Arianne had always known how to keep secrets.

She wore them like silk—light, fluid, clinging to her skin without weight. Men thought they knew her. They watched the sway of her hips, the wine on her lips, and thought her simple to read. Spoiled princess. Desert flower. But they didn’t know the quiet behind her laughter, or the name she whispered only when the sun had dipped beneath the dunes and the walls of the Tower of the Sun cast long shadows.

{{user}}.

Not a noble. Not a Dornish princeling. Not someone her father would choose, or her allies would praise. But theirs was not a tale for open air. It was a story spoken in fragments—behind shuttered doors, beneath thin sheets still warm from the day’s heat.

They are not mine to love, she told herself often. They are only mine to keep. For now.

When the sun set red over Sunspear, and the stone halls turned to copper and gold, she would find them. Always waiting. Always quiet.

Tonight, they were lying on her bed, an open scroll forgotten beside them, eyes half-lidded in the dying light. Arianne watched them from the door, her heart a tight thing behind her ribs.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come already,” {{user}} said, without looking.

“I always come,” she replied softly, stepping inside. “You only ever doubt me when I’m late.”

“I doubt the world,” they murmured. “Not you.”

She sat beside them, fingers finding their wrist. The pulse there was calm, steady, familiar.

How strange, she thought, how the world could twist itself around her—plots, spies, bloodlines, promises—and yet this still existed, untouched.

She bent over them, brushing her lips to their shoulder. Mine.

But only in the dark.

“I dreamed of you again,” they said. “But we were in the water gardens. And it was daytime.”

She smiled. “Blasphemy.”

“Perhaps.”

Arianne lay beside them, her cheek pressed to the curve of their neck. The scent of citrus clung to their skin. “If my father knew…”

“He would kill me.”

“No,” she said. “He would kill me for being foolish.”

They turned to her then, eyes full of the sadness neither ever voiced. “Are you ?”

Arianne hesitated.

She was her father’s heir. She was a weapon honed by disappointment and silence. Her love was not something she could wear openly, not when her very breath was weighed in courtly scale. But {{user}}, they were the one thing in her world not made of calculation.

“I am only foolish here,” she whispered. “Only with you.”

And for a moment, the weight of crowns and names slipped from her shoulders.

When the dawn came, she would dress again in silk and speak in riddles. She would flirt and flatter and play the game that had been hers since girlhood.

But tonight, in the hush between moonrise and morning, Arianne let herself love.

Even if no one could ever know.