Slut for targs

209 A.C Flea Bottom

The first thing you ever remembered was your brother’s hands.

Not your mother’s face, that was gone, worn away like a coin passed through too many fingers. You could summon the shape of her if you concentrated: the blurred watermark of a jawline, the suggestion of a mouth that laughed like a cracked bell, the smell of cheap wine and cheaper perfume that clung to her hair long after she stopped breathing. But her face? No. That belonged to the dark now, along with everything else from before.

But the hands, those you remembered. Dunk’s hands. Too large for a boy of eight, the knuckles already crosshatched with scars from street fights and kitchen fires, but impossibly gentle as they lifted you from the straw mattress where your mother lay cold and still. You had been five years old. You had not understood death, only that Mother would not wake. It was Dunk who wrapped you in a blanket thin enough to see through. Dunk who carried you out into the grey morning, your face pressed to his neck so you would not see the body being hauled away. Dunk who said, in a voice that splintered because he was barely more than a child himself, “I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”

And he had, you slept in doorways at first, curled together like kittens against the cold that seeped up through the cobblestones. Dunk learned quickly which bakers threw out day old bread and which watchmen could be bribed with a sad eyed look. He found work at an inn in Flea Bottom and the innkeeper’s wife let you sleep in the stables so long as Dunk scrubbed the floors and hauled the kegs and made himself useful in a dozen small ways. You would sit in the corner while he worked, your knees drawn up to your chin, watching him. Watching the boy melt away, season by season, into something that looked more like a man. He grew taller and broader and harder, his shoulders widening, his voice dropping. He was three years older than you, but sometimes he felt like thirty. He had never been a child. Neither of you had.

But you had each other. And that was enough. It had to be.

Every night, after his labors were done, Dunk would come to you in the stables. He would reek of sweat and sour ale, and he would lower himself onto the hay beside you with a groan that belonged to a man three times his age. And then he would tell you stories he’d gathered like dropped coins from travelers and old soldiers and the septon who sometimes came to beg a bowl of soup. Stories of knights who never faltered, dragons who spoke in riddles, castles of white stone that caught the sunrise like mirrors. Maidens so beautiful that kingdoms burned for a single glance.

You were twelve when the men began to notice you. It happened on an ordinary night, with an ordinary drunk who’d had too much ale and too little sense. You were carrying a tray of empty cups back to the kitchen, your arms aching with the weight, when a hand came out of nowhere and closed on your backside. You froze, no understanding of what the sudden heat crawling up your neck meant or why your body had locked itself rigid as a board. The man laughed and then Dunk was there.

One moment the drunk was leering at you, his hand still on your body, and the next he was on the floor with blood fountaining from his nose and Dunk standing over him like a thunderhead. He threw the man out into the mud, and when he came back inside his hands were trembling with a rage so profound it seemed to warp the air around him. “Stay close to me,” he said, and it was not a request. His voice was quiet, too quiet, the kind of quiet that lives on the far side of fury. “Always. Do you understand? Always.”

You understood. From that day forward, you were never more than arm’s reach from your brother. When he walked to the market, you walked beside him, your fingers sometimes hooked into the rope that acted like a belt, when the crowds pressed too close. The men still looked, by fourteen, you had grown into the kind of beauty that stilled conversations mid sentence, your mother’s eyes and your unknown father’s soft mouth arranged on a face that seemed to belong in a ballad rather than a Flea Bottom inn, but they looked from a distance. Dunk saw to that.

You were inseparable. Joined at the hip, the innkeeper’s wife liked to say, shaking her head with a fondness that bordered on bewilderment. “Never seen the like. That boy would tear the world apart for his little sister.”

You were sixteen when everything ended. The festival came in the spring, an eruption of color and noise that spilled from the gates of the Red Keep and flooded through the city like a tide. Mummers on stilts, jugglers with flaming torches, singers with harps slung across their backs, knights in armor that caught the sun and threw it back in a thousand glittering shards. Dunk had been given the night off—a rarity—and he had taken your hand with a grin you hadn’t seen since you were children hiding from the rain under a stolen tarp. “Come on,” he said, and his eyes were bright in a way that made your chest ache.

You laughed and followed. The crowd was too thick. The torches made everything swim, light and shadow bleeding together until faces became masks and masks became faces. Dunk kept his hand clamped around your arm for the first hour, his grip unwavering, but then a knot of drunkards staggered between you and in the space of a single heartbeat, you lost him.

“Dunk?”

You rose onto your toes, straining above the heads of the crowd. You saw him turn, saw his mouth open to call back to you, saw the sudden alarm flash across his features, and then the surge of bodies carried you sideways, a riptide of flesh and noise, and you stumbled into an alley to escape the crush.

That was when they took you. There were three of them. You never saw their faces clearly, only hands. Rough and quick and impossibly strong, one clamping over your mouth, another banding around your waist and lifting you clean off the ground. You tried to scream. You bit down on the palm pressed against your lips, tasted blood and salt and felt the man curse and shift his grip, but there was no time. A sack came down over your head, coarse and stinking of something you did not want to name, and the world went dark and muffled and small.

The last thing you heard was the festival. The music, the laughter, the endless churn of celebration. It went on without you, as if you had never been there at all.

Dunk searched for three days. He did not sleep. He did not eat. He tore through Flea Bottom like a storm given flesh, overturning carts and kicking down doors, bellowing your name until his voice shredded into something barely human. He went to the City Watch, and they laughed, a girl from the slums, what did he expect? He went to the sept, and the septon only clasped his hands and murmured prayers that tasted like ash. He went to every inn, every brothel, every lightless corner of the city where a girl might be hidden or sold or worse, and he found nothing. Nothing. Nothing and nothing again.

On the fourth day, a woman came to him, she found him in the alley where you had vanished, sitting against the wall with his head in his hands, and she knelt beside him.

“You’re the one,” she said. Not a question. “Looking for the girl with the H/C hair. The pretty one.”

Dunk’s head came up so fast his neck cracked. “Where is she?”

The woman shook her head. Slowly. Deliberately. A gesture that held everything he did not want to know. “They found her in the water this morning, lad. Some men…” She paused, and something that might have been pity flickered across her ruined face. “They took her. And when they were done—” Her hands made a twisting motion, a brutal pantomime that needed no translation. “The women who found her said she was hardly recognizable. They’ve already burned the body. Too much damage, they said. You don’t want to see that. Trust me. You’re better off remembering her the way she was.”

Dunk did not speak. He simply sat there, staring at the woman’s face, and something inside him cracked straight down the middle and bled dry.

“Who?” His voice did not sound like his voice. “Who did it?”

“No one knows. Drunkards, maybe. Travelers passing through. They’re long gone now.” The woman rose, joints creaking, and looked down at him with something that was not quite pity and not quite indifference. “I’m sorry, lad. Truly.”

She left him there. And Dunk stayed. He stayed in that alley as the sun bled out and the moon rose pale and indifferent and the city settled into its night noises around him. His little sister was dead. He had promised—promised—to protect her, and she was dead. And the world, which had never been kind to either of them, now seemed to hold no color.

—

213 A.C Ashford

The gardens of Ashford Castle were not as grand as the ones in Summerhall but they were still beautiful. You had been here for less than a fortnight, arrived as part of Prince Maekar's retinue for the tourney celebrating Lord Ashford's daughter's nameday, and already the place had worked its way under your skin. The roses were in full bloom, cascading over stone walls in waves of crimson and gold and softest pink. The hedges were trimmed into the shapes of birds and beasts.

The little girl was running through the grass ahead of you, her silver gold hair streaming behind her like a banner caught in a high wind, her bare feet slapping against the earth with the unselfconscious joy of someone who had never known hunger or fear or the back of a stranger's hand. She was two years old, small for her age but fierce, so fiercely alive that it stopped your breath sometimes, with violet eyes that missed nothing and a laugh that could fill an entire hall and still demand more room.

