Chapter Text
Jaime Lannister had learned, over the past year and a half, that Sophey Brackwell was at her most dangerous when she went quiet.
Not silent. Never that. Silence implied absence, and Sophey was never absent from a room. She noticed too much for that. Even when she said nothing, her attention moved with sharp, practiced precision: the door, the hallway, the man in the corner who had been nursing the same pint for too long, the woman at the bar whose shoulders had climbed to her ears when her companion leaned too close.
Quiet, with Sophey, was not empty. Quiet was calculation.
It was one of the reasons he liked working with her.
Liked was too small a word, but Jaime had grown disciplined about not naming things before they were welcome. Especially not with her.
He had known he was in love with her for a year and a half, though it had not arrived as some grand revelation. It had accumulated instead: the way she remembered the names of frightened witnesses, the way she could dismantle a suspect with three polite questions, the way she laughed only when she forgot someone might be trying to earn it. By the time Jaime recognised the shape of the thing, it had felt less like falling and more like finally admitting where he had already landed.
So he had done what he did best when something mattered: he had made a campaign of it and pretended, very badly, that it was casual.
Coffee appeared on her desk on mornings after overtime, always exactly how she took it, though he claimed coincidence with an insulting lack of shame. If they finished late, he suggested food with the air of a man magnanimously rescuing himself from starvation, and somehow it became noodles at midnight, breakfast rolls after night shifts, pub chips neither of them admitted counted as dinner. He learned which places she liked because she stopped arguing about going there.
He had become shameless about errands that were not errands. If he was going to the vending machine, he came back with the crisps she liked and acted offended when she accused him of memorising her weaknesses. If rain started before the end of shift, he somehow had an extra umbrella in his car even though Jaime Lannister had never willingly prepared for weather in his life. When her boiler broke in February, he had dropped round with takeaway and a toolbox, then spent forty minutes insulting the pipes until the hot water returned out of spite.
He learned what made her stay. Not pressure. Never pressure. Practicality worked better: I need a second opinion on this file became coffee on a Sunday; I refuse to eat alone became curry after court; Bronn will be unbearable if I go to the pub by myself became two pints in the back booth where Sophey could see the door and Jaime could pretend he had not chosen the table for exactly that reason.
There were rules to it, though neither of them had written them down. Jaime invited; Sophey decided. Jaime paid sometimes, and she paid others, because she had once gone very still when he tried to make a habit of covering the bill. He never arrived at her flat unasked. He never touched the small of her back to guide her through a crowd. He never called their evenings dates, even when they looked perilously like dates from every angle but the name.
The closest he had come was one October night outside a pub, when she had lingered beside his car with her hands tucked into the sleeves of her coat and looked at him like she was trying to be braver than history allowed. Jaime had wanted to kiss her then. He had wanted it badly enough that he still remembered the shape of the streetlamp light on her cheek. Instead, he had asked whether she wanted a lift home or five more minutes of pretending the night was not over. Sophey had chosen five more minutes.
Five minutes had become twenty. Nothing had happened, and somehow everything had. After that, Jaime had understood the pace: slow enough that she never had to flinch from it, steady enough that she could trust it would still be there when she looked back.
Somewhere along the way, work had stopped being the only excuse. They met for a pint after court dates, sat across from each other in cafés on rest days under the pretence of comparing notes, watched football in pubs where neither of them cared enough about the match to justify staying until last orders. Jaime wooed her in inches: never flowers, never declarations, never anything that demanded an answer. Just presence. Consistency. The door left open.
Sophey had known. Of course she had known. She was too sharp not to notice when a man learned her coffee order, her preferred booth, the takeaway she pretended not to crave after difficult shifts. For about a year now, she had met him halfway and no further: accepting the coffee, showing up at the pub, texting him a photo of a terrible sandwich because he had once called her lunch choices a cry for help. She went along with the wooing, sometimes even nudged it forward, then drew back the moment it began to look like something that might need a name.
