For she was his secret treasure, she was his shame and his bliss.

~GRRM. A Storm of Swords

He was getting used to the dryness of his mouth and the constant swallowing of nothing but now there was the slime of something thick and the taste of iron between his tongue and palate. Ramsay spat the blood that minutely filled his taste buds and there his body shivered whilst curbing his pained breathing.

It hurt as hell.

I'll kill him... I'll kill them all...

His jaw clenched and again his teeth dug on the wall of his mouth. Sweat made its way to the tip of his nose and stayed stagnant till a bead gathered and dropped off. He let out a quick and dense breath aggrieved with bitter opium and there he felt the weakening of his knees as his hand jutted to the wall on the winding staircase and held himself firmly.

I'll kill him... and that rutting pregnant sow...

I'll cut out that worm and feed it to the bitches...

And there the hand that held himself against the wall formed into a white-boned fist and he smashed it against the brick. Dust made a light parade around the shallow dent and he heard the soft clucking of debris against his boots and stone staircase.

Ramsay almost swallowed his tongue, throttling the urge to roar like a cursed dragon, and a few hot tears escaped his eyes. His mind blazed with double-edged curses as if they were the first and only words he could ever natter. But the worst part was that the stinging on his broken knuckles weren't enough to swap with the anguish that stabs his chest.

Again he saw himself: the real Ramsay he wanted to be strangers with but with hostility gunned on him by the two most imperative people in his life, it just kept embracing him as an old, insensible friend. He breathed in, breathed out, breathed in, and continued so in deep, macabre moods while his forehead rested on the wall. His throat hallowed and threatened a sob but he wouldn't let it. He would die first before he'd hear himself whimper.

When a crash hollered from the chamber, Ramsay threw his sight in, momentarily forgetting his own angst. The curve on the staircase obstructed him to know what has happened, and when another crash—a brittle clay jar—clambered into pieces, followed by a wild shriek, he finally moved up.

Two serving girls and a soldier were crowded on the chamber door. The girls were trembling and almost bloodless, their arms wrapped around themselves and shoulders heaving quickly with another crash from the inside. Ramsay moved nearer, and the servants immediately withdrew with mortified eyes as if he was the sun that warned to blind them.

"My Lord..." the soldier, a middle-aged man with a thick dark beard, recognized him but Ramsay passed on eyes burning.

He saw his wife, his wolf, growling at another soldier attempting to take hold of her arms as she is about to fling another earthen jar. She was who she looked like when he found her wandering on the forest. Her hair was a mesh of red still with the dust and small particles of the woods put together. When the soldier took sight of his master, he quickly held himself back in fearful apology. When Sansa turned and their eyes met, the coals on her eyes were added with fuel. She bared her teeth and pointed a finger at her husband, "YOU...!"

In three rapid steps, she tossed the jar which rolled as cracks on the rugs, and in front of the spectators, Ramsay felt the outraged palm that fiercely smashed on his face.

He flung away but seized the strength not to fall, as the soldier pulled Sansa apart from him and angrily shoved her on the bed mattress. His jaw stung and a part of his eye retracted in blinding pain, momentarily filling the rims with hurt tears. Her nails had scratched on the tip of his lips and he sipped the blood that began to break. Eyes wide open in shock and rage; everyone saw how they turned into cold blue slits which immediately sent Ramsay charging to her who awaited his open, furious fist.

Yet he froze, trembling hand stuck in midair as if gravity was sucked off them in an instant. Ramsay looked down on her, his face tarnished with wrath but which slowly faded at the sight of Sansa's hollow gaze. He could feel the velocity of his heartbeats pounding on every corner of his body and his deep defying breathing.

Sansa's nearly cracked lips were parted and she pierced through his eyes without knowing the effect she impaled on him. Ramsay saw, not Sansa, but another sight below. He saw the same blank stare adhered on his wife and another woman, the dull and sedated faces wrecked with a thousand minutes of psychological and physical torture. The shambled, devastated eyes awaiting death like a better option.

And he withdrew with an embarrassed sigh and the lines of sweat bathing his face.

"LEAVE!"

The soldiers and the serving girls hadn't moved a finger, trying to understand whether the command was meant for them or for his wife. And Ramsay's eyes threw daggers. "Do I need to say it a second time? I hate saying it a second time."

With this they all turned their backs and opted to clear the door, except for one girl which Ramsay halted. She turned, looking down like a bitch with her tail between the legs, and he imagined having an arrow buried on the dark birthmark on her collar bone.

"Draw a bath." He called. She bowed stiffly and stepped back. Again he stopped her. He could feel the fear radiating on her pores and he loved every undulation that she projected.

