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Detective Aemond Targaryen looked entirely too comfortable in Officer Emerson Vale’s kitchen for a man who still technically did not live there.
He was barefoot on her tile, silver hair still damp from the shower and falling loose around his shoulders. The night shift had left shadows under his eye and a faint roughness in his voice, but somehow it only made him softer around the edges, sleep-warm and stubborn and unfairly beautiful in the pale morning light.
Emerson stood at the stove in uniform pants and a thin tank top, one hand on the handle of a skillet, the other reaching blindly for the coffee mug she had abandoned beside the toaster. Her radio was already clipped to her belt. Her vest sat heavy on the chair behind her. Breakfast was eggs, toast, and whatever fruit had not gone questionable in the back of her fridge.
Aemond came up behind her without making a sound, which would have been impressive if he had not done it every morning he slept over and frightened years off her life the first dozen times. This time, she only smiled when his arms slid around her waist and his chin dipped to her shoulder.
His lips brushed the side of her neck, slow and familiar.
“You know,” he murmured, voice still low from sleep, “this would be a whole lot easier if we just shared an apartment.”
Emerson hummed, fighting her grin. “Would it?”
“No more going back and forth,” he said, tightening his hold just enough to keep her there. “No more pretending I do not have a drawer in your dresser or you an entire closet at mine. Think of all the money we would save on gas.”
She laughed then, turning her head just enough that her cheek brushed his. “It would still be a financial hit for me, given how you like to use all of my expensive purple shampoo and leave-in conditioner.”
Aemond made a wounded sound against her skin. “You said it makes my hair look nice.”
“It does.” She flipped off the burner, turned carefully in his arms, and looked up at him. “That does not mean I intended to supply your entire hair-care routine.”
He pouted. Actually pouted. Detective Aemond Targaryen, the terror of Major Crimes, the man who could silence a briefing room with one look, stood in her kitchen with his hair in loose silver waves and his mouth tilted into something dangerously close to a sulk.
Emerson laughed again despite herself and reached up to smooth a strand away from his cheek. He looked exhausted. Adorable, though she knew better than to tell him that unless she wanted to watch him pretend not to enjoy it. Night shifts always wore him down. Not physically, not really—Aemond ran on discipline, black coffee, and sheer refusal—but they made him quieter, clingier in ways he would deny under oath. They barely saw each other when his schedule flipped, and it showed in the way his hands lingered at her waist.
“Em.” His expression shifted, the teasing fading into something steadier. “I am serious.”
There it was. The private version of her name, soft in his mouth and meant only for kitchens, unmade beds, whispered phone calls after midnight. Never the station. Never the squad room. Never where anyone else could hear it.
“I know you are.” Emerson’s fingers settled against the front of his shirt. “But we have talked about this.”
“We have talked around it.” His thumb moved once over her hip. “I am tired of sneaking out before sunrise. Tired of sleeping in two different places. Tired of standing three feet away from you at work and calling you Officer Vale.”
Her chest tightened. Damn him for saying it like that. Damn him for being right.
She kissed him because it was easier than answering, because he tasted like toothpaste and exhaustion and home, because for one brief second she could pretend the world outside her apartment did not exist.
When she pulled back, his eye stayed on her face.
“As soon as word gets out,” she said quietly, “everyone will talk. You are a detective. I am patrol. They will make it sound like I am sleeping my way into favors I never asked for.”
Aemond’s jaw tightened. “Who cares?”
“I do.” She held his gaze, even though it was the last thing she wanted to do. “I care. I worked hard to be taken seriously, Aemond. I will not have them looking at every call I get, every assignment, every good word from a superior, and wondering if it came from you.”
His expression softened by a fraction. With anyone else, it would have been invisible. Emerson knew him well enough to see the hurt beneath it.
“You know I would never let them—”
“I know.” She rose onto her toes and kissed him once, quickly, before he could argue. “But I am running late. We will talk about this later.”
Aemond did not look satisfied. He never did when she put the conversation away like a case file she was not ready to reopen. But he let her go, because beneath all that sharpness, beneath the arrogance and the control and the way people mistook silence for coldness, Aemond Targaryen loved her enough to wait.
The station was already loud by the time Emerson arrived.
Phones rang behind the front desk. Someone cursed at the printer near the report room. Coffee had gone bitter in the breakroom an hour ago, which meant half the precinct was drinking it anyway and pretending not to notice. Officers moved in and out of the bullpen with radios crackling at their shoulders, body cameras charging on desks, duty belts thumping against chair backs.