Jaime had his suspicions about why. Not details. Not proof. Only the shape of a closed door: the way she went still when other men crowded too close, the way dating jokes made her smile vanish, the way she could flirt with him for three seconds and then retreat behind professionalism as if she had touched something hot. He did not know what had burned her. He only knew better than to reach for the scar before she showed it to him.
Still, there were moments when he thought she might be reaching back: a tea left on his desk after a rough interview, no note, no fuss, made exactly how he took it; a saved seat in the corner of the pub before he arrived; her shoulder brushing his in crowded doorways when there had been room enough to avoid it. Once, after a child witness had finally been collected by family, Sophey had texted him three hours later: You did well with him. She had followed it immediately with: Don’t be smug. Jaime had kept both messages.
He had thought about the job too, because wanting her did not give him the right to make work unsafe or complicated. If she ever chose him properly, he would request a new partner assignment before anyone could use their relationship against her. He would not put her in a position where saying yes to him made it harder to say no at work. That, too, was part of loving her quietly.
Their shift had been long enough to make his shirt cling unpleasantly between his shoulder blades and his patience thin around the edges. England, in Jaime’s opinion, had no business pretending it knew how to do summer. The whole country seemed to turn damp and irritable the moment the temperature climbed above tolerable, and the station had been no better: sluggish computers, bad coffee, and too many people pretending an ancient desk fan counted as climate control.
Sophey had endured it with the expression of a woman personally betrayed by the sun. “If I die of heatstroke,” she said, falling into step beside him as they left the station, “I want it noted in the official record that management did this.”
Jaime glanced down at her. “I’ll make sure the coroner writes ‘murder by inadequate ventilation.’ Very dignified.”
“There’s nothing dignified about sweating through my uniform.”
“No,” Jaime said, letting his gaze flick over her for the briefest moment before he pulled it back to the pavement ahead. “There isn’t.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, either because she had caught the look or because she had decided to blame him for the weather by proximity. With Sophey, both were possible.
They had worked together long enough that he knew the shape of her moods. He knew when she was amused and pretending not to be, when she was irritated but not truly angry, when she needed a moment of quiet after a call and when she needed him to keep talking until the worst of it passed. He knew the difference between ordinary vigilance and the moments when her attention sharpened into something closer to alarm.
He knew all of that, and he knew enough not to mention it. Sophey had relaxed with him slowly, not because he had talked her into it, but because he had stayed consistent long enough for her to believe in the shape of him. The distance was still there sometimes. The carefulness. The invisible line she stepped over only when she chose to.
Now she bumped her shoulder lightly against his arm as they walked, a small, careless contact she would once have avoided. Jaime did not smile. He deserved a medal for it.
“You’re very smug for a man whose hair is losing the fight against humidity,” she said.
“My hair has never lost a fight in its life.”
“It’s surrendering as we speak.”
“Tactical retreat,” Jaime corrected. “Very different.”
Sophey laughed under her breath, and Jaime tucked the sound away with all the other things he had no right to want as badly as he did.
They were halfway down the street, cutting past the glossy front windows of a café that had given up pretending its iced coffee was worth four pounds, when Sophey stopped.
At first, Jaime thought she had seen a collision coming.
His body reacted before his mind caught up: one half-step forward, shoulder angling slightly in front of hers, eyes sweeping left to right. Traffic crawled at the lights. A cyclist swore at a taxi. Two teenagers argued over a cracked phone screen near the bus stop. Nothing immediate. Nothing loud. Nothing moving toward them.
Still, Sophey did not move.
“Brackwell?” he said quietly.
She heard him. He could tell by the tiny catch in her breath, by the twitch of her fingers near the seam of her trousers. But she did not answer, and when Jaime turned his head to look at her properly, the last of his amusement drained away.
All the colour had gone out of her face.
Not the controlled pallor of someone who had clocked a messy scene or a dangerous suspect. This was different. This was bloodless. Hollowed out. Her gaze had fixed on something across the street, and for one brutal second Jaime had the sickening sense that she was no longer standing beside him at all.
