Chapter 6: The Prince's Shame
The smell of him was still on her skin, beneath the lavender water. Alicent sat by her cold hearth, a blanket around her shoulders, staring at the grey ashes. Her knees throbbed, a dull, persistent ache from the rough carpet. The memory of Otto’s placid gaze, watching her being fucked like a beast in a pen, was a brand on her mind. It was one thing to be used in secret. It was another to be reviewed.
The door crashed open.
It was not the soft click of Otto’s entrance. It was wood slamming against stone, a violent announcement. Aemond stood in the doorway, backlit by a torch in the hall. His silver hair was disheveled, as if he’d been raking his hands through it. His one eye was wide, the pupil blown so dark the violet iris was a thin ring. He looked unhinged.
He kicked the door shut. The bolt slid home with a final thunk. He didn’t speak. He crossed the room in three long strides, his boots heavy on the rushes. Alicent had only begun to rise, the blanket falling from her shoulders, when his hands were on her. They weren't gentle or calculating. They were desperate. He grabbed her upper arms, his fingers biting, and shoved her backward. She fell onto the bed, the breath knocked from her lungs.
He was on her before she could gather a thought. He climbed over her, his weight pinning her down, his knees forcing her legs apart. A wild, frantic energy radiated from him. He yanked her nightgown up to her waist, the fabric tearing at the hem. He fumbled with the laces of his own breeches, his hands shaking. He freed his cock. It was already fully hard, angry and red, a bead of moisture glistening at the tip.
“Aemond—” she managed, her voice tight.
He didn’t answer. He positioned himself, the head nudging against her entrance. She was still tender, slick from the aftermath of their earlier coupling and the quick, frightened arousal his violence provoked. He pushed. It was not the slow, claiming invasion of before. It was a single, frantic thrust, burying himself to the hilt with a choked, guttural groan.
The moment he was fully sheathed inside her, a violent tremor wracked his entire frame. He froze, buried in her heat, his body bowing over hers. A strangled sound escaped his throat.
“Fuck,” he gasped. “Fuck, fuck.”
He tried to move. He managed three short, ragged thrusts, his hips pumping in a jerky, uncoordinated rhythm. Then his control shattered. His back arched, his head thrown back, a corded tendon standing out in his neck. A high, wounded whine, utterly stripped of pride, ripped from his lips as his climax took him. It was a surrender, not a conquest. She felt the hot, urgent pulse of his release deep inside her, a flood that seemed to go on and on, spilling from him in a wave of helpless intensity.
He collapsed. His full weight came down on her, his face buried in the crook of her neck. His breath came in ragged, wet sobs against her skin. He was trembling. Not with passion, but with a shame so profound it had a physical texture.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, the words cracking. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t stop it. I saw his face. I saw him watching.”
Alicent understood. It wasn’t her that had unmanned him. It was the audience. The cold, evaluative stare of his grandsire had poisoned the well of his control, turning his possessive fury into this frantic, shameful spasm. Her arms, which had lain rigid at her sides, slowly lifted. She wrapped them around his trembling shoulders. One hand came up to cradle the back of his head, her fingers sliding into the damp silver strands.
“It’s alright,” she murmured, her voice a low, practiced hum. The Queen Dowager soothing a wounded knight. The mother comforting a son. The whore assuring her patron. All three were true. “It’s okay. Just stay right there, sweet boy. Don’t move.”
He made a pathetic, shuddering sound against her neck. He was still inside her, softening now, bathed in his own spend. Alicent shifted beneath him, just a subtle rock of her hips. Her hand slid down between their sweat-slick bodies. Her fingers found her own clit, already swollen, slick with his cum. She began to stroke herself in slow, deliberate circles.
Aemond whimpered at the movement. His oversensitive cock twitched inside her, a faint echo of its previous urgency. “Mother…” he breathed, the word a prayer and a curse.
“Shhh,” she soothed, her own breath starting to catch. She focused on the feeling, on building the rhythm, on conjuring a believable show. She thought of power. Not his, but the sliver of it she held right now, with him broken and pliant atop her. She thought of the crack inside her widening, and the strange, cold things that grew in such darkness. Her breathing hitched, turned to soft gasps. She arched her back, rubbing her clit harder, faster, her hips moving against his trapped length.
Her climax, when it came, was not the violent, unwelcome rip of before. It was a performed artifact, a well-crafted lie made physical. She shuddered beneath him, a series of convulsive tremors, and let out a shuddering gasp, squeezing her inner muscles rhythmically around his soft cock.
The effect on him was immediate. He moaned, a broken, grateful sound, as her body milked the last dregs of sensation from him. He clung to her, utterly spent.
She held him, her hand stilling, stroking his hair. Her lips brushed his temple. “My good boy,” she whispered into the silent, dark room.
He didn’t speak for a long time. The only sound was their slowing breath. Finally, he rolled off her, onto his back. He lay staring at the canopy above her bed, his eye stark and empty. The shame had hardened into something colder.
Alicent sat up, pulling her torn nightgown down. The sheets were damp beneath her. “He saw a prince claim what is his,” she corrected quietly, weaving the narrative. “The timing is irrelevant. The claim is what matters.”