Emerson liked the noise. Most days, anyway. It gave her something to focus on besides the phantom heat of Aemond’s hands at her waist and the weight of the conversation she had left sitting unfinished in her kitchen.
She had just finished securing her vest when Officer Jace Velaryon dropped into the chair beside her desk with all the casual confidence of a man who had never met a boundary he respected.
“Morning, Vale,” he said, grinning too widely. “You look well-rested.”
Emerson did not look up from checking the spare magazine on her belt. “I got five hours and burned my toast.”
“Sure.” Jace leaned back, chair creaking. “That explains the glow.”
She finally looked at him. “Do not start.”
“I did not say anything.”
“You are always saying something.”
Jace only laughed, lifting both hands in surrender. Across the bullpen, near the glass-walled conference room, Detective Aemond Targaryen stepped out of a briefing with a folder tucked beneath one arm and his expression arranged into its usual unreadable line.
He had changed before coming in. Dark slacks, white shirt, black tie knotted with military precision. His hair was pulled back now, smooth and severe, giving no hint that less than an hour ago it had been loose around his shoulders while he argued about conditioner in her kitchen.
His gaze found hers immediately. Only for a second. Barely that. But it was enough for Emerson to feel it like a hand at the back of her neck. Then Aemond looked away, because they were at work and they were careful and he was better than anyone she knew at pretending not to want things.
“Officer Vale,” he said as he passed her desk. Professional. Cool. Distant.
Emerson lifted her chin. “Detective Targaryen.”
Jace made a sound into his coffee that was suspiciously close to a snort.
Emerson kicked his chair leg without looking at him.
Roll call started five minutes later. Sergeant Baratheon ran through assignments with his usual rasp, marker squeaking across the board as he paired units and rattled off problem addresses. Emerson stood near the back with Jace, arms crossed over her vest, listening as her sector was assigned to routine patrol with a few extra drive-throughs near the west end after a string of break-ins.
Aemond stood near the front with the other detectives, silent beside the whiteboard. He did not interrupt. He did not ask why Emerson’s unit had been put on that side of town. He did not object when Baratheon mentioned a possible stolen vehicle tied to the break-ins. He did nothing that anyone could point to and call personal. But Emerson knew the shape of his concern. She saw it in the slight narrowing of his eye; in the way his fingers tightened once around the folder in his hand.
When roll call broke, she headed for the garage before he could find a reason to cross the room. She almost made it to the hallway.
“Vale.” His voice stopped her more effectively than a hand would have.
She turned. “Detective?”
Aemond stopped at a professionally acceptable distance, close enough that she could see the exhaustion he had hidden from everyone else, far enough that no one could accuse him of anything but passing along information.
“Watch the west end,” he said. “The vehicle from the break-ins was last seen near Hightower and Sixth.”
“I heard the sergeant.”
His mouth flattened. “Then hear me.”
For one dangerous second, the hallway seemed to narrow around them. Emerson wanted to touch him. Wanted to smooth the tension from his jaw and tell him she would be fine. Instead, she adjusted the strap on her vest.
“I always do,” she said.
His eye dropped briefly, not to her mouth, not anywhere reckless, but to the vest across her chest. Then back to her face.
“Good.” It was nothing. A word any detective might say to any patrol officer before shift. But his voice softened around it, just enough that her stomach turned over.
Behind him, Jace passed through the hallway with two paper cups in hand and a grin he did not bother hiding.
“Subtle,” Jace said under his breath as he handed Emerson her coffee.
Emerson took the cup from him. “Get in the car.”
Jace walked backward toward the garage, still smiling. “Yes, ma’am.”
Emerson did not look back at Aemond as she followed. She could feel him watching anyway.
The first hour of patrol was uneventful enough that Jace decided to make it everyone’s problem. He complained about the coffee. Then the radio volume. Then the fact that Emerson refused to let him control the music.
“You have terrible taste,” he said from the passenger seat, one boot braced against the floorboard as the cruiser rolled through the west end. “It is genuinely impressive.”
“You listened to a sea shanty remix for three straight weeks,” Emerson said, checking her mirror before turning onto Hightower. “You lost your right to criticize anyone.”
“That was culture.”
“That was a cry for help.”
Jace laughed and tipped his head back against the seat. For a few minutes, it almost felt like any other shift. Grey morning light over wet pavement. Storefronts just opening. A woman walking a dog in a neon raincoat. The ordinary city waking up around them, unaware of all the sharp edges hiding beneath routine.