"Rhaenyra," you called, and you tried to sound stern, you really did, but the smile kept breaking through no matter how firmly you set your jaw. "Come back here before you trip and ruin that dress."

"Won't," the child announced, with the absolute conviction of someone who had never been wrong about anything in her life, and kept running.

You sighed, gathered your skirts in both hands, and gave chase. The dress you wore was finer than anything you had owned before Aerion had claimed you, a gift he had given you specifically for this journey. Pale blue silk that whispered when you moved, with silver embroidery at the sleeves and neckline. He had wanted you to look presentable at Ashford. You suspected, though you had not said it aloud, that he also wanted to show you off. To remind his family, and perhaps himself, what he possessed.

You were twenty years old now, no longer the trembling girl who had been thrown into a black carriage while a brothel burned behind her, no longer the hollow eyed creature who had learned to disappear inside her own body while men did what they pleased. The past months and years had reshaped you, smoothed some of the sharp edges and hardened others.

But there was something new in you now, something forged in the long nights of learning to survive Aerion Targaryen and the longer days of learning to love your daughter. You knew how to bend without breaking. And you knew, with a certainty that lived in your bones like marrow, that you would kill any living soul who tried to harm your child.

Rhaenyra had tripped over an exposed root and was sitting in the grass, more affronted than injured, examining a smudge of dirt on her palm with the grave concentration of a maester confronted with an ancient and inscrutable text. You scooped her up before the tears could organize themselves, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head, breathing in the smell of sunshine and crushed grass and something warm and sweet that was just her.

"Told you," you murmured into her hair. "You fell."

"Didn't cry," Rhaenyra pointed out. This was technically true, and there was a note of such fierce pride in her small voice that your heart performed an odd, painful little flip in your chest.

"No," you agreed, pulling back to look at her solemn face. "You didn't. You're a brave little dragon, aren't you?"

The child beamed. She adored being called a dragon. It was one of the few gifts Aerion had given her that did not make your stomach twist into complicated knots. This inheritance of fire and blood and the unshakeable conviction that she was meant for something magnificent.

You carried her back toward the castle, her small arms wrapped tightly around your neck, her voice a ceaseless ribbon of chatter about the butterfly she had almost caught and the bird that had flown directly over her head and the flower she had picked that was pink, Mama, pink and pretty and can I keep it forever please please please. You made the appropriate sounds of wonder and encouragement, your eyes scanning the courtyard as you crossed it, your body perpetually aware of who was watching.

The servants of Ashford avoided your gaze, much as the ones at Summerhall did. They had learned, over the course of the tourney's first days, to treat you with a careful neutrality. Not quite respect, not quite disdain, something suspended in the ambiguous space between. They knew what you were. Prince Aerion's paramour. The woman he had brought with him from Summerhall, installed in a guest chamber near his own, paraded through the grounds like a provocative piece of art he wanted everyone to see whether they wished to or not. They did not speak to you unless absolutely necessary, did not meet your eyes, did not acknowledge the child in your arms except to incline their heads stiffly and step aside.

Ashford Castle was a crowded place during the tourney. Lord Ashford's daughter Gwin had turned thirteen, and to honor her nameday, her father had declared a tourney that would last five days. Knights and lords from across the Reach and beyond had gathered to compete, their banners snapping in the spring breeze, their pavilions spreading across the fields like a crop of colorful mushrooms.

Prince Maekar's entire family had come with his children. You saw them sometimes, in the corridors or the courtyards or the great hall at supper, but you never spoke to them. You were not permitted. Prince Maekar had made that blisteringly clear from the very beginning, his voice cold with a disgust he did not bother to disguise.

"The woman stays in her chambers," he had told Aerion when he first met you. "I will not have her parading about in front of the children. She is a whore, Aerion. A whore and you will not embarrass this family."

Aerion had not argued. He rarely argued with his father directly. But he had kept you anyway, had dressed you in silk and silver, had installed you in a room that connected to his own. And now you were here, carrying your daughter back toward the keep while the roses nodded in the breeze and the distant sounds of the tourney grounds drifted over the walls like distant thunder. You had not been permitted to attend the jousts. Not since the yesterday.

You closed your eyes for a moment against the memory. It had been horrible. Aerion's tilt against Ser Humfrey. You had been watching from the stands, Rhaenyra on your lap, your heart in your throat the way it always was when he rode. He was a skilled jouster, your prince, but he rode with a recklessness that bordered on suicidal, and sometimes you thought he would not be satisfied until he left someone broken in the dirt.

This time, he had aimed too low. Deliberately, you were almost certain, though you would never say so aloud. His lance had struck Ser Humfrey's horse in the neck, a brutal, illegal blow that sent the animal crashing to the ground with a scream that would haunt your nightmares for weeks. Ser Humfrey had been thrown, his leg twisted at an angle that made your stomach lurch, and the horse had thrashed in the dirt with blood pumping from its throat.

The crowd had broken through the barriers. Prince Baelor Breakspear himself had risen from his seat, his face a mask of disgust, and you had seen the way he looked at Aerion. The way everyone looked at Aerion. Like he was something monstrous. Something broken beyond repair.

Aerion had found you afterward, still flushed with adrenaline, his eyes too bright. He had forbidden you from attending any more of the jousts.

"It's not safe," he had said, his grip on your arm just shy of bruising. "The crowds are unpredictable. The horses are dangerous. You and Rhaenyra will stay in the castle or the gardens. I don't want you anywhere near the lists."

You had not argued. You rarely argued with him about things that mattered. But you had seen the truth behind his words, the truth he would never admit. He did not want you to see him lose. He did not want you to see the way the other knights looked at him after what he had done.

So you had stayed away. You had walked in the gardens, and played with Rhaenyra, and smiled your careful smile whenever Aerion returned to your chambers in the evenings, bruised and bristling and desperate for the praise only you could give him.

"Up," Rhaenyra demanded as you approached the castle's side entrance. "Up high, Mama. I want to see."

You lifted her higher, settling her higher on your hip with the practiced ease of two years of motherhood, and she gazed around the corridor with the same wide eyed wonder she brought to everything. You loved her so much it scared you sometimes. Loved her with a ferocity that made the love you had felt for your own mother, dim and distant and blurred at the edges, seem like a candle held up against the sun.

"You spoil her."

The voice came from behind you, and you did not startle. Months with Aerion had taught you the particular cadence of his footsteps, the faint jingle of the sword he wore even at peace, the way the air in a room seemed to tighten and grow watchful when he entered. You turned, shifting Rhaenyra to your other hip with a fluidity that had become second nature, and offered him the smile you had perfected over your time together.

It was not a false smile. That was the strange thing, the thing that still surprised you when you stopped to examine it. It was not false at all. There was calculation in it, yes. There was calculation in everything you did, a habit you could not have broken if you tried. But there was warmth there too. The warmth of a woman looking at a man she had somehow, against all odds and reason, come to care for.

Love. The word still felt strange in your mouth, like a garment that did not quite fit. Aerion was not kind. He was not gentle. He was not good, in any sense that your brother Dunk would have recognized. But he was yours, in his possessive, consuming, infuriating way, and you were his, and somewhere in the crucible of the past years, that mutual belonging had transmuted into something that looked, from certain angles, remarkably like love.

He was not a tall man, standing at five and a half feet, and you knew it rankled at him. Knew that every inch he lacked compared to the warriors he trained with was a splinter under his skin. But what he lacked in height he more than compensated for in presence. The way his boots struck the stone floors, deliberate and commanding. The sharp, hawkish beauty of his face, all angles and shadows. The particular weight of his attention when it landed on you, heavy as a hand on your shoulder.

"My dragon," you said, and the word was warm, intimate, a private jest between you that no one else would recognize. "She wanted to explore the gardens. You know how she loves the roses."

He stepped closer, and Rhaenyra immediately lunged toward him, her small arms outstretched, her face alight with the uncomplicated adoration of a child who had never been given a reason to fear her father. "Papa! Papa, I found a flower!"

