Chapter 6: The Bath of Submission
The kiss in the dark was a brand. It followed him.
Aemond moved through the next day like a man wearing armor two sizes too small. Every council meeting, every petitioner’s plea, every scratch of a quill on a tax ledger was filtered through the memory of that soft press of lips against his knuckles. It wasn’t submission. It was something worse. It was understanding. It was complicity. She had pulled him from the beast’s pit and shown him his own reflection in her eyes, and he had not looked away.
The shame was a cold, metallic taste at the back of his throat. The need was a fever beneath it.
He found himself standing before the door to the Lord Commander’s chambers as the last of the afternoon light bled from the sky. No conscious decision brought him there. His feet had carried him, a condemned man walking his own trail. He could still smell her on his skin, a phantom lavender and sex, and beneath it, the salt of her silent tears he had not seen but knew were there. He needed it scourged. He needed a simpler filth.
He did not knock. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open and entered, closing it behind him with a soft, final click.
The room was warm, steam curling in the air from a great copper tub placed before a dying fire. Ser Criston Cole was in it, submerged to his chest, his head tipped back against the rim. His eyes were closed. Water gleamed on the corded muscles of his shoulders, on the old scars that mapped a lifetime of violence across his skin. He looked older like this, stripped of his white enameled plate and crisp tabard. The weariness was etched into the lines around his mouth, the grey streaking his dark hair.
Aemond stood there, silent, watching the steady rise and fall of the knight’s chest.
Criston’s eyes opened. He did not startle. A warrior’s instinct, perhaps, or a dreadful familiarity. His dark gaze found Aemond in the shadowed room. For a long moment, they simply looked at each other. The hiss of the embers in the hearth was loud.
“What do you want?” Criston’s voice was a low rasp, stripped of ceremony.
Aemond didn’t answer with words. He walked forward, his boots silent on the thick rug. The steam dampened his fine tunic. He stopped at the side of the tub, looking down into the water, now clouded with soap and the grime of the training yard. He could see the vague, pale shape of the man’s body beneath the surface.
He knelt.
The movement was graceful, deliberate. On his knees beside the bath, he was eye-level with Criston. He reached out, his hand breaking the surface of the water. It was hot, almost scalding. His fingers trailed through the murk, over a muscled thigh, through coarse hair, until they found their destination.
Criston drew in a sharp breath. His cock, soft amidst the heat, twitched under Aemond’s touch.
“Don’t,” Criston said, but it was a whisper, stripped of conviction. His hands gripped the sides of the copper tub, the tendons standing out.
Aemond said nothing. He wrapped his fingers around the thickening flesh and began to stroke. Slowly. Underwater, the motion was a languid, obscene glide. His thumb rubbed over the head, spreading the bead of moisture that had already gathered there.
Criston’s head fell back against the rim again with a soft thud. He stared at the ceiling, his jaw clenched. “This is a sin,” he muttered, but his hips gave a minute, involuntary jerk, pushing his cock deeper into Aemond’s fist.
“You’ve tasted sin,” Aemond said, his voice flat, his first words. “You’ve supped on it. Now you’ll swallow it whole.”
He tightened his grip, picking up the pace. The water sloshed, little waves lapping against the copper sides. He watched Criston’s face, the struggle there—the grimace of pleasure warring with the twist of self-loathing. This was clean. This was simple. Here was a man who hated the part of himself that responded, and Aemond could speak to that hatred. He understood it. He could lose himself in inflicting it.
Criston was fully hard now, a rigid, heated length in his hand. Aemond stroked him with a ruthless, rhythmic precision. He used his free hand to grasp the knight’s hip, holding him still, forcing him to simply take the sensation.
“Look at me,” Aemond commanded.
With a visible effort, Criston dragged his gaze from the ceiling. His eyes were black pits, glazed with a humiliated arousal. He looked at the prince kneeling beside his bath, at the fierce sapphire eye locked on him, at the scarred socket that seemed to see deeper. He was breathing in short, ragged pants.
