Chapter 5: The Night's Claim
The lavender was a lie now, too. It couldn’t mask the musk of spent seed that seemed to have seeped into the very wool of the rugs, the oak of the bedposts. Alicent had given the order for the warrant herself that morning, her signature a crisp, swift slash of ink. The power of it was a quiet thrill. She had made a man kneel with a piece of parchment. It was cleaner than making a man kneel with her body.
Ser Criston was at her door that afternoon. He did not look at her directly. His gaze was fixed on a point beyond her shoulder, on the tapestry of the Seven-Pointed Star that hung on her far wall. “The audit of Lord Wylde’s offices has begun, Your Grace. At the Prince Regent’s command.”
“Efficiently done, Lord Commander.” Her voice was cool water over stone.
His eyes flicked to hers then, just for a second. They were bloodshot, hollow. In them, she saw a reflection of her son’s frantic need and a self-loathing so profound it was a living thing. He had tasted that need. He had swallowed it. The knowledge hung between them, a corpse on a gibbet.
“He is… unsettled,” Criston said, the words ground out like gravel.
“The realm is unsettled. He is its regent.” She turned away, ending the audience. She heard the whisper of his white cloak as he bowed and left.
Aemond did not come at night. He came in the deep afternoon, when the sun slanted low and bloody through her window, painting the room in shades of bronze and old gold. The door opened and he was there, a silhouette against the dying light. He’d been drilling in the yard; she could smell the leather, the horse, the sharp tang of male sweat. He closed the door and stood there, not speaking.
He looked like a stranger. Like Viserys in his final days, a vessel stretched too thin, filled with a poison only he could taste. The loving boy from the night before was gone, burned away by daylight and the harsh reality of ledgers.
“Wylde pissed himself,” Aemond said, his voice flat. “When my men started boxing up his personal correspondence. Literally. A dark stain spread right across the front of his doublet there in the Small Council chamber.” A faint, cruel twist touched his lips. “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
He walked to the sideboard and poured himself a cup of wine. He drank it standing, his back to her. The silence was a physical pressure.
“Is that why you’re here?” she asked, finally. “To tell me a man wet himself?”
He set the cup down with a sharp click. “No.” He turned. His eye was not soft, not devotional. It was a shard of ice. “I’m here because I can still smell that fucking knight on me.”
The words hung in the scented air. Alicent went very still.
“I’ve scrubbed my skin raw. It doesn’t matter.” He took a step toward her. “I can taste his mouth. I feel his fucking hands.” His voice dropped, becoming a raw, furious whisper. “I need it gone. You are the only thing that can burn it out of me.”
This was not a request. It was a declaration of war on his own senses. He crossed the room in three strides. There was no gentle kiss, no tentative touch. He grabbed the front of her gown, a costly thing of emerald damask, and ripped it open from neckline to waist. The sound of tearing fabric was savage. Cool air washed over her bare skin, pebbling her nipples.
She didn’t gasp. She didn’t flinch. She looked up at his face, at the turmoil etched there, and saw the tool she needed. Her hands came up, not to cover herself, but to work at the buckles of his weapon belt. She unfastened it, let it fall with a heavy thud. Her fingers moved to the laces of his trousers.
He was already brutally hard, his cock springing free, thick and veined and flushed an angry red. It jerked in the air. He hadn’t been touched, but the mere sight of her, bared and compliant, had done this. The power of that was a dark, sweet shock in her veins.
“On the bed,” he ordered, his voice choked.
She turned, letting the ruined gown slip from her shoulders to pool at her feet. She walked to the great mahogany bed and laid herself down on the coverlet, on her back. She opened her legs. The invitation was obscene, deliberate. A cool, calculated seduction to counter his hot madness.
He followed, crawling over her like a wolf over prey. He didn’t kiss her. He stared down at her cunt, at the sparse auburn curls, at the pink flesh already glistening with a readiness that shamed her. He spat into his palm, a crude, wet sound, and slicked himself. Then he notched his cockhead against her entrance and drove into her with one vicious, bottoming thrust.
“Fuck!” The curse was torn from both of them. The stretch was immediate, punishing. He was bigger than she remembered, or he was angrier. He filled her to the point of breathlessness.
He didn’t pause. He set a brutal, piston-like rhythm, fucking into her with deep, punishing strokes that shoved her body up the bed with each impact. The mahogany frame groaned in protest. He braced himself on his elbows, his face inches from hers, his single eye wild.
“Is this what you are?” he panted, each word a thrust. “A fucking hole… to make me clean? A sheath… for my fucking sword?”
She reached up and grabbed his face, her nails digging into his scarred cheek. “Yes,” she hissed, meeting his thrust with a roll of her own hips. “And you are a fucking boy… who comes to his mother… when the world touches you.”
A snarling sound erupted from his throat. He slammed into her harder, faster. The wet, filthy slap of skin on skin filled the room. His sweat dripped onto her breasts, her throat. The loving gaze from the previous night was a forgotten fairytale. This was raw, mutual defilement.
