stone-like muscle of his chest—utterly freezing, utterly lifeless. Death wreathed in darkness.

You still in your spot, staring up into sharp, predatory eyes with visible terror, vaguely remembering the blade at your hip.

“What are you doing here?” He asks lowly, hands kept casually at his sides, but you don’t doubt he could strike at any moment should the desire take him. “I— Please,” you beg, internally screaming for your body to move, to turn and run from the beast before you clad in the skin of an angel. “Just let me go,” you breathe shakily, stumbling back.

The man watches you silently, coldly. “You know that’s not going to happen,” he says shortly, “either you can obey and I’ll escort you back to your room, or you can make this painful.” Your eyes widen, pressure building quickly, the blade practically searing into your skin. If you comply, you’ll probably be locked up. You’ll never escape, and choice will have been taken from you. But if you fight… Even against something as terrifying as him… It will be on your own terms.

But you’re not a fighter—at least, not in the face of this particular beast. The best you can do it run.

You spin on your heel, turning for the door, but a stone-cold hand has already gripped your shoulder and you cry out in pain. His hold is like ice, stern and unforgiving. “Fine,” he mutters, making to—

“Hold on, Az,” that voice drawls, pure terror slicing through your stomach.

One was impossible enough, but two? There’s no way. You���re going to die.

The man—Az, he’d said—stops, his grip lightening by a fraction. “She’s Rhys’, Cass. We should return her.” Muscle trembles beneath his grip, neck craning to turn to spot the other man at your back, having come in through the hallway. He shrugs nonchalantly, as if the warning gleam in the shadowy one’s eyes doesn’t bother him. “That’s his fault for letting her out,” he drawls, coming to stand closer behind you. Too close.

His hazel eyes drop to yours, that wolfish smile breaking across his lips. “Besides,” he says lowly, “you know he only keeps the good ones around for more than one meal.” The man—Cass—steps closer, hands going to your waist as he lowers to your throat, pulse spiking as he noses along the smooth expanse. “This is it,” he mumbles, lips brushing your skin. “This is what I picked up, Az. She smells so good.” He pulls away, pulling your hair to the side, exposing the bare top of your shoulder and you tense, remembering how little clothing you’re wearing. How unprotective it is. “Go on,” he urges quietly, “give her a try.”

Az narrows his eyes, but relents, curiosity getting the better of him. Spine turns rigid as he dips down, nosing along the column of your throat, feeling the trembling pulse of your life-force beneath his mouth. You hear the sound of him inhaling, scenting your skin, before pulling away. “See?” The man at your back drawls. “I’ve got a good nose for these things. I told you I smelled something delicious.”

“Rhys has good taste,” the other answers flatly, “unlike some people, Cassian.” Still, his eyes remain on your throat for a little too long for your comfort.

Cassian doesn’t seem bothered by the jab, instead raising one of his hands from your hip to trace along the stuttering pulse of your heart, grazing down your neck. “I bet she tastes good,” he murmurs, and you can feel the weight of his gaze alone, hairs prickling beneath its intensity. “Cass,” the man at your front warns, voice low and cold. “She’s Rhys’. He won’t like it if you decide to put your grubby teeth all over her.”

Cassian pays him no mind, and Az’s grip on you tightens, pulling you toward him, aiming to distract the other. “When was the last time you drank?” He asks distastefully. Cassian shrugs again, “I assumed Rhys would provide a meal, and since he has such good taste,” he says pointedly, “I thought I’d enjoy myself.”

Another beastly snarl rips through the halls of the castle, and Cassian muffles a low chuckle. The man before doesn’t seem to find it as funny, the shadows at his back darkening. “What did you do this time, Az?” The man asks, lips curved with mirth.

“You’re the one who said you wanted to slip away,” Az hisses in a flash of canines. That deadly thrum of power intensifies, and you realise it must mean Rhysand is approaching. Whatever Az had done, the illusion’s over. It feels like he’s already right outside the door.

“Are you going to drink, or not?” Cassian asks, rough fingers slipping beneath the neckline of your gown, thumbing at the soft buttons at your front, slowly un-popping them in order to move the fabric out of the way of his teeth. “I don’t want to share Rhys’ meal,” Az says, a note of distaste to his words.

“Why not? It wasn’t a problem a couple of centuries ago,” Cassian drawls, challenge in his tone. “What happened? Spend a few decades fawning over a woman and suddenly all taste for adventure’s gone?” He scoffs, the taunt clear in his deep voice. “You’ve lost your touch, brother. You’re getting soft.”

A warning snarl drags from the other man’s throat, hazel eyes flicking to the door.

But Cassian sees his chance, head dipping down, incisors piercing your throat, biting down and spilling blood. Your lips part in a scream, paralysed as his venom enters your body, making your limbs feel heavy and clunky.

“Cassian,” Az hisses roughly, forcefully ripping him from you. Pain stings through your shoulder and collar bones, the only thing keeping you up being the hand at your hip and the chest at your front. Pressure wells behind your eyes at the ache, blood trickling down your skin. “What’s gotten into you? One scent catches your attention and suddenly centuries of discipline dissolves?” He snarls lowly, aware of the pulsing power that’s filling the room.

Cassian’s silent, but you can feel his body begin to tremble at your back. Fear drenches your skin as his grip tightens on you with the same display of inhumane strength Rhys had shown after his initial bite. Weakly you try to press closer to the man before you, but his attention is now trained on the blood beading at your throat, the puncture wounds already sealing over.

Terrifying hunger fills the dark hazel of his eyes, and you want to shrink away.

“You’ve got to try her, Az,” Cassian rasps at your back, voice low and strained. “Fuck, that’s the best I’ve ever had.” Wide eyes lock with hazel, silent and pleading. You’d take being returned to that room over this easily, no doubt in your mind.

The dark, raging power grows closer, reaching it’s peak. He’s right there.

Az’s lip curls back for a moment, but then he’s forcing the neckline of your gown over your shoulder, tearing at the lovely cotton in favour of piercing his canines into the softness of your neck. Your head tips back, falling into Cassian as your lips part in a soundless scream, rounding into a pained shape as he drinks, his own venom sinking into you.

Already dizziness is taking over you, but then Cassian is curving over you again, mouth parting, incisors sliding back into your skin with a now pleasurable pain. Arms go limp at your sides as their bloodlust wraps around you, completely overpowered by their hunger as hands grip and grope at your skin.

Tears push from your lashes, dripping down your cheeks as the ecstasy spins your mind, wickedly turning the pain into something soft and blissful. Making you want them to drink deeper, wanting to have their teeth in you, to put their hands across your body.

Darkness explodes through the room, rage blasting through the soft warmth of lust, pulling you from the jaws of vampiric seduction.

The world tilts a little as they pull away, but without the adrenaline of their venom you feel weak. Like you’re unable to go on.

The last thing you remember is the fierce grip on your hips, the possessive touch over your back and shoulders as icy violet brings the night to its crescendo.

Then everything explodes in glittering black.

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