“You think of her,” Aemond said, not a question. He twisted his wrist on the upstroke, a cruel, clever motion. “When you touch yourself in the dark. You think of my mother.”
A broken sound escaped Criston’s throat. His resolve shattered. His hips began to buck in earnest, fucking up into the tight, wet tunnel of Aemond’s fist. The water churned. “Stop,” he gasped, even as he thrust. “Gods, stop.”
“You don’t want me to stop,” Aemond whispered, leaning closer, his lips almost brushing the knight’s ear. “You want to remember what it is to serve. This is your service now.”
Criston came with a guttural, choked-off roar. His body arched, rigid, out of the water. Thick, white pulses of seed erupted from him, clouding the bathwater instantly, mixing with the soap in milky swirls. He shook through it, his knuckles white on the tub, his eyes screwed shut in an agony of release.
Aemond did not let go. He milked him through the last spasms, watching the ecstasy and torment play across the weathered face. Only when Criston sagged, boneless and spent, back into the water did he withdraw his hand.
He brought his wet, slick hand to his own trousers. He unlaced them hastily, his own cock springing free, achingly hard. He hadn’t been touched, but the act of control, of reducing the proud Lord Commander to a trembling, spent thing, had lit a fire in his gut.
He shuffled forward on his knees, the rough rug biting through the fine wool. He pressed his forehead against Criston’s damp, hot temple. Their breath mingled, fast and sharp. He wrapped his own hand around his length, the slickness from Criston’s spend making the glide easy, filthy.
“Watch,” Aemond gritted out, his voice strained.
Criston turned his head. His eyes, heavy-lidded and defeated, looked down. He watched the prince’s pale fist pistoning over his own red, leaking cock. The intimacy of it was grotesque. Unforgivable.
Aemond’s rhythm was frantic, desperate. He chased it, his breath hitching. He was thinking of the dark, of the kiss, of the ledger snapped shut, of the way power could slip through your fingers like water. He was trying to grab it back here, in this steam-filled room, from this broken knight.
“Fuck,” he spat, the word a sharp explosion. His climax took him with violent suddenness. He came with a shudder that racked his entire frame, his seed streaking through the air to land in the already sullied bathwater, on Criston’s chest, mixing with the other man’s release. He slumped forward, his forehead sliding down to rest on the cool copper rim of the tub, gasping.
Silence descended, broken only by the crackle of the embers and their labored breathing. The air stank of sex and sweat and cheap soap.
Aemond pulled back. He stood on unsteady legs, tucking himself away, lacing his trousers with trembling fingers. He felt hollowed out. The fever had broken, leaving a cold, clear clarity that was somehow worse.
Criston hadn’t moved. He stared into the fouled water, his expression blank.
Aemond walked to the knight’s dressing table and picked up a clean linen towel. He wiped his hand slowly, meticulously. He tossed the towel onto the foot of the bed.
He was at the door when Criston spoke, his voice worn thin as old rope. “Why?”
Aemond paused, his hand on the iron latch. He didn’t look back. “Because you let me,” he said, the words leaving him like a final thrust. “And because she knows you would.”
He opened the door and stepped out into the cold stone hallway, leaving the steam and the shame and the shattered knight behind. The brand of the kiss felt colder now. He had tried to cauterize it with a different heat, but all he had done was deepen the wound. He walked toward the throne room, the weight of the crown already settling back onto his brow, heavier than before.
He walked toward the throne room, the weight of the crown already settling back onto his brow, heavier than before. The fouled bathwater seemed to cling to him, a phantom scum on his skin no amount of scrubbing could remove. He tasted copper, not blood, but the memory of a knight’s choked surrender.
Sleep was a frayed net. It caught nothing.
