AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hello my lovely readers!

So we've reached chapter 11. Yay! Ten down... plenty more to come. I've said this before, and I'm going to say this again, this is a slow burn story. I'm not just talking about their romantic relationship. But I promise to deliver chapters that are heavy, captivating and suspenseful, even when extremely lighthearted (kinda like a good episode of Teen Wolf or Riverdale).

If you guys have any questions... please REVIEW. If you have any opinions... please REVIEW. If you wanna say hi... please say HI (in the REVIEW section). I want to set a challenge to all my readers, anonymous and not, that we can reach one hundred reviews in the next week. It's because I wanna know where y'all are at with the story, how you feel about it, what you like, don't like, confuses you, what theories you have about this story, or whether you like some of the Easter Eggs I've dropped in it (i.e. references to other shows, films and books, or music, or even politics... I'm pretty sure Donald Trump makes into one of Nadia's musings. Let's be honest, it's hard to turn the news on and not see him on it). If you have any questions about how this reality works... anything really that you'd like to ask or say, please REVIEW.

And if you do review, I will answer it in following chapters.

Now... onto the story.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Game of Thrones or any of its characters. These are the property of HBO and George R.R. Martin. I own Nadia alone.

ROBB

Lannister.

Blonde haired, green-eyed assassins flash before his eyes, a haze of red drowning out all rational thought.

Why?

Why them?

Why Bran?

'He saw something. Something he shouldn't have seen.' And yet… 'He's just a boy. An sweet, innocent boy, whom they tried to murder in cold blood.' He can still see Bran's mangled body on the cot; still hear the child's unconscious screams echoing through the stone hallways with every crack and snap of his bones under their Maester's artful manipulation.

What if the fall had been higher? Or the force had been greater? Robb cannot deny the nights his dreams had been haunted by the sight of their hunting party returning to find the ten year old's corpse, bleeding out onto the summer snows at the base of the Broken Tower. He'd imagined their direwolves howling sombrely in unison, a mournful tune for what very nearly could have been his lost brother.

Lannister.

He'd wanted a name. And now he has it. Yet he feels none the better for it. Only fury. Fury and fear. Robb's fingers itch for his sword. He's never taken a life, but at this moment he cannot imagine a joy more precious than to see pungent Lannister blood stain his steel. For a fleeting moment, he'd felt hope for such; with Theon behind him, his brother-in-arms. But only for a fleeting moment. And then Maester Luwin, ever the voice of reason, expunged all such boyish notions.

A battle in the Godswood.

It would be laughable should the situation not be so dire.

But no. There would not be a battle. No great act of vengeance. Only sly words and hushed warnings.

And what role will he play? The good son who stays at home, like a pathetic pup with his tail between his legs.

With a loud growl, the young Stark swipes his desk clean, papers and stationary littering the floor, a bottle of ink cracking against the stone; the black ink oozes across the cracks in the floor but Robb cares not. His chair is the next thing to be thrown, it's hind legs shattering against the post of his bed. The little desk is hurtled across the ground, impacting loudly against the far wall by the door. The sound could be heard several corridors down, but Robb cares not.

This tantrum, this destruction should be enough to subdue the outburst of his knotted emotions. Yet he can't help but feel it isn't enough. Nothing can be seen through the red haze. Only pain. Anger. Fear. His emotions threaten to overwhelm him. Suffocate him.

He doesn't understand. Why Bran? Why hurt Bran? How could someone come into their home, and abuse their guest rights like that?

Are the southerners not satisfied with all they've already taken from his family? His father. His sisters. They'd tried to take Bran. And now his mother too.

At the forefront of it his harried thoughts… her warning. The mysterious riddle she'd delivered her first night in front of Bran's room.

He'd thought her crazy.

And then he learnt about her.

About the voices in her head.

'Wolves will fall.' Nadia had said something along those lines. His gut clenches, a sense of foreboding tugging at it, threatening to pull him under, to drown him in worry.

Beating his fists against the wall, Robb doesn't hear the thump-thump of his knuckles; only the sound of his heartbeat pumping in his ears like a drum.

He doesn't hear the tentative knock on the door. Doesn't hear the creak of wood against stone. Doesn't hear her footsteps until she's only feet away. His hands fall to his sides.

"Robb." Her voice is like a whisper. He hates the concern in her tone.

"Get out."

"Ro-"

"Get out!" he growls. From the corner of his eye, he sees her shadow flinch back.

Robb closes his lids, just waiting for the sound of his door shutting, signalling her leave. But it never comes.