He followed her stare.
The man stood in the narrow shade of an awning outside a shop, hands in his pockets as though he had all the time in the world. He was a few years younger than Jaime, perhaps, neatly dressed despite the heat, with pale eyes and a smile that made no attempt at warmth.
He was not looking at Jaime. Every part of him was aimed at Sophey. Jaime knew enough men to recognise possession when it dressed itself up as patience.
The man’s smile widened by a fraction, as if he had been waiting for her to see him properly. As if her fear was not an accident, but the point.
Something cold moved through Jaime, clean and immediate. He wanted, with a clarity that disturbed even him, to cross the street and wipe that smile off the man’s face. Instead, he took one slow breath and turned slightly, blocking Sophey from view.
“Sophey,” he said, lower now. Not sharp. Never sharp. “Look at me.”
For a moment, she did not seem capable of it. Her eyes remained locked past his shoulder, wide and glassy, her breathing shallow enough that Jaime’s own chest tightened in answer.
He shifted again, not touching her, just taking up more space between her and the man across the street. “Sophey. With me.”
Her gaze snapped to his at last.
There she was. Terrified, yes. White-faced and trembling in a way he had never seen from her, yes. But there. Present enough to hear him.
“We’re going to walk,” Jaime said. “Not run. Not give him a show. Just walk with me.”
Her mouth parted, but no sound came out.
“Can you do that?”
Sophey blinked once. Then again, slower, as if the movement cost her something.
“I—” Her voice cracked on the single syllable. She swallowed, hard enough that he saw it. “I don’t know.”
The honesty of it hit him harder than bravado would have. Jaime nodded as though she had given him a perfectly ordinary answer. As though they were discussing whether the deli on the corner was still open, not whether her legs would obey her with that man smiling across the street.
“All right,” he said. “Then we’ll do one step first.”
He angled his body closer to hers, still careful not to touch. Every instinct in him screamed to take her hand, to put an arm around her shoulders, to gather her against him and move her bodily out of the man’s line of sight. He ignored every one of those instincts.
“Left foot,” he murmured. “Just that.”
Her eyes flicked down, then back to his face. For one awful second, nothing happened. Then her left foot shifted forward half an inch.
“Good,” Jaime said, and kept his voice so steady he might have been talking a witness through a statement. “Again.”
This time, she moved when he did. Not smoothly. Not naturally. Her shoulders were rigid, her hands curled into fists, and he could feel without touching her that every part of her wanted to fold inward. But she walked.
Jaime matched her pace exactly, close enough to shield, far enough not to trap. He kept his gaze forward, because if he looked back at the man again, he was not certain what his face would give away.
Behind them, nothing happened. That was worse. No shout. No footsteps. No attempt to follow them across the pavement. Only the memory of that smile pressing between Jaime’s shoulder blades, patient and cold.
“Breathe,” Jaime said.
“I am.”
“Badly.” It was a risk, the dry edge of it. But Sophey made a sound that might, in kinder circumstances, have become a laugh.
He took it as permission to keep talking.
“You know,” Jaime said, as if they were still only discussing the weather and his allegedly defeated hair, “if you collapse on me, I’m going to have to do paperwork.”
Sophey’s mouth twitched without quite managing to become anything. “Tragic for you.”
“Deeply. I’d have to write that my partner ignored a direct order to continue breathing properly.”
“Wasn’t an order.”
“It had better not be,” he said. “You hate those.”
That got her eyes to him again, briefly. Still too bright. Still fixed with fear around the edges. But there was recognition there, a thread of herself catching on the familiar shape of him needling her when everything else had gone wrong.
Good, Jaime thought. Stay with me. Hate me a little if you need to. Just stay with me.
At the next corner, he did not take the direct route back toward the station. Too obvious. Too exposed. Instead, he steered them left with nothing more than a shift of his shoulder and a quiet, “This way.”