She had dropped the flower somewhere in the garden, of course. You had seen it fall, a little pink bruise against the green grass, left behind in her headlong rush toward the next thing and the next and the next. But Aerion did not know that, and you suspected he would not have cared if he did. He took the girl from your arms with an ease that still surprised you, settling her against his chest as naturally as if he had been doing it all his life.

Aerion, who was never gentle with anyone. Aerion, whose hands had left bruises on your body in the early days. Aerion, who had aimed his lance at a horse's throat and watched it die without flinching.

But Rhaenyra had never seen that side of him. Rhaenyra saw only the father who bounced her on his knee and called her his little dragon and looked at her as if she were the single good thing he had managed to produce in a life full of sharp edges and bad decisions. And you saw both versions of him, the monster and the man, and you had learned to hold them both in your mind at once, to love the whole complicated, contradictory mess of him.

"A flower," Aerion repeated, bouncing Rhaenyra gently against his chest. "What color?"

"Pink!"

"Pink," he said, with the solemnity of a man receiving a sacred revelation. "Pink is an excellent color. You have impeccable taste."

Rhaenyra giggled, burying her face in the curve of his neck, and Aerion's eyes met yours over the top of her head. There was something in his gaze. A flicker of warmth, a flicker of something that might have been gratitude. It made your heart clench in that way you had long since stopped trying to explain away.

I love him, you thought, and the thought did not feel like a lie. It felt like the truth, strange and inconvenient and slightly terrifying though it was. Gods help me, I truly do.

You knew what people would say if they could hear your thoughts. How can you love him? After what he did to that horse? After what he did to you? After what he is? And they would not be wrong to ask. The early days had been brutal; there was no use pretending otherwise. He had hurt you, in ways that still surfaced in your dreams on bad nights. He had fucked you without asking, had demanded without giving, had treated your body like territory to be conquered and your compliance like tribute to be extracted.

But then something had shifted. Slowly, incrementally, in the way of seasons changing. He had begun to see you. The woman who praised him when no one else would. The woman who listened to his fears and his rages and his strange, tangled dreams of dragonfire and destiny. The woman who had given him a daughter and held his hand through the disappointment and taught him, patient as a stone worn smooth by water, how to be something other than cruel.

And you had seen him, the man underneath, the one who craved praise because he had never received it, the one who lashed out because he had never learned another way to ask for what he needed. You had seen him, and against all wisdom, against all self preservation, you had loved him.

He still hurt you, sometimes. When his black moods descended and his hands grew rough and the words that came out of his mouth were designed to wound. But those moments were rarer now, spaced further and further apart, and after each one he would come to you with his arms full of gifts. Dresses of silk and velvet, jewels that glittered in their velvet nests, books with leather bindings and gold leaf on the pages that you devoured in the quiet hours when he was training and Rhaenyra was napping. He would hold you afterward, his face pressed into your hair, his arms wrapped around you like a cage he was afraid you might slip through.

"You understand me," he would whisper, and his voice would crack on the words in a way that made your heart splinter. "You're the only one who does. The only one who ever has. Don't leave me. Promise me you won't leave."

And you, holding him in the dark, would stroke his short silver hair and murmur the words he needed to hear. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I'm yours."

You meant them, too. That was the strangest part. After everything, you meant them.

Where would I even go? you thought, watching him bounce your daughter in his arms in this borrowed garden in a borrowed castle, surrounded by roses that belonged to someone else.

You looked at Rhaenyra, at the small, fierce face that was so clearly her father's, and you thought about the day she had been born.

It had been the longest day of your life.

The labor had lasted nearly eighteen hours. You had screamed until your voice gave out entirely, had bitten straight through the leather strap the midwife had given you, had prayed to gods you had not believed in since childhood to make it stop, please make it stop, I can't do this, I'm going to die, please let me die. Aerion had paced outside the door like a caged animal, his boots wearing a groove in the stone, demanding updates every few minutes and threatening bodily harm to the maester whenever the news was not to his liking.

"Is it a boy?" he had shouted through the door, over and over, his voice fraying at the edges. "Tell me it's a boy. It has to be a boy. I'm going to name him Maegor. A strong name. A dragon's name. Tell me!"

You had heard him, even through the wall of agony that had swallowed the world, and you had felt a cold dread settle into the pit of your stomach like a stone dropped into deep water. Maegor. He wanted to name his son after Maegor the Cruel. You had prayed then, harder than you had ever prayed in your life, with what remained of your shredded voice and your failing strength. Not a boy. Please, not a boy. Whatever else you give me, don't give me a boy who will carry that name.

The gods, for once in their capricious existence, had listened.

When the baby had finally emerged, slick and furious and impossibly, breathtakingly alive, the maester had looked between her tiny legs and pronounced, with the careful neutrality of a man who knew exactly how dangerous this moment was: "A girl, my prince. A healthy girl."

The silence that followed had been more terrifying than any scream.

Aerion had burst into the room, his face pale as milk, his short hair standing up in wild disarray from running his hands through it for eighteen hours. He had stared at the child in the maester's arms. At the tuft of silver gold hair plastered to her scalp, at the violet eyes that were already open and glaring at the world with an indignation that seemed profoundly personal. His expression had twisted into something ugly.

"A girl," he had said, and his voice was flat. Hollow. A room with all the furniture removed. "I waited nine moons. Nine moons. For a girl."

He had not touched you. He had not touched the baby. He had simply turned on his heel and walked out of the room, and you had heard his boots ring down the corridor, and then the distant slam of a door, and then nothing.

The next three days had been the darkest of your new life. Aerion did not come to your room. He did not send for you. He did not acknowledge the existence of the child at all. He ate his meals with his family, trained in the yard with a brutality that left his sparring partners bloodied and bewildered, and refused to speak to anyone who so much as mentioned the baby's existence. The girl, the servants called her in whispers, because she had no name yet, and a child without a name was a ghost.

You lay in your bed, your body slowly knitting itself back together, your breasts aching with milk, and you held your daughter against your chest and wondered if this was the end. If Aerion would cast you both out, send you back to the streets of King's Landing with nothing but the clothes on your back and a bastard child in your arms. You made plans in the dark hours. Foolish, desperate plans, the kind of plans that only seemed reasonable at three in the morning when you were alone and terrified and your stitches still pulled every time you moved. You would run. You would find Dunk if he was still alive, throw yourself at his feet, beg him to take you back even though you were ruined and used and nothing like the sister he had lost. You would find work, honest work, kitchen work, anything, and you would raise your daughter to be strong and fierce and free, and she would never, ever know what it felt like to be owned.

But on the fourth day, the door had opened.

Aerion stood in the frame, and you barely recognized him. His eyes were ringed with shadows so dark they looked like bruises, his short hair a disheveled mess, his fine clothes rumpled and stained as if he had been sleeping in them, or not sleeping at all. He had been wrestling with something, you realized. Himself, his pride, his expectations, his disappointment. And from the look of him, he had lost.

"Let me see her," he said. His voice was hoarse, scraped raw, as if he had been shouting or weeping or both. "Let me see my daughter."

You did not trust yourself to speak. You simply lifted the baby from your chest. She was awake, her violet eyes tracking the movement with that unnerving intensity newborns sometimes had. And you held her out toward him.

Aerion approached slowly, cautiously, like a man approaching a wounded animal that might bite. He looked down at the small, wrinkled face, at the silver gold fuzz on her head, at the tiny fists that clenched and unclenched in the air as if she were already fighting battles only she could see. And something in his expression shifted. Not softened. Aerion did not soften, not in any way you had ever witnessed. But cracked. A fissure in the ice, unexpected and profound.

"She looks like me," he said. It was not a question.

"Yes," you whispered, your voice still ruined from screaming. "She's a true dragon, my prince. Just like her father."

He reached out one finger, just one, his hand trembling almost imperceptibly, and touched the baby's cheek. Rhaenyra turned her head toward the contact, her tiny mouth opening and closing in that instinctive rooting reflex.