"Your hands are bleeding." Her voice is much closer now. Robb can almost feel her body heat. He knows he would not have to reach very far to touch her.

Grinding his teeth, the young lord commands this girl to leave him be. But his words seem to fall on deaf ears, for she presses on, determinedly. "Let me help you." Robb still refuses to look her in the face. He hears her sigh, feels the slightest brush of air against his stubbled cheek. "Please," she seems to beg. "It's not much but it's the least I can do for you."

An admission of guilt.

Her tawny fingers appear near his crimson fist, stopping short of touching him. She's waiting for his permission.

Robb releases a short breath through his nose. Clenching and unclenching his jaw. He turns his head, only enough to look at her sideways, and offers a stiff nod. Her reaction is to bite her lip to hold back the smile threatening to break her face.

The pair awkwardly shuffle around one another, Robb taking a seat on his displaced desk as instructed, while Nadia goes to retrieve a pitcher of water from his bedside. He silently watches her take notice of a flagon there too, pick it up and sniff its contents. "Rum?" she inquires, brows raised. He nods in reply. "May I…?" she carefully questions, tilting the flagon as she approaches him. Another nod.

"Got anything I can bandage with?"

He tucks into a desk drawer and comes away with a depleting roll of gauze cloth, placing it on the desk at his side.

Retrieving an empty bowl from the floor, Nadia lays out her equipment beside him. Rinsing out the bowl with water first, she then carefully fills it with his rum, sparingly. She carefully takes his hands in hers, chewing her lip nervously. From beneath dark lashes, she watches for his reaction, as if anticipating he'll pull away.

He doesn't. Though he'd be lying if he says his fists didn't tense at her cool touch. "Sorry. My hands are always cold," she mutters sheepishly, glancing up at him. Nadia proceeds to carefully pour the water out over his hands, and only then does he notice she'd also kicked his chamber pot between their feet to catch the water.

Replacing the pitcher on the table, she removes her coat and much to his surprise, soaks it in the rum. "This may sting a little," she warns before pressing the cloth to his fresh cuts. Robb had already anticipated the burn. So to feel nothing more than a discomfortable tingling, does surprise him. He watches her carefully dabs at his bloodied knuckles, brown eyes ignorant to his eyes wandering her face. Her brows are creased together, her bottom between her teeth; her chest rises and falls deeply but slowly, her warm breath brushing his fingers ever so slightly, such a stark comparison to her much colder hands nimbly working against his.

Robb recalls how not long ago their roles had been reversed. He'd remembered how his larger hands had fumbled much more with hers, recalls the muffled groans and slip-away cusses she'd uttered under her breath before apologising for her language. He specifically remembers how she'd instructed him to properly bandage her up.

In the present, she carefully manipulates the bandage around his knuckles, curling it through the hook of his thumb and index, around his palm, wrist and back again, alternating twists here and there to firmer the hold.

In the middle of the heavy, awkward silence that has enveloped the pair of them, the young woman says, "I'm sorry."

He looks at her. Really looks at her. Those dark eyes are watching him carefully, nervously from beneath her raven lashes. She bites her bottom lip. He can already see what's in her mind. Rejection.

His anger still bubbles away beneath the surface. But her words just sounded so honest. So genuine.

He nods.

Her eyes widen.

It's not forgiveness. But it is something. A step forward, perhaps. She waits again, not wanting to push her luck. It's a whole twenty seconds later before she speaks again (Robb knows this because he counts it, feeling the awkward tension seeping back in).

"How are you?"

It's a stupid question he thinks. Just looking around his room, he'd think it would be obvious how he's feeling. He's about to answer, when he feels it then. That fury. That rage, he'd felt before. It's not gone but it has dissipated. Now it's just the sense of mourning. Mourning his little brother. A ridiculous notion, given that Bran is still alive. 'But he's not living.'

It's that. But it's also something deeper than that. His family. He mourns them. He mourns for the happier times that now feel a lifetime ago but realistically was not even two months back. "You miss them," her rasp breaks through his brooding thoughts, "I get it. I do."

He finds himself staring into her brown eyes. She glances back down to her work. "I was sorta in your shoes a few months ago-" strange phrase, he thinks, but he doesn't question it, "I moved outta my parents'. Got a my own place. It's all I wanted for years. But when I went to bed that first night, it hit me. No more being taken care of, no more peddling responsibility, no more hiding my mistakes. I was all alone. I could do anything I wanted but now I had to be entirely, one hundred percent liable for every decision. There was no running back to my parents for help. It was just me. Paying my own way, surviving on my own. At least until my roommates moved in, but even then it's not the same. We still carry that burden, that responsibility that we're all adults now and we have to pull our weight or break." She finishes bandaging his arm, rising from her kneeling position. She hovers there a moment, waiting to see whether she should leave or stay.