Sophey followed. That, more than anything, put a knot in his throat. Sophey, who questioned everything on principle. Sophey, who would argue with a satnav out of spite. Sophey, who had once made a superintendent visibly regret using the phrase “because I said so.” She followed him without asking where they were going. He hated the reason for it.
The side street was narrower, shaded by the backs of shops and the overhang of flats above them. It smelled faintly of hot brick, bins, and old rain trapped in the gutters. Not ideal. Nothing about this was ideal. But it was out of the man’s direct line of sight, and that mattered.
Only when they had turned again, putting another corner between Sophey and that smile, did Jaime let himself glance back.
No one followed.
Jaime did not find that comforting.
He guided her toward the recessed doorway of a closed bookshop, far enough from the main road that the noise softened to a dull, distant rush. Then he stopped, turned so his back was to the street, and gave her the shelter of his body without closing her in.
“You’re not going back that way,” he said.
Her head snapped up. Panic flared again, quick and sharp. “Jaime—”
“Not an order,” he said at once, softer. “A recommendation from someone who likes you alive and not cornered on the pavement.”
For a second, Sophey only stared at him. Then she looked away, jaw tightening as if she could force herself back into shape through sheer stubbornness. Jaime knew that look. He had seen it after brutal interviews, after ugly domestics, after the kind of calls that left even seasoned officers quiet in the car afterwards.
“I’m fine,” she said. It came out too fast. Too flat.
Jaime did not call her a liar. He only lowered his voice. “You don’t have to be fine with me.”
That was worse, somehow. Her face crumpled for the smallest, most controlled fraction of a second before she got hold of it again.
“Who is he?” Jaime asked.
She shook her head once.
“Sophey.”
“Don’t.” The word came out small and furious. “Please don’t do that voice.”
He stopped immediately. Not because he understood what she meant, not fully, but because whatever that voice had sounded like to her, it had not helped.
“Alright,” he said. “Then practical questions. Is he armed?”
Her laugh was breathless and awful. “I doubt it. Not that he needs to be.”
Jaime’s hand flexed at his side. He made it still. “Does he know where you live?”
Sophey opened her mouth. Nothing came out. That answer, at least, was clear enough.
“Name?” he asked.
She shut her eyes. “Ramsay Bolton.” The name sat between them like something rotten.
“Ex?” Jaime asked, though he already knew enough from her face to hate the answer.
Sophey nodded once, sharp and miserable. “I left two years ago.”
Left. Not broke up with. Not ended things.
Left.
Jaime kept very still.
“There was a restraining order,” she said, each word scraped thin. “Two years. It ran out last month. I thought—”
She gave a humourless little breath. “I thought moving across the country would make me too inconvenient to bother with.”
Jaime wanted to say a dozen things, most of them useless. He wanted to ask why she had never told him, which was selfish. He wanted to promise Ramsay would regret coming near her, which was satisfying and not what she needed. He wanted to touch her, which was dangerous if it was for him rather than for her.
So he asked the question that mattered. “Do you feel safe going home?”
Her eyes opened. For a moment, Jaime saw the answer before she buried it: no, no, absolutely not. Then she swallowed it down and squared her shoulders.
“I’m not a civilian,” she said. “I can handle myself.”
Jaime heard the steel in it. He also heard the crack beneath. “I know you can,” he said.
That, too, seemed to hurt her.
Her face twisted before she could stop it, shame rising fast enough to drown out everything else. “Do you?” she asked, and the bitterness in her voice was not aimed at him, not really. “Because I’m standing here shaking in a doorway because my ex smiled at me across the street.”
“Because he found you,” Jaime said.
“Because I let him,” she snapped, then flinched at her own words as if they had come from somewhere outside her.
Jaime went very still.
“No,” he said.
She laughed once, sharp and hollow. “No? That’s it?”
“That’s where we start,” Jaime said. “With the part where none of this is something you let happen.”