"Bring warm water first, and a rag."

He dipped his fingers on the liquid to assure its lukewarm taste and the droplets made a tinkling sound that filled the quietness.

On the corner of his eye he sees her seeing him, snuggled on the pile of feather pillows on the head of their bed. He sat in a tensed, diffident manner on the edge and placed the basin beside her folded legs without seeing the expression in her eyes. When his hands touched her feet, she immediately pulled them away in surprise as if he was a clap of thunder, and wrapped her arms protectively around her knees, stuffing herself deeper on the pillows she was leaning on. He sighed.

Ramsay tried to roll his already rolled sleeves and sweat started to glisten on his brow. This was peculiar, too peculiar for the last time he ever serviced cleaning was on Reek. And it wasn't even sincere: he was only taunting him to ask that he pretend to be someone he was not. But this time, he didn't know what the recipe is in his cauldron of feelings. Shame? Guilt? Pride? It wasn't the best of choices but there certainly was a percent of each.

Earning the courage to look at her, he did and met her big watery eyes: dark at the rims, its pupils contracting at the reflection of him. He looked at the smudge of soil on her jaw and neck.

"It's warm, Sansa," he spoke, referring to the water, "Place your feet on it, will surely help."

And like a toddler, she was slow to receive his message but awhile when he touched her feet again, she moved it herself and he heard her sigh with relief. When her feet were fully dipped, he watched the blood disperse across the tepid water and for a while he decided to be amused. But before arousal would take over his stead, he began to cup the liquid and let it pour across the light wounds. Sansa hadn't flinched one bit, even when his breaths hallowed with his fingers on the abrasions. He began washing the marred skin and more blood reddened the water.

In the fused sounds of cracking firewood and chiming droplets, her voice added weakly, "Where is mother?"

His jaw clenched, marking avoidance off the query that sent his wife running off under the moonlight.

"Where is mother?"

With this he looked up. God why was he such a pussy with words? "She's not here," he heard himself, "She's dead. Quite a time ago."

Ill silence brooded and he need not see her reaction to it and he kept pouring the blood-diluted water on her feet. The wounds began to appear: red and purple lines of carelessness. The water began to turn dark as he stroked on the ankle of her right feet to launder hardened mud. She has soft feet, he thought, a pair of beautiful feet used to glittering boots and slippers as there was no single callus blended in, so supple to the touch he almost wanted to kiss them clean. Why hadn't he noticed these before?

"How?" she asked coldly, "How did she..."

Ramsay sighed, for a moment he considered gagging her instead. "I'll tell you on the morrow."

He was supposed to be safe now as she leaned against the pillows and he found himself wanting her to feel drowsy so she could just shut up. But he was not. It even became a more gauche conversation he only wanted to suddenly vanish from.

"What is that thing you do to me?" Sansa asked with the deepest touch of innocence. "On this bed...?"

He breathed in and his tongue played at the edge of his right incisors. His fingers rubbed softly between her toes as to soften the blooded mud caked on them. The smell of earth and iron lifted around the basin's circumference. Her toes were curling when he tried to clean them. He decided not to answer but she urged on and it began as an irritation now.

"We are married, Sansa, we..." he was cut off with an involuntary sigh because it felt like his heart has just leapt to his throat and bobbed back down, "We do things..." We just fuck. Oh gods can't it be that easy?

"We are...?" she sniffled, "But you're a bastard and I don't like you...how can mother approve to this?"

He was slapped inside out indeed and there was the thick feeling on his tongue like he had drank a barrel of Dornish wine, on with a stinging sensation on his neck. He was only thankful there was no one else there as agitation clambered awkwardly on his pores.

"There is nothing you can do about it and your mother is dead, I said awhile ago. Can't you just keep quiet?"

Ramsay grabbed the clean rags beside him and lifted one of her feet. His sudden touch made a fingernail scrape on a deep gash and she flinched. Again the blood greeted and Ramsay grunted as he dipped it back to the stained water.

"You're careless," she added.

"Shut it."

"But you are."

Ramsay gashed his teeth as she let go of her legs and handed out the dry rags which she claimed. He accidentally put force on a gaping wound and sighed. Sansa was biting her lip to stifle a cry and he took to glaring at her. Don't you bloody go out in the woods and stare at me like that, woman!

"It hurts." Again she spoke in a breaking voice.

Ramsay slapped his own knee and looked away, "I get it. I know. I know. But you ra—"

"I did not mean this."

He turned back to her. He did not quite absorb that well but she didn't have the time to repeat it. But he didn't want to hear it either, and continued to watch her wipe her own feet like she was putting up a show for him and he wanted to appear like someone who had the habit of missing the point.