"Rhaenyra," he said. "I'll call her Rhaenyra."

You knew the name, of course. Everyone in Westeros knew the name. The princess who had been called Maegor with teats, who had fought a war that tore the realm in half and refused to surrender even when the odds were hopeless. It was a name soaked in controversy, in blood, in the stubborn refusal to be anything other than what she was. It was a cruel name to give an infant daughter, in some ways. A challenge. A provocation. A reminder that girls could be as dangerous as boys, if they were bold enough.

But it was not Maegor. It was not the name of the Cruel. And on that fourth day, with your daughter finally named and Aerion's hand resting awkwardly, almost shyly, on your shoulder, you had decided to be grateful for small mercies.

"Rhaenyra," you repeated, trying the name on your tongue. It tasted like strength. Like fire. Like survival. "My little dragon."

And now, two years later, watching that same daughter tug impatiently at Aerion's doublet while he laughed, that hope had only grown. Rhaenyra was fierce and stubborn and clever and alive, so vibrantly alive, and you would make certain she stayed that way. You would die before you let that happen. You would kill before you let that happen. And the truth of that, the absolute crystalline certainty of it, was the most liberating thing you had ever felt.

"Y/N."

Aerion's voice pulled you back from the precipice of memory. He was watching you over Rhaenyra's silver gold head, his expression hovering somewhere between amusement and irritation.

"You're brooding again," he said. "You get that look on your face when you're thinking too hard. I've told you. I don't like it."

You let your expression shift, the distant look replaced by something warmer, more present. But you did not apologize; you had learned, over your time together, that apologizing for your thoughts only made him more suspicious. Instead, you reached out and straightened the collar of his doublet, letting your fingers brush the skin of his throat, a gesture of casual intimacy that you knew he craved even if he would never admit it.

"I was thinking about how happy she looks," you said, and it was the truth, or a version of it. "You make her happy, Aerion. You know that, don't you?"

He grunted, but you caught the flicker of satisfaction that crossed his features before he could suppress it. Praise. He could never get enough of it, had been starved for it his entire life, and you had learned to feed him with the same regularity you fed your daughter. All this time, and he still turned toward your words like a flower toward the sun, drinking in every affirmation, every acknowledgment, every whispered you are magnificent, you are powerful, you are loved.

"She's a dragon," Aerion said, adjusting Rhaenyra on his hip with practiced ease. "Dragons don't get sad. They incinerate the things that upset them."

"Papa," Rhaenyra said, with the sudden, intense solemnity that only a two-year-old can muster, "I want to incinerate something."

Aerion threw back his head and laughed. A real laugh, full throated and genuine, the kind of laugh that transformed his sharp features into something almost boyish, almost approachable. "That's my girl," he said, and pressed a kiss to her forehead with an uncharacteristic tenderness. "That's my little dragon. We'll find you something to burn later."

You watched them, this strange, fierce man and this strange, fierce child, and your heart performed that complicated maneuver it had been practicing for years, folding affection and exasperation and hope and fear all into one impossible shape.

This is real, you told yourself. Whatever else is happening, whatever else they say about us, this is real. He is my Aerion, and she is my daughter, and this is my life, and it is real.

Aerion shifted Rhaenyra to his other arm and extended his free hand toward you. His earlier tension seemed to have eased, replaced by something almost eager, a restless energy that crackled just beneath his skin.

"There's a play tonight," he said. "Some puppeteers have set up in the village. I've heard it's about a dragon." His mouth curved into that sharp, knowing smile you had come to recognize. "I thought we might go after supper. You and me and the little dragon here. She should see something worthy of her name."

Rhaenyra's head came up at the word dragon, her violet eyes bright. "A dragon play, Papa?"

"A dragon play," Aerion confirmed, tweaking her nose. "With fire and scales and everything a proper dragon ought to have. Would you like that?"

Rhaenyra's shriek of delight was answer enough. She bounced in his arms, clapping her small hands together, already launching into a stream of questions about whether the dragon would be big or small, whether it would breathe real fire, whether she could meet it afterward and be its friend.

You smiled, and this time there was no calculation in it at all. Aerion was trying. In his own strange, possessive way, he was trying. He had brought you to Ashford to wound his cousin, yes. He had paraded you in front of his family like a trophy, yes. But he was also here, in this sunlit corridor, planning an evening at a play with his paramour and his bastard daughter, and there was something in his face that you had learned to recognize as hope.

"That sounds wonderful," you said, and meant it. "Rhaenyra will be talking about it for weeks."

"She'll be talking about it regardless," Aerion said dryly. "The child never stops talking. She gets that from you."

"From me?" You pressed a hand to your chest in mock offense. "I am the very soul of silence, my prince."

Aerion snorted. It was an undignified sound, entirely at odds with the sharp, cruel prince the rest of the world knew. "You are a terrible liar, Y/N. You always have been."

But he was smiling when he said it, and when he offered you his arm, you took it without hesitation. Rhaenyra was still chattering about dragons, her small voice filling the corridor with improbable questions and even more improbable declarations. Aerion answered her with patience, with warmth, with the particular tenderness he reserved for her alone.

And you walked beside them through the halls of Ashford Castle, your hand on Aerion's arm, your daughter's laughter echoing off the stones, and for this moment, this single bright moment, you let yourself believe that everything would be all right.

—

The screaming started before you understood what was happening.

One moment there had been music, the thin reedy piping of a flute and the thump of a hand drum, and Rhaenyra had been bouncing on your hip with her small hands clapping together in delight. The painted dragon had been swaying above the stage on its strings, its wings catching the torchlight, its jaws opening and closing in roar while the puppeteer below made a rumbling growl deep in her throat to give it voice. Rhaenyra had laughed. You could still hear the echo of that laugh, bright and silver and utterly without fear.

Then Aerion and the white cloaks moved, and the world splintered. The first tent pole went down with a sound like a thunderclap. Silk billowed inward, red and gold and orange, catching the torchlight and becoming flame even as it fell. People were screaming. People were running. A woman stumbled into you from behind and you curled around Rhaenyra on pure instinct, your spine curving, your arms locking, your body becoming a shell with your daughter at its center. Someone's elbow drove into your ribs and you felt something grind and shift and send a bright white bolt of pain up your side.

"Mama," Rhaenyra whimpered, and her voice was small, so terribly small, the voice of a child who did not understand why the world had turned cruel between one heartbeat and the next. "Mama, I want to go. I want to go home."

"Shh," you breathed into her hair, though your own voice was shaking so badly the word hardly had a shape. "Shh, my love, my dragon, Mama's here. Mama's got you. Close your eyes, sweetling. Close your eyes and it will be over soon."

She buried her face in the curve of your throat. You could feel her tears, hot and wet, soaking through the silk of your gown. You could feel her heart beating against your chest, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone. You could feel every tremor that ran through her small body, and each one was a knife slipped between your ribs.

The guard Aerion had assigned to you stood at your back like a statue carved from ice. Ser Harrold, his name was, you had begged him to escort you from the pavilion the moment the violence began. You had turned to him with Rhaenyra clutched against your chest and pleaded with him to let you leave, to let you take your daughter somewhere safe, somewhere the screaming did not reach.

He had looked at you with eyes that held no more warmth than a winter pond. "Prince's orders," he had said, and the words fell from his mouth like stones dropped into still water. "You stay until he says otherwise."

"But she's frightened," you had said, and you had hated the tremor in your voice, hated the way it made you sound weak when you needed to be strong. "She's two years old, Ser Harrold. She doesn't understand what's happening. Please."

"Prince's orders," he had repeated, and he had not looked at you again.

On the stage, Aerion had the puppeteer by the wrist. She was young. That was the detail that lodged itself in your memory like a splinter, the detail that would come back to you in the dark hours of the night for years afterward. She was young, perhaps your age. Her mouth was open in a scream that you could not hear over the roaring of the crowd, and her free hand was beating uselessly against Aerion's chest, against his arm, against the unyielding iron of his grip.

