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The house felt like a kingdom of silence.
Rhaenyra wandered from the kitchen to the living room, bare feet padding against cool hardwood. The afternoon sun poured through the tall windows, hot and golden, but no small voices called for snacks. No video game explosions echoed from the den. Her children were across the Narrow Sea, digging in the dry earth of Essos at a summer archaeology camp, living their best dusty adventures. And Daemon—her husband, her chaos, her anchor had kissed her forehead at dawn and left for a five-day business trip.
Five days. She had smiled, waved him off. A whole house to herself for the first time in years. She’d made a list. Binge that historical silly drama he always mocked. Eat ice cream for dinner. Read until dawn without anyone tugging the book from her hands and murmuring come to bed.
It sounded like freedom.
Until the night came.
The bedroom was too quiet. Rhaenyra slipped under the sheet, the cotton cool against her legs, and stared at the ceiling. She reached out. Her fingers touched nothing.
Strange. All day she had felt so capable, so adult. Now the dark pressed in and her body refused to settle. She closed her eyes and commanded sleep the way a queen might command a dragon, but sleep ignored her entirely.
Her hand slid to the empty side of the bed. The sheets held no warmth. No weight. She pressed her nose into his pillow anyway and breathed in, catching only a faint ghost of him.
Conditioned, she realized with a soft, bitter laugh. Her body had been conditioned. All these years, Daemon had been a furnace beside her, one leg thrown over hers, an arm clamped around her waist like she might vanish in the night. He snored, a low gravelly rumble that should have been annoying but had become her lullaby. He mumbled in his sleep, sometimes Valyrian curses, sometimes her name.
Without him, her nervous system simply didn’t know how to power down.
She tried logic first. It was just the first night. One single, solitary night out of more than ten years of marriage. She was a grown woman, a mother of three, a person who had birthed children,she had an impressive record of courtroom victories and stared down her own father’s disappointment without flinching. Surely she could manage eight hours of unconsciousness without her husband in the bed.
The bed. The damned, traitorous bed.
She started on her left side, knees curled slightly, the way she always began the night before Daemon reeled her in like a fishing net. But the position felt wrong without the wall of his chest behind her. She flopped onto her back and stared at the ceiling fan, watching the blades make lazy circles in the dark. The house hummed with the sound of the air conditioner kicking on, a sound she usually never noticed because Daemon’s breathing drowned it out.
She turned onto her right side. Then her stomach. Then her left side again, punching the pillow into a lumpy submission that did nothing to help.
Her body was searching. That was the problem. Her limbs were running a constant scan, reaching out for the missing part. Normally, sleep happened in a very specific configuration, one so familiar it had become muscle memory. She would lie on her left side, Daemon on his back, and she would drape herself over him like ivy on a wall. Her right leg would slide between his, calf hooking over his shin, ankle locking them together. Her arm would snake across his chest, fingers finding the steady thump of his heart. And the crucial part, the part her body was screaming for now—half her weight would settle onto him, her hip pressed into his flank, her ribcage aligned with his, her head tucked into the hollow of his shoulder. He bore her weight without complaint, without even waking, his body accepting hers as if she were an extension of his own anatomy.
And then his hand would find hers. Even in sleep, his fingers would lace through hers, thumb stroking slow circles over her knuckles, a rhythmic, unconscious caress that traveled up her arm and loosened every knot in her mind. The sound of his breathing—deep, powerful, a little rough at the edges would fill her ears like the ocean, and she would be gone, into dreams, gone into the safest place she had ever known.
None of that was here now.
She stretched her leg across the empty sheet. Cold. She pressed her palm flat where his heart should have been. Nothing but mattress. The silence was so thick she could hear her own pulse, a thin and lonely beat with no counterpoint.
She grabbed her phone from the nightstand.
12:47 AM.
No messages. Not that she expected any. Daemon was probably passed out in his hotel room, dead to the world, the infuriating man. He could sleep anywhere:planes, trains, the floor of their kids bedroom during a thunderstorm. She used to tease him about it, call him a lazy cat. Now the thought made her want to throw the phone at the wall.