“You want it to hurt,” he groaned, his rhythm faltering into something more frantic, uncoordinated. “You want me to… to ruin you for anyone else. Don’t you?”
Her climax was climbing, a treacherous vine twining up from where he split her open. It was built on anger, on the sight of his unraveling, on the sheer, amoral power of holding him here, inside her, as he came apart. “You already have,” she gasped.
He cried out, a shattered, broken sound. His hips stuttered, his control gone. He plunged into her, once, twice more, and then he was coming. His release was a hot, pulsing flood, jetting deep into her womb. He shook with the force of it, his entire body seizing, his face buried in the crook of her neck as he emptied himself with ragged, sobbing breaths.
He collapsed, his full, sweat-slick weight pressing her into the mattress. He was still inside her, still throbbing weakly. They lay there, two animals in a trap of their own making, breathing in the stink of sex and rage.
Slowly, his breathing evened. He softened and slipped out. A hot trickle leaked onto the coverlet beneath her. He rolled off, onto his back, staring at the canopy as he had the night before. But his expression was blank, emptied of everything.
Alicent sat up. Her body ached exquisitely. She felt raw, used, triumphant. She swung her legs off the bed and stood, naked, before him. She walked to the washbasin, her movements steady. She cleaned herself with the same clinical detachment she had used on him. The water in the basin was pink.
She did not go to him. She walked to her wardrobe and drew out a simple robe of grey wool. She put it on, tying the sash with precise movements. Then she went to her writing desk.
She picked up a fresh piece of parchment, selected a quill, and began to write. The scratch of the nib was the only sound in the room.
Aemond turned his head on the pillow to watch her. “What are you doing?”
“Writing to Lord Wylde,” she said, without looking up. “A personal note. To express my… regret at the necessary unpleasantness of the audit. To suggest that his continued loyal service would be remembered fondly by the Crown. To offer a private supper, to discuss how the Crown might compensate him for his… discomfort.”
She finished the sentence, her script flowing and elegant. She sanded the paper.
Aemond pushed himself up on his elbows. The ice in his eye was back, but it was speculative now. Calculative. The beast was sated; the prince was returning. “You’ll bind him to you with kindness after I terrified him with cruelty.”
“I will bind him to the throne,” she corrected softly, finally looking at him. “You are the fire. I am the balm. It is how we rule.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he swung his legs off the bed and began to gather his clothes. He dressed in silence, his movements efficient. He buckled his sword belt, the leather whispering. He ran a hand through his disheveled silver-gold hair, smoothing it back.
He looked every inch the Prince Regent again. Only the faint flush on his neck, the smell of sex clinging to him, betrayed what had just transpired.
At the door, he paused. He didn’t look back. “The balm,” he repeated, his voice quiet. “See that it doesn’t lose its potency, mother.”
He left.
Alicent sat at her desk, the letter to Wylde before her. She lifted the quill again. She added a postscript, a trivial query about the health of his new grandchild. A personal touch.
She set the quill down. The throbbing between her legs was a persistent, dull echo. A tool, she thought. A sheath. A balm. She was all of those things. But as she felt the cold trickle of his spend begin to slide down her inner thigh, soaked up by the wool of her robe, she knew she was also the hand that now held both the fire and the salve.
The power was no longer a quiet thrill. It was a deep, humming current, and it scared her more than his anger ever had.
It was a deep, humming current, and it scared her more than his anger ever had. She spent the day moving through its flow, the letter to Wylde sent, the phantom ache between her legs a constant reminder. She took a long, scalding bath, scrubbing the scent of him from her skin until it was raw. It didn’t work. The sense of him lingered beneath the lavender soap, a ghost in her muscles.
Night fell, deep and quiet. She was in bed, the accounts ledger open but unread on her lap, when the door opened. No knock. Just the sigh of hinges and his shape filling the frame. The candlelight caught the sapphire first, a cold blue star in the gloom. He was still dressed from council, but his hair was loose, a silver-gold cascade over his shoulders. He looked young, and tired, and utterly certain of his welcome.
“You’re back,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“You are here,” he replied, as if that explained everything. He closed the door. The lock clicked, a soft, definitive sound. He walked to the bed, his boots silent on the rug. He looked down at the ledger, then at her face. “Does the arithmetic of the realm comfort you, mother?”
“It is orderly.” She closed the book, setting it aside. “It obeys its own rules.”
“Nothing obeys rules.” He sat on the edge of the mattress, the weight of him tilting her toward him. He smelled of ink and cold night air. “Not really. They only obey strength. Or necessity.” His single eye traveled over her, from the loose braid over her shoulder, down the plain linen of her nightgown. “Which am I?”
She didn’t answer. She knew what came next. The script was written on her bones. His kiss, his weight, her surrender. The cycle of fire and balm. A vessel, endlessly filled. The humming current of fear tightened in her chest, threatening to become resentment.