His eyes train on his bandaged hands, almost glaring at the white material where his bloodied, broken skin hides beneath. "My whole life has been preparing me for this. To be Lord of Winterfell," he pauses for a breath. He glances at her from the corner of his eye; she's watching him closely, attentively. "I didn't think it would come this fast. I know the rules, how to act, how to react…"

"But knowing what to do and doing it is a different thing?" she offers.

Robb tilts his chin, clenching his jaw a little. Not out of anger, but as a nervous tick. "I've watched my father for years. The people respect him. Love him. He was supposed to be here, guide me as I succeed him.

I… I've barely been managing these past few weeks. My mother… she's just started returning to her old self, returning to running the household…"

"And now she's leaving."

"You knew. You knew it was the Lannisters." Nadia nods. "Why not tell us? What do you have to protect?"

No answer. He feels his anger at her rising again. He doesn't understand.

"What do you have to hide?" he demands lowly, trying to rein in his torrid emotions. Still no answer. "Nadia-"

"Myself," she whispers. So shameful is her expression, head bowed, cheeks flushed, voice practically hoarse. "Myself. I have to protect myself."

Robb stills. Incredulously he states, "You think we'd hurt you."

"No… but," she sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. "I told you. I can't play with fate, with people's lives. I can't have that on my conscience. I can't get involved Robb. This isn't… this isn't…"

"This isn't your world," he accurately surmises, not preventing his disappointment from bleeding through. "So why bother? Am I right? You could care less if Bran died-"

"No!"

"Then what is it?" Robb demands, rising to tower above her. She flinches back, but quickly recovers. Her dark brown gaze matches him with as much insult as he feels towards her. "Why did you try to stop the assassin?"

She frowns. "I don-"

"You said it yourself that Bran would have been fine. So why did you do it?"

Nadia swallows a lump in her throat, her defiant eyes growing less and less so under The young Stark's heated gaze. He doesn't let this shake his resolve. "Nadia," he coaxes, voice tempered and cool, like when he'd been training Grey Wind.

"I don't know," she whispers. "Going there. Tackling the assassin. It just felt… right."

"Right?"

"Like I just had to be there. Like they needed me - your mother and Bran - even though I knew they didn't."

Robb's bemused. She makes it sound as if she's a puppet, tied to one end of a string and someone or something pulled her to Bran's room that night. Guided her. Just like how she'd found those two corpses in the Bell Tower. Just like how she'd walked trance-like into the Bifrost. Against all rational thought, against all she'd known of this story they exist in, Nadia followed it. Whether it be the voices in her head, or her gut instinct, or may-he-be-damned but fate itself…

A throbbing ache permeates in his temples. 'It makes no sense.' And perhaps that's reason it should make perfect sense.

"I don't understand," he finds himself muttering anyway.

She shrugs casually but he can see the fear in her eyes; practically feel it radiate off her. She forces a small smile, pursing her lips a little. Her gaze doesn't meet his; she's focussed on his chest but seems detached, lost deep in her thoughts. Not for the first time be wonders what's going in this strange woman's mind. "Me neither," she eventually says, voice just above a hoarse whisper. "And that scares me, 'cause I don't know what to do."

The silence is terse. Palpable.

Robb's still thoroughly confused. He has a hundred and one questions on the tip of his tongue just begging to be answered. But unfortunately the young woman before him doesn't have all the answers he needs, and even if she does, he doubts she's in any position to answer. Not now at least.

Either way, regardless of whether he has the nerve to voice them or not, it would seem he doesn't have much of a choice. Because before he knows it, she's shooting him another one of her nervous forced smiles, apologising for something else she believes to be entirely her fault, and disappears from his room in such a haste that she manages to hit her leg on two different pieces of furniture, almost tripping over her own feet, all on her way out.

And what remains is a speechless lord, filled with nothing but contempt and guilt towards a raven-haired maiden, and many a question still unanswered.

His furry familiar manages to rouse from a deep and peaceful sleep just time to catch his master like this. Feeling Grey Wind's nudge against his palm, a sign of comfort and reassurance, Robb collapses back against his desk. Eyes flicker between his bandaged hands and the oaken door that she'd disappeared through.

Well, isn't this a situation he's familiar with.

A/N Please review! Or follow! Or both! :)

Until next time,

Amber