She had made a dragon out of paint and wood and string. She had painted scales on its wings with her own hands, had worked its jaws with her own fingers, had given it a voice that made children laugh and grown men cheer. She had made the terrible, fatal mistake of letting her dragon be killed in the story she told. The knight had slain it with his sword and the audience had gasped and clapped and cheered the hero's victory.

Aerion had not cheered. Aerion had stared with a face like a thunderhead, and then the Kingsguard had begun to move, and now he was on the stage with the puppeteer's wrist in his hand and her dragon lying forgotten at his feet.

He started with her fingers. The first one broke with a sound like a dry branch snapping underfoot in the depths of winter. It was surprisingly quiet, that sound, almost delicate, almost polite. The puppeteer's index finger bent backward at an angle that made your stomach contract violently, and she screamed, a high thin shriek that cut through the chaos of the pavilion like a blade through silk.

Rhaenyra flinched in your arms. "Mama," she whimpered, "why is the lady screaming? Is she hurt? Mama, I want to go."

"Close your eyes, sweetling," you whispered again, and your voice was breaking now, splintering into pieces you could not put back together. "Close your eyes and think of something nice. Think of the roses in the garden. Think of the pink flower you picked. Think of anything but this."

The second finger broke wetter than the first. A muffled, grinding crack that seemed to echo in the hollow of your chest. The puppeteer's legs gave out beneath her, but Aerion held her up by her ruined hand,ìand his face, his beautiful face that you had kissed and praised and learned to love, was alight with something that went beyond cruelty into a territory you had no name for.

Pleasure. A bright, burning pleasure that lit him from within like a lantern lights a room. His violet eyes were wide and shining, his lips parted slightly around his bloodied teeth, his breath coming in short sharp bursts that were almost sexual in their rhythm. He was enjoying this. He was enjoying this in a way he had never enjoyed a single moment of the years you had spent together, and the realization crashed into you like a wave into rocks, cold and brutal and undeniable.

You love him, you had thought earlier in the gardens. No, you hate him. That was the horror of it, the horror that would never leave you no matter how many years passed. You loved him, you loved the father of your child, you loved the man who had burned down a brothel for you. You loved him, and he was standing on a stage in a village called Ashford, breaking a girl's fingers one by one because her puppet show had insulted his pride.

The third finger made a sound like a walnut being crushed in a vise.

"Please," you heard yourself saying, and you did not know if you were speaking to Aerion or to Ser Harrold or to the gods who had never listened to a single prayer you had ever sent their way. "Please, someone stop him. Someone make him stop."

Ser Harrold's hand closed around your upper arm, immobilizing you. He was wearing gauntlets, the leather stiff and unyielding against your skin. "Hold still," he said, and his voice was the voice of a man who had learned long ago that obedience was safer than conscience.

The puppeteer's fourth finger snapped.

Then the giant came out of the crowd. His hair was dirty blonde, cut short against his skull in a way that suggested practicality rather than fashion, and it was matted with sweat and dust and something that might have been blood. His face was a shadowed blur in the torchlight, his features obscured by the angle and the distance and the chaos, but his size. Gods above and below, his size.

He was enormous. Seven feet of bone and muscle and righteous fury, with shoulders broad enough to block out the firelight behind him and hands the size of dinner plates curled into fists at his sides. He did not slow. He did not hesitate. He cleared the edge of the stage in a single stride, and then he was on Aerion, and his fist was connecting with the prince's face with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil.

Aerion staggered backward. His grip on the puppeteer's wrist broke, and she crumpled to the stage in a heap of brown wool and ruined hands, sobbing. Blood flew from Aerion's mouth in a dark arc that caught the torchlight and glittered like rubies scattered across the stage. He hit the wooden planking hard, his head snapping back against the boards, and for one impossible, crystalline moment, the entire pavilion went silent.

Then the Kingsguard moved. They came from every direction at once, white cloaks streaming behind them like wings, white enameled armor flashing in the firelight. Six of them. Seven. More, perhaps. They swarmed the big man the way wolves swarm a bear, throwing themselves onto his back and his arms and his legs, trying to drag him down by sheer weight of numbers. He fought them. Gods, he fought them. You saw one Kingsguard reel backward with blood pouring from the visor of his helm. You saw another take an elbow to the throat and go down choking, clawing at his gorget. You saw the big man's fists rise and fall and rise again with the relentless rhythm of a blacksmith's hammer, each blow carrying the weight of a righteous anger that no amount of white armor could withstand.

But there were too many. There were always too many. They dragged at his legs and his arms and his neck, six white cloaked knights and then seven and then eight, and still he nearly threw them off, still he nearly got free, still he nearly made it back to his feet with his massive hands reaching for Aerion again. Then one of the Kingsguard drove the pommel of his sword into the back of the big man's skull, and his knees buckled. Another kicked his legs out from under him. Another twisted his arm behind his back at an angle that made the joint scream in protest even from where you stood watching.

They forced him to his knees on the stage. One of them, a tall man with a captain's bars on his white cloak, grabbed a fistful of that dirty blonde hair and yanked his head back, forcing his face up into the torchlight.

Aerion rose to his feet. He moved slowly, carefully, the way a man moves when he is holding onto his composure by the thinnest of threads. His lip was split open, a gash that ran from the corner of his mouth nearly to his chin. Blood sheeted down his jaw and dripped onto the white silk of his collar, staining it crimson. He probed at his teeth with his tongue, grimaced, and spat a wad of blood and saliva onto the stage. Something small and white and hard skittered across the wooden boards.

“Why did you throw your life away for this whore” Aerion said.

"You've loosened one of my teeth,"

The pavilion had gone very quiet. The screaming had stopped, or perhaps it had simply receded to a distance where it could no longer reach you. The only sounds were the crackle of the torches, the soft sobbing of the puppeteer still huddled on the stage, and the ragged, labored breathing of the big man as he knelt in the grip of the Kingsguard. Aerion's voice was soft, almost conversational, the voice of a man discussing the weather over a cup of wine. It was more terrifying than any scream could have been.

"So," Aerion continued, prodding at his mouth again with his thumb and forefinger, examining the blood that came away, "we'll start by breaking out all of yours."

"No." The word came out of your mouth before you could stop it, a reflex as automatic as breathing, as instinctive as flinching from an open flame. "Aerion, no."

He did not look at you. He was not capable of hearing you, not in this state, not with the blood of a puppet show on his hands and the taste of his own tooth in his mouth. He was looking at the big man the way a child looks at an insect he has caught in a jar. Curious. Utterly without pity.

One of the Kingsguard, the captain with his hand still fisted in the big man's hair, forced his head down toward the stage. Another moved to stand on either side of him, gripping his shoulders, pinning him in place. A third stepped forward, removing his gauntlets one finger at a time, flexing his bare hands with the deliberate precision of a man preparing to perform a task that required both strength and care.

"Hold him still," Aerion said. "I want to watch."

Rhaenyra was sobbing in earnest now, her small body shaking with the force of her terror. She did not understand what was happening. She understood only that her father was on the stage and there was blood on his face and the safe bright world of the puppet show had collapsed into screaming and white cloaks and a big man on his knees who was about to be hurt in a way she had no language for.

"Mama," she wept, "Mama, I want Papa to stop, make Papa stop, please make him stop."

"I can't," you whispered into her hair, and the admission was a wound that would never fully heal. "I can't, sweetling. Mama can't make him stop. Close your eyes. Close your eyes and don't look."

The Kingsguard with the bare hands stepped forward. He was flexing his fingers, working the joints loose, his movements unhurried and methodical. The captain still had the big man's head forced down at the angle required for what was about to happen. The other guards braced themselves, digging their heels into the wooden stage, preparing for the struggle they knew would come.

