Ser Adrian Thorne had learned to read a city by its silences—but you were the one silence he could never interpret.

He stood at the window of his chambers overlooking the street below, armor half-removed, listening to King’s Landing breathe. The city never truly slept; it only shifted its weight. Somewhere beyond the Lion Gate, order held. Somewhere else, it frayed. He should have been thinking of patrol rotations, of grain wagons, of the subtle tremor that always preceded unrest.

Instead, he was thinking of you.

Alannys.

He said your name quietly, tasting it as he always did, letting it settle him. You did not belong to this city of soot and suspicion. You carried the Iron Islands with you—not the salt and the axe, but something wilder and less easily catalogued. Pale skin against crimson silks. Curly red hair spilling down your back like fire uncontained. You were soft where the world had taught him to be sharp, excessive where he had learned restraint, unpredictable in ways that both unsettled and consumed him.

You laughed too easily. At everything. The sound startled him every time, bright and misplaced in halls accustomed to whispers. He watched you laugh earlier that evening, wide hazel eyes crinkling, worry and wildness colliding in the same breath. You worried endlessly—about money, about weather, about things that had not yet happened—and then spent coin without thought the next moment, as if daring the future to object. He never stopped you. He could not. Control ruled every other part of his life; with you, he relinquished it willingly.

You smelled of spiced pumpkin and pine, warmth and forests and something faintly northern, and that scent followed you through his thoughts long after you left a room. It clung to his cloak when you touched him in passing, lingered on his hands. He noticed everything. He always did. Your wide shoulders beneath fine fabric. The curve of your hips. The way your colorblind gaze trusted others to name the world for you—and how that trust frightened him more than blades ever had.

Alannys. He said it again, because repetition was his habit, and obsession his quiet sin.

The marriage had been arranged, like all sensible things. Harlaw strength. Ten Towers. A bond that made sense to men who counted ships and influence. He had expected politeness. Distance. Mutual tolerance. What he received instead was you—unfriendly yet loyal, inconsistent yet fiercely present, pretending and playing at things as if the world were not always watching for weakness. You played tag with children in courtyards where spies lingered. You acted when it pleased you, wore masks with ease, and somehow never lost yourself in them.

He feared attachments. He had built his life on that fear. Yet with you, the fear sharpened into vigilance, not retreat. He learned your habits the way he learned patrol routes. How you laughed when nervous. How worry gnawed at you even in joy. How your loyalty was absolute once given. He called your name often—not to summon you, but to reassure himself that you were real, that this was not another vulnerability waiting to be exploited.

The city pressed in from all sides. Regents schemed. Power shifted. Adrian Thorne held the line as he always had—quietly, without spectacle. But when he turned from the window and crossed the chamber toward where you waited, all that discipline narrowed to a single point.

You were his only excess. His only indulgence. The one thing in King’s Landing he guarded not out of duty—but devotion.