For three nights, Aemond paced the stones of Maegor’s Holdfast, his shadow a frantic companion. The kiss on his knuckles. The milky cloud in the water. They played behind his eye in a sickening loop. He wanted to scour the first with the violence of the second, but the arithmetic of degradation never balanced. He only felt emptier, a vessel for a cold, restless energy that hummed in his teeth.
Criston Cole drank. He sat by his own hearth, a flagon of sour Dornish red at his elbow, and drank until the room blurred. He tried to summon the shame. It was a page from a discarded book, its words smeared and meaningless. All he could feel was the hot, tight grip of the prince’s hand. The exact pressure of it. The look in that single, relentless eye. He drank until he staggered to his bed, falling into a thick, black sleep.
A few nights later, Criston woke to a warm, wet pressure.
Consciousness returned in a slow, sensual slide. A deep, humming ache pulled him from the depths. The room was dark, the fire dead. A figure was knelt over him in the blackness, a pale silhouette he knew by the shape of the shoulders, by the fall of silver-gold hair against his thighs.
Aemond’s mouth was on him, sucking his soft cock to hardness with a dreadful, focused patience.
Criston didn’t startle. A long, slow breath left him, fogging the cold air. He didn’t feel shame. He didn’t feel loathing. The wine was gone, and in its place was a cavernous, insatiable lust, hot and clear. It flooded him, straightening his spine against the mattress.
“You fucking cunt,” Criston rasped, his voice sleep-ravaged and thick.
His hand came up, not to push away, but to fist in Aemond’s hair. He gripped the back of the prince’s head, fingers tangling in the fine strands, and held him there. Aemond made a low sound, a vibration that traveled straight up Criston’s spine. He took it as encouragement.
He began to move his hips, shallow at first, then deeper. He fucked up into that hot, willing mouth. Aemond took him, his tongue working along the underside, his lips sealed tight. The wet, sucking sounds were obscenely loud in the silent chamber.
“That’s it,” Criston growled, his head thrown back. “Take it. Swallow it, you princely whore.”
His thrusts became rolling, deliberate plunges. He used his grip on Aemond’s head to set a brutal, perfect rhythm. He was using him, a living vessel for his need, and the freedom of it was intoxicating. This was not service. This was taking.
“Your mouth was made for this,” he panted, his hips snapping faster. “Better than your fucking hand. Christ, Aemond…”
Aemond’s hands were braced on Criston’s thighs, holding on. He gagged once, a wet, choked sound, but didn’t pull away. He took every inch, his nose pressed into coarse hair. The submission was absolute, and it lit a fire in Criston’s gut that burned away the last of his pretense.
The coil in his belly tightened, snapping. “I’m gonna come. Take it. Fucking drink it.”
He came with a raw, shouted curse, his body bowing off the bed. He pumped his seed in deep, pulsating waves down Aemond’s throat. He felt the swallow, the working of the prince’s jaw, the frantic pull to drain him. Pleasure, sharp and blinding, radiated from his core, leaving him panting and shaking desperately against the sheets.
Slowly, he loosened his death-grip on Aemond’s hair. His hand fell away, limp.
Aemond pulled off with a soft, wet pop. He stayed on his knees, breathing hard, a silver thread of spit and spend connecting his lips to Criston’s spent cock. He lifted his head. The moonlight from the high window caught the sapphire, making it glow like a malevolent star in the dark socket. His other eye was shadowed.
Criston met his gaze. No shame. No loathing. Only a mirror of his own bottomless hunger, reflected back in a prince’s face. The air between them crackled with it, spent but far from sated.
Without a word, Aemond got up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, turned, and left. The door closed with a click so faint it might have been a heartbeat.
Criston relaxed into the bed, the tremors of his release still dancing along his nerves. The scent of sex—musky, salty, deep—filled the room. He stared at the canopy, a slow smile curving his torn lips. He felt clean. He felt owned. And for the first time in years, he felt perfectly, horrifyingly powerful.