She opened their message thread. The last exchange was from that afternoon. He had sent a photo of the most boring conference room she had ever seen, a long table surrounded by men in identical suits. Pray for me, he had written. She had replied with a string of laughing emojis and a heart.
Her thumb hovered over the keyboard.
She could text him. She could call him. It would be so easy. He would answer, she knew it with absolute certainty. He would grumble and tease her and then his voice would wrap around her like a blanket and she would finally, finally sleep.
But the thought filled her with a hot flush of something between embarrassment and defiance. It was absurd. It was one night. One night in over a decade. What kind of woman couldn’t survive a single evening without her husband’s breathing in her ear? She was not that woman. She refused to be that woman. She was a Targaryen, for god’s sake. Her ancestors had conquered continents. She could conquer eight hours of sleep.
She locked the phone and tossed it onto Daemon’s pillow.
1:23 AM.
She closed her eyes and tried to summon sleep by sheer force of will. Instead, her brain decided this was the perfect moment to replay every problem she had ever faced in her entire life. The time she failed her driving test at sixteen and cried in the bathroom. The fight she had with her father the week before her wedding, words she still wished she could take back. The terrifying emergency C-section with the twins, the beeping machines, the look on Daemon’s face when he thought he might lose her. Every awkward conversation, every mistake, every regret—her mind curated a greatest hits album of anxiety and set it on shuffle.
2:15 AM.
She kicked the sheets off. Too hot. She pulled them back on. Too cold. She rearranged the pillows into a poor substitute for a human body and tried to spoon it, but the pillow smelled like laundry detergent instead of cedar soap and skin, and she shoved it onto the floor in frustration.
2:58 AM.
She was crying now, just a little, tears of pure exhaustion and frustration leaking into her hair. This was ridiculous. This was pathetic. She was a woman who had built a career, raised children, survived loss and joy and everything in between, and here she was, weeping into a pillow because her husband was in a different time zone.
3:31 AM.
The bedroom felt like a cage. The walls pressed in. The darkness was no longer peaceful; it was suffocating. She tried the leg thing again, hooking her calf over a bundled-up corner of the duvet, but the duvet didn’t breathe, didn’t stroke her knuckles, didn’t anchor her to the earth. She imagined his hand, tried to conjure the phantom pressure of his fingers interlaced with hers. The mind was a powerful thing, she told herself. She could visualize. She could meditate. She could—
3:47 AM.
She couldn’t.
Rhaenyra sat up so abruptly her head spun. Enough. Enough of this spinning, this searching, this aching absence that had turned her own bedroom into enemy territory. The clock on the nightstand glowed 3:52 AM in accusing blue numbers. She had been lying there for nearly four hours, and she was no closer to sleep than when she started. Her eyes burned, her head throbbed, and her chest ached with a hollow, childish longing she was too tired to be ashamed of anymore.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. The hardwood was cool against her bare feet, grounding. She stood, swaying slightly, and grabbed the silk robe draped over the chair in the corner. The house was dark, but she knew its paths by heart, the creaky floorboard outside the twins’ empty room, the narrow turn of the stairs, the smooth banister worn from decades of hands.
The kitchen light was harsh and fluorescent when she flicked it on, and she winced, blinking against the sudden brightness. The coffee maker sat on the counter, gleaming and judgmental. Four in the morning was not coffee time. Four in the morning was deep-sleep time, REM-cycle time, the time when normal people were lost in dreams. But she was not normal people. She was a woman undone by an empty bed.
She filled the machine with water, measured the grounds, and waited while the sounds sputtered and hissed to life. The smell of coffee filled the kitchen, rich and bitter and comforting in a way the bedroom had refused to be. She leaned against the counter, arms crossed, watching the dark liquid drip into the pot.
Outside the kitchen window, the sky was still black, not even a hint of dawn. A single bird chirped, confused and premature. She felt a kinship with that bird.
When the coffee was ready, she poured a mug and wrapped her hands around it, letting the heat seep into her palms. She didn’t drink it right away. She just stood there, breathing in the steam, feeling the silence of the house settle around her like a different kind of blanket,not as warm as Daemon’s arms, not even close, but something she could bear.