The big man lifted his head against the pressure of the captain's grip. It was a monumental effort; you could see the muscles of his neck straining, the veins standing out like cords, the sweat cutting tracks through the blood and dirt on his face. He lifted his head, and the torchlight fell full upon his features for the first time.

You saw his face.

Time did not slow. It did not fade. It stopped. It stopped completely, absolutely, as if some vast and terrible hand had reached down from the heavens and seized the mechanism of the world itself and held it motionless. The torches froze mid-flicker. The screaming faded to a hum that existed somewhere beyond the boundaries of hearing. The blood in your veins turned to ice and then to fire and then to something that had no name at all.

You knew that face. You knew the hands. The enormous hands that had lifted you from your mother's deathbed, that had carried you through the cold morning while the other whores watched with pity and disgust, that had wrapped you in a threadbare blanket and held you against his chest while he promised you in a cracking boy's voice that he would always, always have you.

Dunk. He was alive. He was on his knees on a stage in a village called Ashford with a Kingsguard's hand in his hair and another Kingsguard's bare knuckles preparing to break his teeth out of his skull one by one, and he was alive.

"Dunk."

You did not recognize your own voice. It did not sound like a voice at all. It sounded like something that had been torn out of you by the roots, something that had been buried so deep and so long that pulling it free left a bleeding hollow in the center of your chest.

"Dunk."

Louder this time. Louder, and it cracked on the second syllable, cracked like your mother's laugh had cracked, like a bell that had been rung too hard and too long and had nothing left inside it but splinters.

"DUNK."

Time restarted itself with a violence that made your vision swim. The torches flared back to life. The screaming returned, a wave of sound that crashed over you and through you and left you gasping. The Kingsguard hesitated, their hands pausing on their prisoner, their white helms turning toward you with the synchronized precision of hunting dogs catching a scent.

Dunk turned his head. The captain still had his fist twisted in his hair, still had his neck bent at that brutal angle, but Dunk turned his head against that grip with the slow, inexorable force of a continent shifting, and he looked at you.

His eyes found yours across the chaos of the ruined tent. You saw the recognition hit him. Saw it travel through his body like a physical blow, a shock wave that started in his eyes and rippled outward through his shoulders, his chest, his hands. His face went slack with it, the tension draining out of his jaw and his brow, replaced by something that was too raw and too vast to be called surprise. It was disbelief. It was hope, the kind of hope that had been dead for so long its resurrection was indistinguishable from agony. It was joy and grief and guilt and love, all of them crashing together in the space of a single heartbeat.

His mouth moved. Formed the shape of your name. You could not hear it over the screaming, over the roaring of your own blood in your ears, but you saw it, saw the way his lips shaped the syllables he had not spoken in years, the name he had called across a hundred alleys and a hundred dark streets while he searched for you, the name he had whispered to himself in the long nights when he believed you were dead and gone and never coming back.

He surged against the guards holding him. Not fighting to escape now. Fighting to get to you. His massive shoulders bunched and heaved, nearly throwing off the two Kingsguard who were gripping his arms. A third lunged in to reinforce them, his white cloak tangling around his legs in his haste. Dunk did not seem to notice. He did not seem to feel the hands dragging at him or the knees pressing into his back or the captain's fist still grinding into his scalp. He was looking at you and only at you, and he was trying to reach you, trying to cross the impossible distance between the stage and the place where you stood with Rhaenyra in your arms.

You surged forward to meet him. You did not think about it. You did not calculate the odds or weigh the consequences. Your body moved before your mind could catch up, driven by an instinct older than thought, older than fear, older than anything you had learned in the years since they took you from the festival. Your brother was here. Your brother was alive.

Ser Harrold's arm locked around your waist like an iron bar. "Hold still," he snarled, and he was no longer calm now, no longer indifferent. He was struggling to hold you, struggling to keep his grip on a woman who had spent years learning to be still and silent and obedient and had finally, in this single shattering moment, forgotten how.

"Let me go!" The words tore out of your throat with a force that made your vision white out at the edges. Rhaenyra was screaming in your arms, her small fists beating against your shoulders, her voice a thin high wail that you could barely hear over the roaring in your ears. "Let me go, that's my brother, that's my brother, let me GO!"

"Aerion!" You were screaming his name now, the name of the man you loved, the name of the monster on the stage, the name of the only person in this pavilion who had the power to make the nightmare stop. "Aerion, please, please, you have to stop, he's my brother,please, Aerion, PLEASE!"

Aerion turned to look at you.

His face was still smeared with blood, his lip still split and swollen, his violet eyes still bright with the pleasure of the violence he had been orchestrating. But something flickered in their depths when he saw your face, when he registered the raw, unvarnished desperation in your voice. Confusion first. Then irritation, a flicker of the familiar petulance that crossed his features whenever something did not go the way he had planned. And then something else, something that chilled you more than any cruelty could have done.

Something calculating.

"What," he said, and his voice was a blade drawn slowly across a whetstone, "the fuck are you doing? What is she screaming about?"

You could barely form the words. Your throat was raw, your chest heaving, your arms trembling with the effort of holding Rhaenyra while Ser Harrold's grip threatened to crack your ribs. But you forced them out, forced them past the sobs that were building in your chest, forced them into the space between you and the man who held your brother's life in his bloodstained hands.

"He's my brother. He's my brother, Aerion." Your voice cracked on his name, splintered into something that was half a plea and half a prayer. "The brother I told you about. Dunk. The one I thought was dead. The one who raised me. Please. Please don't hurt him. I'll do anything. I'll give you anything. Just please, Aerion, please don't hurt my brother."

Something moved in Aerion's face. A muscle in his jaw jumped. His eyes narrowed, the bright pleasure of the violence draining out of them, replaced by something harder and colder and infinitely more dangerous. He looked at you, and he looked at Dunk, and he looked back at you, and you could see him putting the pieces together. The brother you had wept for in the dark hours of the night, the brother whose name you had whispered in your sleep, the brother Aerion had forbidden you from ever mentioning again.

The brother who was now on his knees in front of him, bloodied and defiant, the man who had dared to strike a prince of the blood, and his expression closed like a door slamming shut in a winter gale.

"Take her back to her chamber," Aerion said. He was not looking at you anymore. He was looking at Dunk, and his voice was utterly without warmth, utterly without the history that stretched between you, utterly without anything that might have been mistaken for mercy. "Lock the door. No one goes in or out until I give the order."

"No." The word was barely a whisper. Ser Harrold was already dragging you backward, his arm still locked around your waist, his heels digging into the trampled grass of the pavilion floor. "Aerion, no, please, you can't do this."

"Take the child to the nursery," Aerion continued, as if you had not spoken, as if your voice did not exist, as if you were already gone. "She does not need to see any more of this. Make sure she stays there."

"No!" The scream that tore out of you was not a sound. It was a living thing, a creature with claws and teeth and a heart full of desperation, and it ripped its way out of your throat and into the torchlit air of the pavilion with a force that made the nearest Kingsguard flinch. "You can't separate us! She's my daughter! She's MY daughter!"

Rhaenyra was shrieking now, a high thin sound that rose above the chaos like a needle sliding into flesh. Her arms were wrapped around your neck so tightly that you could feel her small fingernails digging crescents into your skin, and her legs were locked around your waist, and her face was buried in the curve of your shoulder, and she was screaming, screaming, screaming. "Mama, Mama, don't let them take me, Mama, please, I want to stay with you, Mama, MAMA!"

Ser Harrold was dragging you backward. Another guard, a man in the pale grey of Prince Maekar's household, was trying to untangle Rhaenyra from your arms. His hands were gentle, gentler than you had expected, but that gentleness made it worse somehow, made it more real, made it a kindness that was not a kindness at all. He was murmuring something to Rhaenyra, some meaningless reassurance that neither you nor she could hear over the screaming, and his fingers were prying at her small grip one digit at a time.

"Don't," you sobbed. "Don't take her. Please. Please don't take my daughter."