The serving girl emerged from the darkness on the doorway, announcing the tub was ready to be occupied.

Ramsay wound in the tail of the cloth between the coils swathed on his hand. Only now he realized it throbbed and stung like...like the hardened lines on his back. The thick muscles behind him heaved like flaming logs to greet the scars that embraced them.

Once when he was younger, quite younger than Sansa, he entered the castle doors hiding a broken arm under a soiled and torn shirt. He remembered Waldon, a big and burly boy who looked like a son of the ugliest bull instead, with a thick nest of brown hair and eyebrows, a bulbous and freckled nose between bulging brown eyes, and a wide mouth which reminded Ramsay of a wild boar missing tusks. He remembered this bull boy shoving him outside the kennels, muscled fingers closing around his thin, bony neck, with all other peers in an amused riot. He recalled their faces under the grey drizzle, angry and excited to see his nose break, to hear him plead and admit he killed his half and legitimate brother.

When Ramsay was let go after Waldon grinned at his eyes threatening to bleed from pressure, he sucked in a mouthful of air and swung his arm on the other but missed and instead crushed his fist on the bricked wall. The laughter still haunted him like it was stripping him piece by piece, and Waldon kept braying until he pushed Ramsay face down on the mud and stepped on the broken hand like it was a snake's head. Ramsay screamed as each bone and tendon crisscrossed in a flaming ordeal until he passed out, only to be awakened by the kennel master and his daughter. And Ramsay remembered too, how Father had not come visit him on his room when he nursed high fever out of the bruises in his scrawny body. Father was still grieving and irate at the loss of his eldest, even after he had taken his anger out on Ramsay the morning his lawful son gave up life. But what he could recollect most, was dropping the bloody rock from his hand, the same hand that was crushed, and Waldon's brains splattered on the dry forest grass. And as the once-feared baby giant lay helpless with his eyes strained up to his gaping skull, Ramsay looked at the smiling kennel girl. Ramsay hadn't smiled back, but with a whistle, the hungry hounds pounced on big screaming dinner and tore him from skin to bone as he watched without looking away. And it was the first of times that ecstasy crashed on him and a victorious grin swept across his face, like he had just jumped off a cliff and sprouted wings instead to defy the winds of dejection. The second of these times were spent on days and nights fucking the kennel master's daughter.

He thought of the wall on the staircase, a souvenir of his broken fist caused by a perturbing conversation with Father. That dent on the wall would not be noticed, he was sure, like he himself more invisible than air around on the family tree.

The doors creaked and the Sansa walked in like a ghost in a dark robe and stood before the bed. The serving girl who attended to her halted at the door.

He looked at his wife. The red puffy eyes and cheeks told him she had been crying in her bath. She had been crying again and with this he felt fractious. She was looking down shyly but disoriented, probably calculating another time to strike him? He had no idea now. He dismissed the servant, who bowed and closed their chamber door.

Ramsay walked to her after finding the sleeping robe he set out for her, to help her dress and finally rest in the remaining hours of dawn. She stepped back and cringed but her eyes were looking on his feet to anticipate the next nearing. Ramsay's lips pressed at the annoyance of having to scare her even without his motive to do so now.

"Take off the robe and put this on," he told her, almost kindly but monotonous, handing out the thin gown. Sansa still hadn't moved but her eyes were scanning him up and down with lips agape. There was a light purple blotch under her mouth, and a small gash on the side of her discoloured lip.

He sighed and moved behind her so he could only see her tangled mats of damp hair. "Take off the robe now, Sansa. I can't bloody see you,"

He heard the bland sighing, and after which her fingers started to tangle on the knot of her robe and she slowly pulled the cloth belt. Ramsay was slowly watching her, profused with unwanted anticipation as she parted the robe from her chest and started to peel it off her. The moment her shoulders bared and the sweet smell of cinnamon perfume oozed from her skin, every cell on his body pulsated. He sucked in a breath, following the robe that inch by inch exposed the bruises on her flesh painted ivory by malnutrition. She wasn't now as beautiful as when he first set eyes on her. She had lost weight highlighted by the scapulas jutting on her shoulders, the thinned arms and the bony elbows, her ribcage rippling on the sides, the visible bulges of her backbone.

But all of these, and more, had not shelved the desire he felt for her. Her scent had been as vigorous as before, and this was still Sansa Stark, his wife, his wolf...the mother of his unexisting child, and nothing could take it all from him.

Ramsay dropped the sleeping gown and it fell crumpled on his feet instead. His hands wound around her stomach and he closed the space between them. Her nakedness pressed against his body and with that he buried his face on her neck while her damp hair exuded the scent of Mary rose. I want you. His own words gushed inside him. I want you, Sansa.