She thought about calling him. The phone was still upstairs on his pillow, and the temptation pulsed through her like a second heartbeat. She imagined his voice, rough with sleep, saying her name. She imagined the teasing and the tenderness and the way he would stay on the line until she drifted off. Her fingers twitched against the warm ceramic of the mug.
But no. The night was almost over. The sky would lighten soon. She would survive this, and tomorrow—tonight, she would figure something out. Maybe she’d steal one of his shirts from the laundry. Maybe she’d play one of the voice notes he sent her, the one where he grumbled about traffic and called her my queen at the end. Maybe she’d swallow her pride and call him after all.
The gray dawn Rhaenyra had watched from the kitchen window turned into a pale gold morning, and she made a decision. If her body refused to sleep without Daemon, she would simply exhaust it into submission. A war of attrition, and she intended to win.
She started with coffee. Two cups, black, the caffeine hitting her empty stomach like a slap. Then she laced up her running shoes and attacked the long gravel path that looped around their property. The summer air was already thick with heat, the kind of wet warmth that clung to skin. She ran until her lungs burned and her legs turned to rubber, past the old oak tree with the rope swing, past the stone wall Daemon had rebuilt with his own hands two summers ago, past the small pond where the boys liked to catch frogs to scare their little sister with. She ran until sweat soaked through her tank top and her ponytail stuck to the back of her neck. When she finally stopped, bent over with her hands on her knees, gasping, she felt the satisfying ache of physical depletion. Good. Let the body be tired. Let it have no choice.
She showered, dressed in a pale blue sundress that made her eyes look less bloodshot than they actually were, and sat down in the window seat of the living room with the historical romance novel she had been slogging through for weeks. The house was silent, perfect for reading. No one interrupted her. No one asked what was for dinner or where their other sneaker was or whether she had seen the charger for the Nintendo Switch. She read a hundred pages. Then another hundred. The heroine was in the middle of a scandalous kiss when Rhaenyra turned the last page and closed the book with a satisfied thump. Finished. She couldn't remember the last time she had finished a book in a single sitting.
At noon, she drove into town to meet Elinda for lunch. The restaurant was a bright little place with outdoor seating and checkered tablecloths, the kind of spot where the waiters knew your name and the bread came warm in a basket. Elinda was already there when Rhaenyra arrived, seated at their usual table near the fountain, scrolling through her phone with the air of someone who had been early on purpose just to prove a point.
Elinda looked up as Rhaenyra approached, and her brown eyes went wide. She set her phone down slowly, her glossy brown hair swinging over one shoulder as she tilted her head.
"Okay," Elinda said, her voice flat with mock seriousness. "What truck ran over you?"
Rhaenyra slid into the chair across from her and reached for a breadstick. "Hello to you too."
"I'm serious. You look like death warmed over." Elinda leaned forward, squinting. "You did your makeup and everything, but those circles..." She gestured vaguely at Rhaenyra's face. "They're purple, babe. Purple. With your hair that white-blonde, you can't hide anything. You know that, right?"
Rhaenyra sighed and abandoned the breadstick. "I didn't sleep. Not a single minute. The whole night."
Elinda's expression shifted, the teasing concern melting into something softer. And then, to Rhaenyra's confusion, she smiled. A knowing, infuriating little smile that said she had seen this coming from a mile away.
"I knew it," Elinda said, sitting back in her chair with the satisfaction of a prophet proven right.
Rhaenyra blinked. "You knew what? That I wouldn't sleep?"
"That this would happen." Elinda waved a hand as if the whole situation were obvious. "Daemon leaves for the first time in forever, and you fall apart. I called it. I literally said to my husband, 'I give her one night before she's a complete wreck.' I was being generous."
Rhaenyra felt her cheeks warm. "Why would you say that?"
Elinda tossed her chestnut hair over her shoulder with a dramatic flourish. "Because you and Daemon can't exist apart from each other. It's honestly kind of ridiculous. You're like..." She paused, searching for the right word. "Addictes. You're each others drugs."
