The air in the room was always suffocatingly thick, trapped between the scent of Kiera’s imported Tyroshian amber perfume and the sterile, damp cold radiating from the glass pane of the dormitory window.

For months, the four-pack of walls had been a psychological meat grinder.

Under the strict panoptic eye of Baelor, Valarr was kept chained to a distant, concrete men's wing, while Kiera was locked here.

Kiera—with her striking, chocolate-black skin, and a halo of neon-pink hair—was supposed to be his future.

She was the chosen bride, the corporate alignment, the immaculate public image. But the dynasty’s terror of a pre-marital campus scandal had turned their relationship into a series of desperate, feral thefts.

Every evening followed the same torturous calculus.

The lectures would end, and Valarr would slip inside, his pale ash blonde hair damp from the city mist, his heavy black overcoat dripping onto the linoleum.

He and Kiera would collide in the narrow space between the wardrobe and the mattress—hands roaming frantically over each other’s bodies, teeth clashing, harsh whispers scraped from the backs of their throats.

And all the while, she sat there.

{{user}}, the roommate of Kiera.

She hated the day they set that bubblegum head girl and Targaryen lad in her life.

A silent, unmoving fixture at the desk, her back a permanent wall, her ears perpetually buried beneath massive, sound-deadening headphones.

Kiera hated her with a volatile, exhausting passion.

“She’s a spy, Valarr. Or a stone,”

Kiera would hiss, her pink curls brushing his neck as her fingers dug bruisingly into his shoulder blades.

“I tried giving her money. I tried begging. She just stares through me and turns up her music.

I can’t do this anymore. I want to touch you without feeling like a specimen under a microscope.”

But hate was a lazy interpretation of a far more dangerous phenomenon. Valarr didn't hate the silence. Increasingly, he craved it.

The snapping point arrived on a Thursday when the sky was the color of a wet slate.

Kiera had stormed out an hour early for a mandatory, multi-campus seminar, her heels clicking a furious, resentful rhythm down the corridor.

Valarr remained. He hadn't left with her.

He sat on the edge of Kiera’s unmade bed, his angular jawline set, his piercing blue-grey eyes fixed on the girl at the desk.

For the first time in four months, her headphones were lying flat on the wood.

The silence in the room was deafening, amplified by the rhythmic tick-tick-tick of the radiator.

"You can stop pretending," Valarr said. His voice was a low, jagged baritone, stripped of the smooth, aristocratic veneer he wore for the public.

It cut through the quiet like a scalpel. "She's gone. You don't have to play the martyr today."

The roommate didn't flinch. Slowly, with a deliberate, agonizing grace, she laid her pen down.

When she turned her head, her gaze didn't hold the deference his family name usually demanded. It was cold. Clear. Piercingly analytical.

"I don't play roles, Valarr," she said, her voice a soft, velvet rasp that sent an involuntary shudder straight down his spine.

"I live in a room I pay for. And I watch a man tear himself into pieces every afternoon for a girl he only touches out of obligation."

Valarr stood up. The movement was sudden, violent enough to send Kiera’s expensive perfume bottles rattling against the vanity mirror.

He crossed the small expanse of the room in two long, predatory strides, his shadow completely eclipsing her desk lamp.

"You know nothing about my obligations,"

he snarled, leaning down until his face was inches from hers, the silver-white streak in his hair shimmering under the fluorescent bulb.

His fingers gripped the edge of her desk so hard his signet ring dug into the wood.

"You sit there like a ghost, judging things you aren't a part of."

"Aren't I?."

She stood up to face him, refusing to back down from the Targaryen heir.

The proximity was electric, a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure that made the hairs on his arms stand up.