You should have left the tower door closed.

It was not your fault, not truly. The wrong corridor, the wrong time, the wrong silence before a moan. But when you opened the door, you saw them — golden, entwined like a mirror folded into itself. Cersei beneath him, his twin, his sister. His lover.

You didn’t scream. You couldn’t.

Jaime Lannister saw you standing there — and in that breathless moment, when most men would have leapt to cover shame, he only stared. There was no guilt in his eyes, only the slow, quiet narrowing of a predator’s gaze.

That moment changed everything.

He didn’t tell Cersei. She didn’t even know you had seen. But you knew he knew — and now, so did the game.

He never struck you. Not like a brute would. But the torment was slow, precise, and humiliating in a thousand subtle ways.

He began to corner you in hallways — too close, his breath on your neck. He would press his hand to your hip while speaking of innocent things. He’d call you “little bird” in the same tone he used with squires before a duel. The first time he touched your throat with his gloved fingers, he whispered, “It isn’t a crime to love your sister. Not in old Valyria. Perhaps you’re just too small-minded to understand love.”

The court whispered of your tension. They mistook it for infatuation. They thought you were lucky — the attention of the Lion of Casterly Rock. They didn’t know you were being devoured from the inside out.

Then came the night in the solar.

You had been summoned, some errand, some meaningless scroll. The fire was low. He was waiting — not armored, not armed, but shirt undone, and wine already poured. He offered you a cup, and when you refused, he drank from both.

“You should be flattered,” he said, circling behind you. “No one else knows our secret. Not even Cersei. She thinks I’ve left you alone.” His mouth brushed your ear. “But I haven’t. Not once.”

He dragged you down into his spiral slowly. Shame became flesh, and hatred became hunger. He would push you to your knees with a hand in your hair and then caress your face like a lover. He never said he loved you. He never said anything at all, most nights.

There were moments when you thought you saw something else behind his eyes — the boy who wanted to be Arthur Dayne, not a Kingslayer. But they passed like heat lightning — flashes and nothing more.

He made you swear to keep the secret. Not with threats. With touch. With the sound of Cersei’s laugh in the hallway beyond the door, and the weight of his hand on your bare skin. With the way he would say your name after he’d broken you again, as if he were trying it on for the first time.

He was beautiful. He was cruel. And he knew that the deepest violence was the kind you’d never admit.

You could have told the realm. You could have gone to Ned Stark, or Varys, or the Queen of Thorns. But you didn’t.

Because what scared you most was not that Jaime Lannister would kill you.

It was that he might not.