But your arms were being pulled backward, and your strength was failing, and Rhaenyra's grip was slipping. You felt her fingers lose their hold on your dress. Felt the warmth of her body pulled away from yours. Felt the cold air rush in to fill the space where she had been, and that cold was worse than any physical pain, worse than the bruises blooming on your arm where Ser Harrold held you, worse than the raw burning in your throat from screaming, worse than anything you had endured in the brothel or the alley or the long dark nights when you believed your brother was dead.

"RHAENYRA!"

She was being carried away, still reaching for you over the guard's shoulder, her silver-gold hair bright as a candle flame in the torchlight, her violet eyes wide and streaming with tears. "Mama! I want my mama! Give me back my mama!"

You fought. You fought the way Dunk had fought, with every ounce of strength in your body, with your teeth and your nails and your fury. You twisted in Ser Harrold's grip and raked your nails across his face, felt the skin of his cheek tear beneath your fingers, felt the hot wet rush of his blood against your palm. He cursed and tightened his hold, and something in your side gave way with a sharp bright spike of agony, but you did not stop. You could not stop. Your daughter was being taken from you, your brother was on his knees with a prince's boot on his neck, and the world was ending, and you could not stop.

And then, cutting through the chaos like a blade through silk, a young voice rang out across the pavilion.

"No! Don't touch him!"

Everyone froze. The Kingsguard with his bare hands paused mid-motion, his knuckles inches from Dunk's clenched jaw. The captain's grip on Dunk's hair loosened slightly in surprise. Even Aerion turned, his bloodied mouth twisting into an expression of annoyed bewilderment.

The boy who stepped forward from the chaos of the crowd was small, skinny, with a shaved head that gleamed in the torchlight like a polished stone. He could not have been more than nine or ten years old, and he moved with the absolute, unshakeable confidence of someone who had never been told that the world did not bend to his will. He was bald and his clothes were the roughspun of a stable boy, dirty and sweat-stained, but he wore them like a prince wearing borrowed silks.

Dunk's voice was a ragged gasp, desperate and afraid in a way it had not been when the Kingsguard were beating him. "You stupid boy! Hold your tongue or they'll hurt you."

The boy did not slow. He did not even glance at Dunk. His eyes were fixed on Aerion, and there was something in them that made the prince's expression flicker with the first hint of uncertainty you had seen all night.

"No, they won't," the boy said, and his voice was calm, steady, the voice of someone stating a fact as immutable as the rising of the sun. "If they do, they'll answer to my father."

He stepped past the Kingsguard as if they were not there, as if the white cloaks and the white armor and the drawn swords were no more substantial than morning mist. He stopped directly in front of Aerion, this small bald boy in dirty clothes, and he lifted his chin and looked the prince full in the face.

"Let go of him," the boy commanded. "Wate, Yorkel, do as I say."

And the Kingsguard obeyed.

The captain released Dunk's hair. The other guards stepped back, their hands falling away from his arms and shoulders, their white helms inclining slightly in gestures of deference that stopped your heart in your chest. They knew this boy. They knew him, and they obeyed him, and that could only mean one thing.

Aerion stared at the boy. His violet eyes narrowed, studying the shaved head, the dirty clothes, the small defiant face that was upturned to his own. And then, slowly, recognition dawned across his bloodied features like a sluggish sunrise. It was followed immediately by annoyance, a deep and profound irritation that seemed to cut through even the pleasure he had been taking in the violence moments before.

"You impudent little rat," Aerion said. His voice dripped with contempt, but beneath it lurked something else, something that sounded almost like wariness. "What's happened to your hair?"

The boy did not flinch. He did not blink. He looked at Aerion with the steady, unblinking gaze of someone who had spent his entire life watching and learning and understanding things that others missed, and when he spoke, his voice carried the unmistakable weight of royal blood.

"I cut it off, brother," he said. "I didn't want to look like you."

Brother. The word landed in the center of the pavilion like a stone dropped into still water. Brother. This boy, this small bald boy in stable clothes, was Aerion's brother. Which meant he was Prince Aegon Targaryen, the youngest of Prince Maekar's sons, the one you had glimpsed occasionally in the corridors of Summerhall, the one who had looked at you like you were a puzzle he was trying to solve.

And he had just intervened to save your brother's life. The revelation halted the attack instantly. The Kingsguard could not carry out Aerion's orders now. Not against a man who was connected, through his squire, to the royal family. Not against a man who was protected by a prince of the blood, however young and however bald and however inexplicably dressed in the roughspun of a stable hand. The captain stepped back further, his white cloak settling around him like folded wings, and the other guards followed suit, leaving Dunk kneeling alone on the stage.

Aerion's face was a study in frustration. The pleasure had drained out of him entirely now, replaced by a seething, impotent fury that he could not express without defying his own brother, his own blood, in front of half a dozen witnesses. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. The blood from his split lip still dripped down his chin, and his violet eyes were dark with a rage that had no outlet.

But he was a prince, and he knew the rules, and striking a man who was connected to the royal family was a crime that even he could not simply burn his way out of.

"Take him to the cells," Aerion said finally, and his voice was flat and cold and utterly drained of the pleasure that had animated it before. "He struck a prince of the blood. That crime remains regardless of whose squire the little rat has chosen to become. He will await trial and judgment, and lock her in her chamber."

Ser Harrold hauled you backward through the ruins of the pavilion. Your legs gave out beneath you, and he dragged you the rest of the way, your heels scraping furrows in the trampled grass, your head lolling against his shoulder, your voice reduced to a raw and wordless keening that did not stop. You passed overturned benches. You passed torn silk and scattered cushions and a child's abandoned shoe.

The last thing you saw before the tent flap closed behind you was Aerion. He was still standing on the stage, his red tunic splattered with blood, his face a mask of cold, distant contemplation. He was not looking at you. He was looking at the place where Dunk had disappeared, and there was something in his expression that you had never seen before. Something that went beyond jealousy, beyond possessiveness, beyond the casual cruelty of a man who had never been denied anything.

He looked like a dragon counting its hoard, and finding a single coin out of place.

—

The door slammed shut behind you with a finality that echoed through your bones.

You had screamed until your voice gave out. You had beaten your fists against the iron banded oak until your knuckles split and bled, leaving dark smears on the wood that looked like accusations. You had thrown yourself at the door again and again, your shoulder bruising, your strength ebbing, until finally your legs had given way beneath you and you had slid to the cold stone floor with your back against the unforgiving wood and your face buried in your bleeding hands.

Rhaenyra was gone. Dunk was gone. Everyone you had ever loved had been ripped away from you in the space of a single night, and you were locked in a borrowed chamber in a borrowed castle with nothing but the silence and the dark and the terrible, circling thoughts that would not let you rest.

You pressed your forehead against your knees and tried to breathe.The hours crawled past like wounded animals dragging themselves toward death. You did not move from your place against the door. You did not lie down on the bed, though it was soft and wide and covered in Ashford's finest linens. You did not drink the water that had been left on the side table, though your throat was raw and burning from screaming. You simply sat, curled into yourself, and waited.

For Aerion. For news. For something, anything, that would tell you what was going to happen next. You thought about the look on Dunk's face when he recognized you. The shock. The joy. The desperate, agonized love. What must he have thought? What must he have assumed about you, about your life, about the choices that had led you to this place?

The shame of it burned in your chest like swallowed fire.

You did not know how long you sat there. It might have been hours. It might have been minutes. Time had lost all meaning in the darkness of the chamber, with the candles unlit and the fire unbuilt and the only light coming from the pale sliver of moon that crept through the narrow window high in the wall. But eventually, eventually, you heard the sound you had been dreading and hoping for in equal measure.

Footsteps in the corridor. Boots on stone, deliberate and unhurried, the particular cadence of a man who knew that the world would wait for him. The jingle of a sword at the hip. The faint, almost imperceptible sound of a key turning in a lock.

The door swung inward, and Aerion Targaryen stepped into the room.