"We are not drugs." Rhaenyra crossed her arms, but the corner of her mouth twitched. "It's not like that. I just—the bed felt strange. That's all. It was one bad night."
"Uh-huh." Elinda was not convinced. "Do you even notice the things he does? At dinner parties, Daemon won't touch his food until you've finished your plate. Because he's holding your hand under the table. Every single time. I've watched it for years."
Rhaenyra opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. She thought about it. The memory surfaced unbidden,last month at the charity gala, Daemon's left hand resting in his lap, his right hand tangled with hers beneath the white tablecloth, his steak growing cold while she chatted with the mayor's wife. She had never asked him to do that. He just did.
"That's..." She faltered.
"Disgusting and sweet at the same time," Elinda supplied cheerfully. "I know. It's your brand."
Rhaenyra dropped her head into her hands. The fight drained out of her. When she looked up again, her expression was raw, the exhaustion cracking through her defenses. "I miss him so much it's embarrassing. I'm a pathetic woman. I survived law school. I survived my three kids under twelve going aways to summer camp for the last two years. I can't survive one night in an empty bed. What is wrong with me?"
Elinda's teasing smile faded into something genuine. She reached across the table and took Rhaenyra's hand, her grip warm and steady. "Nothing is wrong with you. You and Daemon just have a different level of relationship. It's not my level, and that's fine. I don't need to understand it." She squeezed once and then pulled her hand back, her eyes glinting with mischief again. "But if you want, I can wait until you finish your linguine and then hold your hand after. You know, just to tide you over."
Rhaenyra stared at her for half a beat, then burst out laughing. The sound surprised her, bright and genuine, cracking through the fog of exhaustion. She grabbed her cloth napkin and threw it at Elinda's face.
"Stop being ridiculous," she said, still laughing.
Elinda caught the napkin easily and placed it on the table with exaggerated dignity. "I'm serious. It's a limited-time offer. The Elinda Hand-Holding Experience. Very exclusive."
"Eat your salad," Rhaenyra said, but she was smiling now, and some of the weight had lifted from her chest.
The linguine was good. The company was better. By the time they hugged goodbye in the parking lot, Rhaenyra felt almost human again. Almost.
At home, the afternoon crawled by. She worked for a few hours going through emails and reading documents for the cases for the next week. She reorganized the spice rack alphabetically, which was a new low. She and Daemon exchanged messages throughout the day—short, scattered things. A photo of a sad-looking salad he had eaten for lunch. A joke about one of his colleagues falling asleep during a presentation. A string of heart emojis that made her smile at her phone like a teenager. He was too busy for a real call, and she understood. Tonight was also the night the kids were scheduled to video call him from camp, and she didn't want to steal a single second of that time. The kids needed to tell him about their pottery shards and their bug bites and their newfound hatred of camp food, Visenya was a very much daddy’s girl and Rhaenyra recognized her kid doesn't know when to stop. She could survive one more night without his voice in her ear.
She had a plan. Tonight would be different. The exhaustion from her sleepless night and her morning run and her afternoon of busywork was finally settling deep into her bones. Her eyelids drooped as she climbed the stairs. Her limbs felt heavy, liquid. Good. The tiredness would be her friend. It would knock her out cold, no husband required.
She took a long, hot shower, letting the water beat against her shoulders until her skin turned pink. She pulled on one of Daemon's old t-shirts the gray one with the faded university logo and a pair of soft cotton shorts. She brushed her teeth. She turned off every light in the house except the small lamp on her nightstand.
The clock on her phone read 9:00 PM. A perfectly reasonable hour. A responsible hour. She had done everything right. She had run until her legs ached. She had laughed with a friend. She had finished a book and eaten pasta and drunk enough water to drown a fish. Her body was a temple of exhaustion, and sleep was the god she intended to worship.
She pulled back the covers and climbed into the enormous, empty bed.
The pillow was cool against her cheek. The sheets smelled like fabric softener. The silence wrapped around her like a promise.
She closed her eyes.
And waited.
But this time she would not suffer again.
She grabbed her phone from the nightstand. The screen glowed 12:47 AM. No messages. She typed with her thumb.