Then Jace sat forward. “Slow down.”
Emerson eased off the gas. “What have you got?”
He pointed through the windshield toward a dark SUV parked half a block ahead, tucked badly against the curb with one tire kissing the gutter. The rear plate was bent upward, but not enough to hide the first three characters.
“Partial matches the BOLO,” Jace said, already reaching for the radio. “Could be our break-in vehicle.”
Emerson’s hands tightened once on the wheel, then relaxed. Aemond’s warning slipped through her mind, low and close: Then hear me.
She pulled in behind the SUV, leaving space, eyes moving over the windows, the sidewalk, the narrow alley running beside the convenience store. “Dispatch, Unit Twelve. We have a possible match on the stolen vehicle near Hightower and Sixth. Requesting an additional unit.”
The radio crackled back. “Copy, Unit Twelve. Additional unit en route.”
For one breath, nothing happened. Then the door to the convenience store slammed open.
A man burst out backward, one hand gripping a duffel bag, the other shoved deep into the pocket of his hoodie. The clerk appeared in the doorway behind him, pale and shouting something Emerson could not make out through the glass.
“Hands where I can see them!” Emerson called, already out of the cruiser, one hand near her holster as she moved behind the open door for cover. “Police!”
Jace moved with her, radio at his mouth. “Dispatch, Unit Twelve. Possible robbery in progress. Suspect outside the store, Hightower and Sixth.”
The man froze for half a second. Then he ran. He cut toward the alley. Emerson went after him, boots striking hard against the pavement, pulse kicking up but mind clear. “Police! Stop!”
The alley swallowed the morning light. Dumpsters lined one wall. Old cardboard sagged in puddles. The suspect slipped on the wet ground, caught himself, and twisted back toward her.
Emerson saw the gun at the same time Jace shouted her name.
The sound cracked through the alley, impossibly loud.
For a second, Emerson did not understand why the world had dropped sideways. Then she hit the ground on her back, all the air punched out of her lungs, a white-hot burst of pain blooming across her chest beneath the vest.
Jace was over her so fast she barely saw him move. “Emerson! Emerson, talk to me!”
She tried to answer, but her body had forgotten how breathing worked. Her fingers scraped against the front of her vest and found no blood, only the hard, aching impact point and the torn fabric where the round had struck.
“Vest,” she managed, voice thin. “Vest caught it.”
Jace’s face went hard with relief and fury all at once. He keyed his radio with a shaking hand. “Dispatch, shots fired. Officer hit. I repeat, officer hit. Hightower and Sixth, alley east of the convenience store. We need EMS now.”
The radio hissed. “Copy, Unit Twelve. Officer hit. EMS responding.”
Emerson stared up at the strip of grey sky between the buildings and thought, absurdly, of Aemond standing in the hallway, looking at her vest like it was the only thing between him and ruin.
Aemond heard the first call from across the bullpen.
He was at his desk with three open case files spread in front of him, a half-empty coffee gone cold beside his keyboard, and a witness statement he had been reading for the better part of ten minutes without retaining a word of it.
His body had come back to work. His mind had stayed in the hallway, watching Emerson adjust the strap of her vest and tell him, I always do.
He hated that he had said anything at all. Hated more that he had not said enough. The west end had been a bad feeling under his skin all morning, the kind that made him check reports twice and linger too long near the radio, pretending he was only listening for updates on the stolen vehicle.
Across from him, Detective Daeron Targaryen balanced a pen across his knuckles and watched him with open suspicion.
“You are doing that thing again,” Daeron said.
Aemond did not look up. “Be specific.”
“The brooding.”
“That is my face.”
“No, this is worse than your face.” Daeron leaned back in his chair. “This is personal brooding.”
Aemond finally lifted his eye. “Do you have any intention of working today?”
Daeron’s mouth curved. “I am working. I am developing a theory.”
Before Aemond could answer, the radio on the desk beside them crackled.
“Dispatch, Unit Twelve. Possible robbery in progress. Suspect outside the store, Hightower and Sixth.”
Aemond went still. Daeron noticed. Of course he did. Everyone in this building noticed too much and said too little until it became convenient to do otherwise.
“That is Vale’s unit,” Daeron said, quieter now.
Aemond was already reaching for his jacket. “I know.”
The radio hissed again. Static. A clipped exchange from dispatch. Then Jace’s voice, sharper this time, cut through the bullpen.