I want your smile. I want your laughter.

He gently pushed her to the messed up sheets and vair on the mattress and she was anything but reluctant. He trained her well, and she had been good to know what he wanted, and has been exhausted resisting him so all she needed to do was lay down to stare at the ceiling until the hot fluid rushes inside her.

I want your joys...your pain...your lust.

He bent her forward and he hated how she did so easily. It seemed like crawling on her elbows and resting her head on the sheets have become a routine from a hundred years ago. There was this fire from the pit of his stomach which twisted and burned. He missed her malevolence and defiance, the heat in her eyes as she curses and squirms when he pins her down, even the time she spat on his face and he threw her on the floor so as to rip her clothes off and smouldered them on the fireplace, and since then constantly raped her with a knife on her throat. Myranda was a good fuck, he acknowledged, but she was at a stage play where she willed to his violence but pretended not to. And Sansa's lethal hatred was so pure that only thinking about it would make him release.

Ramsay watched as she waited apathetically. Her breathing was so calm it made him sick. He bent forward too, and held her on the shoulder so as to overturn her and look at her face while his other hand was pressed beside her head. The sheets crumpled more as she followed his lead and she turned to let him catch a full sight of her expression.

It was like looking at frozen lake, her eyes, and looking at an empty abyss too, red at the rims and screaming exhaustion. The embers in them died down and she was no more than a bald sheep than a growling wolf. He caught her trembling sighs as his fingers traced her left eyebrow and cupped her cheek. He felt the cheekbone that was not once there. He tousled his fingers on her hair and noticed its luster had faded and thus the coarseness took over. Its color was autumn no longer but reminded him of rust and dry blood instead. He traced on the collar bone that looked like a valley on a map and a dune on a desert; he could see the grey scar of his teethmark on her nape and others on both breasts which lost the plumpness it had before.

A tear slipped to his fingers. He looked back to her blank eyes only to the welling of them which he was so accustomed with. Her crying had always amused him, because it signified her defeat every after he succeeded spilling his seed inside her and she would only curl on a ball and he would laugh at her silently.

Sansa's almost cracked lips parted with a whisper that brooked no argument. "Do you hate me?"

He froze and his mind started to whirl in an uncontrollable eccentric grimace. Of all things that occurred to him was the way she always gave him an unwelcoming look, and he only had to force feed himself on her to break her. The answer leaked from his lips.

"Yes."

She closed her eyes and sighed with satisfaction from that answer, and without another word she lay like a ball on her side.

I hate you...yes.

Ramsay laid himself on the side too to face her still. Her eyes were closed and he wanted to demand them open until he himself should fall asleep. He continued to stare at her, her folded fingers pressed between her jaw and the mattress seemed to have been the most serene he'd see of her, not the crying wench nor the angry mistress. His hand found a way on the curve of her waist and remained there.

I hate your beauty... I hate how it makes me worry I'd never see it again and I want to break it. The shadows began to drape darker on her body she almost looked like a silhouette now. I hate your inborn kindness, your mirth... how it was wanted by many others, I want to break it. I hate your innocence and how it frets me you will lose it to another. I've always wanted to break you...but...

Ramsay squinted his eyes to the empty sheets in front of him as he still lay on his side. The fire from the hearth had been extinguished by light pouring from early sunshine. It had been what...an hour or two? He couldn't even recall falling asleep but the bizarre light filling the chamber and the smell of burnt wood had told him he did. He couldn't and didn't want to move yet as his muscles pleaded to rest, but his eyes were fixed on his bow on the carpeted floor and around it the arrows spilled like an accident.

There was a soft pressing on the mattress on his legs. Ramsay laid on his back to see what it was and his eyes dilated. Sansa towered above him with an arrow tight on gripped hands; its pointed edge gawked and sparkled like a serpent baring its fangs.

But...

Once he dreamt of Sansa Stark on a horse on a cold snowy morning. She was riding before him, with her lovely braids of red velvet against the snow and ghostly trees. He called her once, twice, and she turned to him with a honey-sweet smile. She had eyes of crystalline sky which greeted him even without a language, and she waved; gloved hands in the air, and gently placed it on the bulge on her belly.

But oh gods...

He watched the tip of the arrow descend on him swiftly.

...what have I done?

A/N: Thank you for the kind reviews and messages, and sorry too for the longest delay ever. Finished this immediately after coming back as there was no pre-written parts of this chapter. I hope you liked it. Valar Morghulis, Valar Dohaeris. I do miss Ramsay Bolton.