Rhaenyra: Are you awake?
The reply came before she could set the phone down.
Daemon: For you? Always.
Then the screen lit up with an incoming call. She accepted, pressing the phone to her ear.
“Can’t sleep?” His voice was low, a little rough. She could picture him in some sleek hotel room, hair mussed, probably shirtless.
“The bed is too big,” she whispered. “It’s stupid. I thought I’d love the space.”
Daemon chuckled, a dark velvet sound. “You hate space. You sleep like a starfish trying to absorb me into your body.”
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do. It’s my favorite thing.”
She laughed, and the tightness in her chest loosened just a little. She burrowed deeper under the covers. “Tell me something boring. Something about your day.”
He told her about a meeting that droned on for hours, about a man with a ridiculous mustache who used the word synergy twelve times. His voice wrapped around her like a heavy blanket. She closed her eyes and let it wash over her, not really listening to the words, just floating on the sound.
“You still there?” he asked after a long silence.
“Mm.” She was too tired to form a real reply. The phone was warm against her cheek.
“Go to sleep, my queen,” he murmured. “I’m right here. Not going anywhere.”
She wanted to say I love you, but the words melted on her tongue. The last thing she registered was the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing through the speaker, a distant, perfect echo of the sound she missed most.
Morning arrived with sunlight sharp and unforgiving. Rhaenyra blinked awake to find her phone still clutched in her hand, screen dead. She fumbled for the charger and saw the call log when it powered back on.
Call ended: 5 hours, 17 minutes.
A ridiculous smile spread across her face. She felt a little silly, a grown woman who couldn’t manage to sleep alone. But the smile didn’t fade.
The third night, she didn’t even pretend to try. She showered, pulled one of Daemon’s worn T-shirts, the black one that still held a hint of him—and climbed into bed with her phone on the pillow. When he called, they talked about their day. The camp had sent photos of the kids covered in dirt, holding up shards of pottery. They laugh together about missing them but thankful for another person that would be breaking apart Viserys and Aegon's fights, the twins could argue for hours.Daemon complained about the hotel coffee. She told him she’d eaten an entire pint of raspberry gelato for dinner and felt zero shame. He laughed, that sharp, genuine laugh she could feel in her bones.
She fell asleep to the sound.
The fourth night, it was a ritual. A lifeline. The house was no longer an echoing cave; it was a quiet space where his voice lived in the dark. She learned that if she curled on her side with the phone cradled near her ear, she could almost pretend his chest was behind her, breath warm against her nape.
Before she could fall asleep, he said, “One more sunrise and I’m on a plane.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
She slept dreamlessly, the best sleep all week.
The afternoon he was due home, Rhaenyra paced. She checked the flight tracker seventeen times. She considered changing her outfit, then decided against it because she was already wearing his other favorite shirt. When she heard the key turn in the front door, she didn’t walk,she ran.
Daemon dropped his bag just in time to catch her as she launched herself into his arms. His laughter rumbled against her ear, real and present and not through a phone speaker. “Well, hello to you too.”
She pulled back just enough to look at his face, his sharp silver-blonde hair disheveled from travel, his violet eyes warm with something smug and tender. “Missed me a little?”
“Shut up,” she said, and kissed him. His smell engulfed her, his taste sooking her mouth, her breath almost gone when he finally let go of her.
They didn’t make it to dinner. They barely made it to the couch, tangled together in a heap of limbs, Daemon had worshipped her body, kissing every single part of her until she was a complete soaking mess on his hand fortunately she repaid the favor, sinking into him with profound dedication, they made love for hours.The sun sank low outside, painting the room in shades of orange and rose. Rhaenyra traced the line of his jaw with her fingertips, feeling the solid reality of him.
That night, in their own bed, she curled into her usual spot—half on top of him, leg hooked over his, cheek pressed to the steady drum of his heart. Daemon’s arm locked around her waist, anchoring her in place. The mattress was no longer vast. The silence was no longer empty.
“Finally where you belong,” she whispered into the dark.
He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Go to sleep, wife. I’ve got you.”
And for the first time in five days, sleep came instantly, the way it was always supposed to.