“Dispatch, shots fired. Officer hit. I repeat, officer hit. Hightower and Sixth, alley east of the convenience store. We need EMS now.”
The bullpen stopped breathing.
Aemond did not remember standing. One second he was behind his desk. The next, his chair was overturned, his coffee was spreading in a dark line across a stack of reports, and every sound in the station had narrowed to the scream of blood in his ears.
Officer hit.
Not Emerson. Not his Em. Not the woman who had laughed into his mouth that morning and told him they would talk later, as if later were something the world owed them.
“Aemond.” Daeron’s voice came from somewhere behind him. Too close. Too far away. “Aemond, wait for confirmation.”
He did not wait.
He was moving before anyone could stop him, past startled uniforms and half-raised hands, through the bullpen where half the precinct had gone silent around the radio. Someone called his name. Someone else said, “Targaryen.” He heard none of it.
At the door, Sergeant Baratheon stepped into his path. “Detective, I need you to let responding units—”
“Move.” The word came out flat. Low. Not loud, but every officer within earshot turned.
Baratheon looked at him for one long second, and whatever he saw on Aemond’s face must have been enough. He stepped aside.
Aemond was halfway to the parking lot when the radio at someone’s shoulder crackled again.
“Officer Vale is conscious. Vest caught the round. EMS on scene.”
For the first time in his life, Aemond nearly went to his knees from relief. Nearly. Instead, he got into his car, started the engine with a hand that did not feel entirely steady, and drove.
By the time Aemond reached Hightower and Sixth, the block had transformed into controlled chaos.
Two cruisers angled across the street with their lights flashing red and blue against the wet pavement. Uniforms moved along the sidewalk, one officer stringing tape across the mouth of the alley while another spoke quickly into a radio. The dark SUV sat abandoned at the curb with all four doors closed and the rear plate still bent crookedly upward, looking almost harmless now that the damage had already been done.
Aemond barely registered any of it.
His car was still rocking on its suspension when he got out. Someone shouted his name. Someone else told him the scene was secure. He moved past them both, eye searching every face, every uniform, every flash of dark hair that was not hers.
Then he saw the ambulance. Its rear doors stood open. Emerson sat on the edge of the stretcher inside, vest unfastened and hanging heavy from one shoulder while a paramedic checked her pupils with a penlight. Her uniform shirt was wrinkled and dirty from the alley. One hand was pressed against the center of her chest where the round had struck, and her face had gone too pale beneath the stubborn set of her jaw. But she was sitting up. She was breathing.
She was glaring at Jace like she fully intended to live long enough to murder him. “I told you I can walk,” she snapped.
Jace, standing at the ambulance doors with blood on one sleeve that did not seem to be hers, folded his arms. “And I told you to shut up and let the medical professionals decide that.”
“You are enjoying this too much.”
“You scared ten years off my life. I am allowed to be annoying about it.”
Emerson opened her mouth to answer, but her gaze shifted past Jace and found Aemond.
The irritation left her face.
“Aemond,” she said softly.
He crossed the remaining distance in three strides. Jace wisely moved aside. The paramedic began to say something about space, but Aemond was already there, one hand braced against the ambulance frame, the other cupping Emerson’s face with a restraint that looked painful.
“Are you okay?” His voice was too quiet. Too controlled. It shook anyway.
Emerson covered his wrist with her fingers. “I am okay.”
His gaze dropped to the mark on her vest, to the bruising already beginning beneath the open collar of her uniform shirt, then snapped back to her face. “You were hit.”
“The vest caught it.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No,” she admitted, wincing when she tried to shift. “It feels like I got kicked by a horse. Possibly two horses. But I am breathing. No blood. No holes. Just bruised and annoyed.”
Aemond’s expression did not change, but something in his eye broke open. “Do not ever make me hear those words over the radio again.”
Her mouth softened. “I will do my best.”
“That is not good enough.”
“Aemond.” Her thumb brushed the inside of his wrist. “Look at me. I am right here.”
He did look at her. Really looked. At the dirt on her cheek, the tremor she was trying to hide, the stubborn lift of her chin, the living warmth of her beneath his hand.
Then he kissed her.
There was nothing careful about it. Nothing professional, nothing distant, nothing that could be explained away as relief between colleagues. Aemond kissed her like the world had narrowed to the space between his mouth and hers, like he had outrun every rule she had built around them and did not care who watched him tear them down.