Aemond turned his head to look at her. The sapphire eye seemed to drink the dim light. “Is that what it is? A claim?”
“What else would it be?” she asked, her voice perfectly neutral.
He didn’t answer. He curled himself back against her warm body.
“I leave at first light for the Trident,” he stated. “The Blackwood defiance ends in fire. I will be gone a fortnight, perhaps longer.”
Alicent nodded, the Queen Dowager receiving a military report. “The realm will be grateful for your strength.”
A ghost of a smile, cruel and thin, touched his lips. “Will you?”
“When I return,” he said, the words hanging in the lavender-scented air like a threat, or a promise, “you will be on your knees again. And you will not come until I permit it. Do you understand?”
It was not a question. It was the reinstatement of a chain, reforged in the heat of his shame, stronger and more brittle than before.
“I understand, my prince,” she whispered. They both fell asleep in each other's arms.
They both fell asleep in each other's arms. The silence was a blanket, heavy and suffocating, over the damp sheets and their tangled limbs. Alicent dreamed of corridors that ended in walls, of trying to scream with a mouth full of ashes.
A hand shook her shoulder, insistent and rough. Grey light seeped around the bed curtains. "Wake up."
Alicent’s eyes opened, gummy and bleary. Aemond was already dressed in riding leathers, his hair pulled sharply back. The sapphire caught the meager dawn, a cold, dead eye. He looked carved from stone, but the set of his jaw was too tight.
“I ride within the hour,” he said. His voice was flat, the regent’s voice. But his real eye flickered over her face, searching. “The Riverlands will not pacify themselves. It will be a long time.”
“I will pray for your safe return,” she said automatically, pushing herself up on her elbows. The ache between her thighs was a dull, familiar throb.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his back rigid. He did not look at her. “I want something. To take with me.”
“A token? Your father’s seal, or—” she began, the Queen Dowager organizing a campaign.
“No.” The word cut the air. He turned his head, and the vulnerability she saw there was more frightening than any fury. It was a raw, hungry need, stripped of all its armor. “I want to remember you like this. Not in a court gown. Not praying. As you are now.”
Alicent’s breath stilled. She waited.
His gaze dropped to the pillows, then back to her. “I want you to use one. For me. To make it smell like you. Like this you.”
Her mind understood before the words fully formed. A flush, hot and shameful, crept up her chest. She stared at him, at the boy beneath the prince, begging for a piece of her depravity to cling to. It was a command, but it sounded like a plea.
She did not speak. She pushed the covers back, the cool air pebbling her skin. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, her movements deliberate. She selected a pillow, one that smelled faintly of her hair, and dragged it toward the center of the mattress.
Aemond watched, utterly still, his knuckles white where they gripped his own knee.
Alicent climbed onto the bed, her back to him. She positioned the pillow beneath her. She hesitated for only a heartbeat, feeling the weight of his stare like a physical touch between her shoulder blades. Then she lowered herself, straddling it, the linen cool against her inner thighs. She pressed her cunt down against the fabric.
She began to move. Not a frantic, secret rhythm, but a slow, deep grind. She rocked her hips, pressing her swollen flesh down into the softness, simulating a slow, penetrating ride. The friction was immediate, a spark on tinder. She heard Aemond’s breath catch behind her, ragged and open-mouthed.
The sound of it, his helpless witnessing, ignited something. A performance became real. Her grinding grew more desperate, her hips rolling in earnest. She fucked the pillow with deep, claiming thrusts, the need building not from the fabric but from the knowledge of his eyes on her, from the control she wielded in this obscene display. She was putting on a show, and it was making her wet.
“Gods,” he whispered, a shattered thing.
She heard the distinct, slick sound of a hand on flesh. A rhythmic stroking. A pathetic, hungry whine followed it. He was touching himself, watching her. The image solidified in her mind: him, fully clothed, frantically jerking his cock while she rode a pillow for him. Her cunt clenched on nothing. A sharp, shocked gasp tore from her throat.
She came. It was a brutal, unpracticed peak that ripped through her, tearing a ragged cry from her lips. Her body bowed, shuddering, grinding down hard against the pillow as the waves pulsed through her.
Her cry seemed to break him. Aemond’s own sound was a choked-off roar. She felt the warm, sudden spatter across her lower back and buttocks, stripe after stripe of his release landing on her skin with a soft, wet patter.
Silence crashed back in, broken only by their harsh breathing. Alicent collapsed forward, pressing her forehead into the mattress, her body still draped over the pilfered pillow. She felt open, used, and powerfully, terrifyingly awake.
The bed dipped. Aemond leaned over her. His lips, surprisingly soft, pressed a kiss to the knobs of her spine, right between the drying streaks of his spend. His whisper was so faint she felt it more than heard it, a vibration against her sweat-damp skin.
“Thank you, Mother.”
Then he was gone. The chamber door closed with a quiet, final click. Alicent lay there, the pillow damp beneath her, her skin marked, listening to the distant calls of the grooms in the yard. She had given him a token to carry to war. It was a piece of her shame, and it was, undeniably, a piece of her power.