The rain had not stopped in three days. Harrenhal stood half-shrouded in mist, its broken towers rising like the ribs of a fallen giant, held together only by the weight of history and the breath of ghosts. Somewhere within its cavernous halls, thunder echoed not from the sky but from the steady, deliberate tread of Ser Harwin Strong.

You had escaped again. Or perhaps—fled was the better word. You always fled.

The path you left behind was predictable only to him: a flutter of parchment, a cup tipped too neatly on its side, the faintest smell of ink and perfume curling like ivy down abandoned stairwells. You ran like a whisper, but he was always the silence that followed.

When he found you—half-wet beneath the awning of a collapsed archway, your cream shawl soaked and hanging like surrender—he didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

His presence filled the space like a tide. You could feel him in your breath before your eyes dared to meet his: tall and hulking in dark leather, hair damp and clinging to his brow, his eyes locked on you with a force so steady it might have passed for calm to anyone else. But not you. You knew that look. You had learned to measure its weight.

You sat with your knees drawn to your chest, indigo skirts mud-caked and caught on jagged stone, and you pretended—again—that this had all been a game. Another escape. Another storm. But Harwin wasn’t smiling.

He knelt before you slowly, as though praying. A knight unbuckling his own gravity.

And then, with those war-roughened hands, he reached—not to scold, not to drag—but to gather. One hand to the curve of your back, the other curling warm and firm at your nape, threading into your short hair like it was a vow. You were soaked and bristling with your own resistance, but he held you as if you were made of silk.

"You should be inside," he could have said. But didn’t. His silence was not empty—it pulsed with frustration, longing, restraint. All unspoken.

Instead, he pressed his brow to yours, and the rain slid off his shoulders in rivulets. You felt the heat of him then. That impossible, infuriating warmth—like being wrapped in the belly of a hearth while the world froze beyond the door. You hated it. You craved it.

Your long fingers, ink-stained and sharp at the joints, curled instinctively into the fabric of his collar. For all your escaping, for all your thorn-laced bravado, this was where you folded.

He exhaled against your cheek, rough and low. His thumb brushed a drop from the corner of your mouth—not water, but the faint tremble of surrender. You hated that he could find that so quickly. That he didn’t need to touch your heart to hold it still—he only needed to look.

And then, slowly, as though it wounded him, he lifted you. Carried you not like a burden, but like something already lost once and never again. Your arms wrapped around his neck without thinking. You told yourself it was for balance, but you both knew better.

The halls of Harrenhal swallowed you whole. Stone and silence and something unbearably tender between each heartbeat. He took you to your shared rooms. Lit a fire. Changed you out of your soaked clothes with hands that could command a warhorse but now unfastened your gown with reverence, with memory, with barely concealed ache.

You never apologized.

And Harwin never asked.

But that night, you lay beside him, your bones against the mountain of his body, your duck nestled at your feet, the warmth between you steady as a blacksmith’s forge.

He slept with a hand curled over your hip, grounding you like a knight would to his sworn post. And though the storm outside raged on, you felt no fear.