He saw it. His expression hardened, just a fraction. “Turn over.”
The command was quiet, devoid of the previous day’s rage or the night before’s desperate sweetness. It was simply instruction. For a heartbeat, she considered refusing. The word no sat on her tongue, a tiny, hard pebble of rebellion.
She didn’t speak it. Instead, with a slow exhalation, she moved. She pushed the ledger fully off the bed. She turned from him, presenting her back. She got onto her hands and knees on the woven coverlet, the position submissive, exposed. The hem of her nightgown pooled around her thighs. She felt the cool air of the room on the backs of her legs, on the curves of her ass.
She heard the rustle of his clothing, the clink of his belt buckle. He didn’t fumble. He was efficient. His hands, cool from the castle stones, grasped her hips. His thumbs dug into the soft flesh. He positioned himself behind her, his knees pressing against the backs of hers. The broad, slick head of his cock nudged against her, probing through the thin linen that still separated them.
“This,” he muttered, and his hand shoved the fabric aside, bunching it at the small of her back. The air touched her directly now, making her skin prickle. He spat, a crude wet sound, and she felt the warm wetness against her opening a moment before he pressed forward.
He entered her in one long, smooth, stretching slide. She gasped, her spine arching. He was deep, so deep, from this angle. It invaded. It claimed. He held there, buried, his fingers biting into her hip bones. “Every fucking time,” he breathed, almost to himself. “Like you’re made for it.”
Then he pulled back and thrust again. And again.
The rhythm was different. She was not a receptacle to be filled. She was an instrument to be played. He set a driving, percussive pace, using his grip on her hips to pull her back onto his length with each forward drive of his own. The impact jarred through her, a relentless, pounding cadence. The wet, slapping sounds of their joining were louder, obscenely rhythmic. The bedstead began a steady, groaning complaint against the stone wall.
Alicent closed her eyes. She tried to retreat into the numbness, the familiar mental ledger where she tallied the cost and the gain. But the sensation was too immediate, too physical. The fullness, the friction, the sheer mechanical intensity of it broke through her walls. A low moan escaped her lips, unbidden.
He heard it. His rhythm hitched. “What was that?”
She didn’t answer. She pushed back against him, meeting his next thrust, taking him even deeper. Another sound rose in her throat, a wanton, needy gasp. She was tired. Tired of the calculations, tired of the fear, tired of being the stable shore for his chaotic sea. For once, just for this moment, she let the current take her. She gave herself over to the purely animal reality of it.
“Fuck,” Aemond grunted, his voice thick with shock and a sudden, wild arousal. “Oh, fuck, yes.” His hands slid from her hips to clutch the globes of her ass, spreading her wider, opening her further to his plunging cock. He drove into her with renewed ferocity, each stroke hitting a spot that sent shocks of pure, bright pleasure radiating through her belly.
She moaned openly now, a string of broken, breathy sounds. She dropped her forehead to her crossed arms, her back curving, presenting herself completely. She was soaking, her own slickness coating him, making filthy, sucking noises with every movement. The pleasure built, a coiling, urgent pressure that had nothing to do with power or politics. It was simple, desperate need.
“Aemond,” she gasped, the name a confession.
He swore again, a filthy, beautiful stream of obscenities. He was losing his measured control, his thrusts becoming frantic, harder, deeper. “Come on,” he growled, pounding into her. “Let go. I want to feel it. Squeeze that fucking cock. Come for me.”
The command shattered her. The coiled spring inside her snapped. Her climax ripped through her with a violence that stole her sight and breath. She cried out, a raw, ragged sound, as her cunt convulsed around his driving length, pulsing wildly, a flood of release soaking his cock and thighs.
The feeling of her tight, fluttering muscles milking him was too much. He shouted, a wordless roar of triumph, and slammed into her one last, shuddering time. He ground deep as he came, his hot seed spurting into her in thick, endless pulses. He collapsed forward, his chest heaving against her back, his weight driving her down into the mattress.
They lay there, a tangled, sweating heap, the only sounds their ragged attempts to breathe. The smell of sex was overwhelming, musky and sweet. He was still inside her, softening. His face was buried in her tangled hair.
Slowly, carefully, Alicent turned her head. Her limbs felt liquid, her mind blissfully blank. She reached back, her fingers finding one of his hands where it still gripped her hip. She pried it loose, bringing it around to her front. She held it in both of hers, this strong, cruel, regent’s hand. She lifted it to her lips.
She placed a single, light kiss upon his knuckles. It was not an act of submission. It felt, terrifyingly, like a signature. A seal. An acknowledgement of a pact written not on parchment, but in sweat and seed and shared, shameful pleasure.
He flinched. A sharp intake of breath stirred her hair. He said nothing. He did not pull his hand away.
Outside, a cold wind rattled the shutters. The flame of the single candle guttered, fought, and went out, plunging them into a perfect, intimate dark.