For half a heartbeat, Emerson froze. Then her fingers tightened around his wrist, and she kissed him back.
The street went very quiet.
Then someone whistled.
Jace started clapping first. “Finally,” he said, loud enough for half the block to hear.
Aemond drew back by inches, breathing hard. His forehead nearly touched Emerson’s. For one suspended second, he did not seem to understand what had happened beyond the simple, essential fact that she was alive beneath his hands.
Then the clapping spread. A pair of uniforms near the police tape joined in. One of the paramedics laughed under her breath. Even Sergeant Baratheon, newly arrived and pretending very hard to study the scene log, made no attempt to stop the noise.
Emerson closed her eyes. “Oh no.”
Aemond turned his head slowly. The look he gave the gathered officers would have cleared an interrogation room in under five seconds. It did absolutely nothing.
“What?” Jace said, still clapping. “We are being supportive.”
“You knew?” Emerson demanded.
Jace blinked at her. “Vale. Please.”
One of the officers by the tape called, “Detective Targaryen once threatened to smash the coffee machine because it ate your dollar.”
Another added, “And he knows your lunch order.”
“And,” Jace said, pointing at Aemond, “he looks like someone kicked his dog every time you get assigned to a different sector.”
Aemond’s eye narrowed. “Careful, Velaryon.”
Jace grinned. “See? Protective boyfriend voice.”
Emerson groaned and covered her face with one hand, immediately regretting it when the movement pulled at the deep ache in her chest. Aemond noticed, of course. His attention snapped back to her with ruthless focus.
“Do not move,” he said.
“I am allowed to move my face.”
“Not if it hurts.”
The paramedic cleared her throat, smiling despite herself. “Detective, if you are done making my patient’s blood pressure spike, we do need to transport her for evaluation.”
Aemond did not take his hand from Emerson’s face. “I am riding with her.”
“You are not family,” Emerson said automatically, because panic apparently had not damaged the part of her brain dedicated to procedure.
Aemond looked at her then, still pale beneath all that composure, still furious with fear, still there. “Not yet.”
The street went quiet again, but this time no one laughed.
Emerson stared at him. Her chest hurt. Her pride hurt. Her entire body ached with the kind of pain that would be worse tomorrow. But beneath all of it, something warm and terrified and certain opened in her.
“Aemond,” she whispered.
His thumb moved once over her cheek. “Move in with me.” The words landed softer than they had in her kitchen, stripped of teasing now, stripped of pride. Not a demand. Not an argument. A plea he had barely learned how to make.
Emerson looked past him at the officers pretending not to listen, at Jace’s too-bright grin softening around the edges, at Baratheon still writing absolutely nothing in his scene log. Then she looked back at Aemond.
“Fine,” she said, voice rough. “But you are buying your own purple shampoo.”
There was one beat of silence.
Then Jace whooped so loudly the paramedic threatened to sedate him instead.
Aemond, for once, did not glare. He only bent his head and pressed one careful kiss to Emerson’s forehead, lingering there like he needed the proof of her beneath his mouth.
“I thought I lost you,” he said against her skin, so quietly only she could hear.
Emerson closed her eyes and held onto him with the hand that did not hurt. “I know,” she whispered. “I am right here.”
***
Three months later, Aemond Targaryen stood in their kitchen and decided, privately, that bliss sounded remarkably like the shower running down the hall.
The apartment smelled of butter, coffee, and the onions he had browning slowly in a pan. Morning light slipped through the windows and caught on the pale length of his hair, still loose around his shoulders because it was his day off and because Emerson had informed him, several times, that he looked less insufferable that way.
Her boots sat by the door beside his. Her jacket hung over the back of a chair. Her coffee mug waited on the counter, already filled the way she liked it. There was a peace in it that still caught him off guard sometimes—the ordinary evidence of her sharing his life, not secretly, not temporarily, not with one foot always turned toward the door.
He was just reaching for the salt when Emerson’s voice rang out from the bathroom.
“AEMOND TARGARYEN!”
He paused with one hand over the pan. There was a brief, ominous silence, broken only by the rush of water.
“Did you use the last of my shampoo and leave the empty bottle in here?”
Aemond looked toward the hallway. Then at the pan. Then at the trash bin, where he had absolutely not remembered to put the bottle because the bottle was, regrettably, still in the shower.
Slowly, despite himself, a smile stretched across his face.
He shook his head fondly and turned back to breakfast.
Bliss.