Sophey dragged a hand over her mouth, then dropped it before it could tremble where he could see. “I should have known better. That’s the job, isn’t it? Seeing patterns. Reading people. Not missing the obvious until you’re living with it.”
“He made sure you didn’t see it until he wanted you to,” Jaime said. “That’s not the same thing.”
Her eyes shone, and she looked away from him as if his certainty was something she could not bear to be offered. “You don’t know that.”
“I know enough.”
“You know I’m an idiot.”
His answer came so quickly it nearly cut her off. “No.”
“Weak, then.”
“No.”
“Pathetic?”
“Sophey.”
She flinched again, but this time he did not think it was the voice. This time, it was the way her name sounded in his mouth, too gentle for the terrible things she was saying about herself.
Her breath hitched. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m something broken.”
The words landed in him heavily, because he suspected they were not the whole of it.
“I’m not,” Jaime said. “I’m looking at you like someone hurt you and then had the arrogance to come back.”
Her mouth trembled despite all her effort to stop it. “And now you know.”
There it was. The second fear beneath the first. Not Ramsay across the street. Not the restraining order. Not even the possibility that he knew where she lived. The fear that Jaime would know and step back.
“Yes,” he said carefully. “Now I know.”
She closed her eyes, and he watched her brace for impact. It broke something careful in him.
“And I am still here.”
Sophey’s eyes opened. She looked at him as if she did not know what to do with that. Not relief. Not yet. Relief would have asked too much of a body still braced for the blow. But something in her face shifted, the smallest fracture in the certainty that had been swallowing her whole.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Jaime said. “You don’t have to explain all of it now. But I need you to hear me when I say this changes exactly one thing.”
Her throat worked. “What?”
“I know what direction to watch.”
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Sophey gave a shaky breath that almost became his name.
Jaime wanted to reach for her then. More than before, somehow. Not because she looked fragile, but because she looked like she had been carrying something too heavy for too long and had forgotten what it felt like to set even a corner of it down. He kept his hands to himself.
“Practical question,” he said again, because practicality had steadied her once and might do it again. “Can you think of any way he could have your address?”
She stared past his shoulder, not at the street this time, but inward. “Electoral register, maybe. A file. Someone from before. I don’t know.” Her voice thinned. “If he found me here, he could have found that too.”
“That’s what I think too.”
Sophey pressed her lips together, then nodded once. Good. A nod was something. A choice, however small.
“I don’t want you going home tonight,” Jaime said. Her shoulders stiffened. He caught it and corrected himself before the fear could harden. “No. That came out wrong.”
He took half a step back, enough to give her space to breathe around him. “You can tell me to sod off. You can call someone else. You can ask me to take you to the station, or to a hotel, or anywhere you want. But I am asking you not to be alone in a flat he may already know how to find.”
Sophey looked down at her hands. They were curled so tightly that her knuckles had gone pale. “And if I say your place?” she asked.
Jaime’s heart did something entirely unprofessional. He ignored that too. “Then I take you to mine,” he said. “You get the bedroom, the lock on the door works, and I sleep on the sofa with my phone on.”
Her eyes lifted to his. “You’d do that?”
“Sophey,” Jaime said, and this time her name came out softer than a promise. “There was never a version of tonight where I let you do this alone.”
For a heartbeat, she only looked at him. Then she nodded. It was not much. Barely an answer at all, if anyone else had been watching. But Jaime had spent a year and a half learning Sophey’s smallest tells, and he knew what it cost her to give even that.
He did not offer his hand. He only turned toward the mouth of the alley and waited until she chose to fall into step beside him.
The street had not changed. The same buses sighed at the kerb. The same heat shimmered above the pavement. The same café window reflected too much sun. Ordinary London went on around them, careless and loud.
Ramsay Bolton was gone.
Jaime found he liked that even less than seeing him.
Beside him, Sophey shifted closer by half an inch, so slight a movement that anyone else might have missed it.
Jaime noticed.
He pretended not to.
Then he took her home.