He had cleaned the blood from his face since you last saw him. His lip was still swollen. His silver gold hair had been combed back from his face, still damp from washing. He had changed his clothes; replaced by a simple black doublet that made his pale skin look almost luminous in the moonlight. He looked almost calm. Almost controlled. But his violet eyes were too bright, too sharp, the eyes of a man who was holding onto his composure by the thinnest of threads.

He closed the door behind him. You heard the lock click into place.

"My dragon," you said, and your voice came out as a croak, raw and broken from screaming. You tried to rise to your feet, but your legs would not hold you, so you remained on the floor, your back against the wall, your hands still stained with your own blood. "Aerion, please. Please tell me what's happening. My brother. Where is my brother? Is he all right? What are they going to do to him?"

The change that came over Aerion's face was instantaneous and terrifying. The careful mask of composure cracked like ice hit by a hammer. His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. His hands, which had been relaxed at his sides, curled slowly into fists.

"I come to you," he said, and his voice was a blade being drawn from its sheath, slow and deliberate and full of promise, "after being attacked in front of half the nobility of the Reach. My lip is split open. My tooth is loose in my skull. My dignity has been trampled by some hedge knight with dirt under his fingernails and hay in his hair. And the first words out of your mouth are not 'Are you all right, my prince?' Not 'Let me tend your wounds, my love.' Not a single word of comfort or concern for me, the man who saved you from a brothel, the father of your child, the prince who has kept you fed and clothed and protected for years."

He took a step toward you. Then another. His shadow fell across you like a shroud, blocking out the pale moonlight, plunging you into darkness.

"Your first words," he said, and his voice was rising now, climbing toward a register you had learned to fear, "are about him. A stranger. A man who struck me. A man who loosened my tooth and spilled my blood in front of the Kingsguard. That is who you ask about. That is who you care about. Not me. Not your prince. Not the father of your child. Him."

"He's not a stranger," you said, and your voice was barely a whisper. You knew you should stop. You knew you should placate him, soothe him, tell him everything he wanted to hear. That was what you had done for years, what you had become so skilled at doing. But you could not. Not tonight. Not with Dunk's face still burned into your memory like a brand. "He's my brother, Aerion. He's my brother. He raised me. He protected me, and you have him locked in a cell like a criminal. Please. Please, just tell me he's all right. Just tell me you haven't hurt him."

Aerion stared at you for a long moment. The torch from the corridor outside cast his shadow long and dark across the floor, stretching toward you like a grasping hand. His breathing was audible in the silence, harsh and uneven, the breathing of a man who was losing a battle with his own rage.

"You love him," he said finally. The words were flat, toneless, utterly without inflection. "This brother of yours. This hedge knight with his dirty hands and his dirty hair. You love him more than you love me."

"That's not true," you said, and it was the truth and it was a lie and it was everything in between. "I love you, Aerion. You know I love you. But he's my brother. He's my blood. I thought he was dead. I mourned him for years. And now he's here, and he's alive, and I just want to know that he's safe. That's all. I just want to know that he's safe. Please."

"Safe." Aerion repeated the word as if it were a foreign language, a concept he had heard described but never experienced. "Safe. You want to know if the man who struck me is safe. You want to know if the man who humiliated me in front of my family and my father is safe."

He laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. It was the sound of something breaking.

"You're mine," he said, and his voice cracked on the word, splintering into something that was half rage and half desperation. "You have been mine since the night I bought you. I paid fifty gold dragons for you. I burned down a brothel for you. I gave you a home, a place in my household, a daughter who bears my name. I have given you everything. Everything. And you stand there, bleeding on my floor, asking about another man."

"I'm not standing," you whispered, and you did not know why that was the detail you chose to focus on. He crossed the distance between you in three swift strides. His hand closed around your arm, hauling you upright with a strength that would leave bruises, and you cried out as the blood rushed back to your legs and the pain in your side flared white hot.

"You are mine," he said again, and his face was inches from yours, his violet eyes blazing with a fire you had seen directed at others but never, never at you. Not like this. Not with this intensity. Not with this complete and absolute absence of restraint. "Say it. Say you're mine."

"I'm yours," you gasped. His grip on your arm was agony, his fingers digging into the bruises Ser Harrold had left, and tears were streaming down your face. "Aerion, please, you're hurting me."

"Good." He shook you, once, hard enough that your head snapped back and hit the stone wall behind you. Stars burst across your vision. "Good. Maybe if I hurt you enough, you'll remember who you belong to. Maybe if I hurt you enough, you'll stop asking about other men. Maybe if I hurt you enough, you'll finally understand that the only way you leave me is in a shroud."

"My brother," you sobbed. "He's my brother. Not another man. My brother. Please, Aerion, please try to understand."

"I understand perfectly." His free hand came up to grip your chin, forcing your face toward his, forcing you to look into his eyes. "I understand that you have spent years telling me you loved me while you dreamed of someone else. I understand that the moment he appeared, you forgot everything I have done for you. I understand that you are a whore I pulled from a brothel, and no matter how many silk dresses I put on you, no matter how much of myself I pour into you, you will never, ever stop being what you are."

The words hit you like physical blows. Each one was a fist to the gut, a slap to the face, a knife slipped between your ribs. You had known, intellectually, that this was how he saw you. You had always known. But hearing it spoken aloud, hearing it thrown at you like an accusation, like a crime you had committed against him simply by existing, was something else entirely.

"Aerion," you whispered, and your voice was so small, so broken, that you barely recognized it as your own. "I have never been unfaithful to you. I have never looked at another man. I have never wanted anyone but you. He is my brother. My brother. Why can't you understand that?"

"Because I don't care!" He screamed the words directly into your face, his spittle flecking your cheeks, his breath hot and sour with wine and blood. "I don't care who he is! I don't care if he's your brother or your father or your long lost lover! The moment you chose him over me, the moment you screamed his name instead of mine, the moment you fought my guards and clawed Ser Harrold's face to try to reach him, you made your choice! And now you will live with it!"

His hand released your chin and came across your face with a crack that seemed to echo off the stone walls.

The backhand caught you across the cheekbone, hard enough to snap your head to the side, hard enough to send a spray of blood from your already split lip, hard enough that your legs gave out beneath you entirely. You fell. You did not fall gracefully, did not fall the way women fell in the songs Dunk used to tell you, floating down like petals on a breeze. You fell like a sack of grain, heavy and graceless, your hip striking the stone floor with a jolt of pain that made you gasp, your palms scraping raw against the cold flagstones, your already injured side screaming in protest as you landed.

You lay there for a moment, stunned. The taste of blood filled your mouth, copper and salt and something that might have been despair. The world swam in and out of focus. The moonlight from the window seemed very far away, a distant silver promise of a world that existed somewhere beyond this room, beyond this night, beyond the man who was standing over you with his chest heaving and his eyes blazing.

Then he was on top of you. His weight pressed you into the cold stone floor, heavy and immovable, the weight of a man who had trained with sword and shield and lance, the weight of a prince who had never been denied anything in his life. His knees pinned your thighs. One hand caught both of your wrists and forced them above your head, pressing them into the stone with a grip that made your fingers go numb. His other hand was at your throat, not squeezing, not yet, just resting there, a reminder, a threat, a promise.

"You're my whore," he said, and his voice was a growl, low and guttural and utterly without the cultured refinement he wore like armor in the daylight. "Mine. You have been mine since the night I bought you, and you will be mine until the day you die. Do you understand? Do you understand what that means?"

"Get off me," you gasped. Your voice was barely audible, strangled by the hand at your throat and the weight on your chest. "Aerion, please, get off me, I can't breathe."

"It means," he continued, as if you had not spoken, as if your words were less than nothing, as if your voice did not exist in any way that mattered, "that I own you. Your body. Your heart. Your soul. Every breath you take, you take because I allow it. Every night you sleep in a warm bed, you sleep there because I permit it. Every moment you spend with our daughter, you spend because I have chosen to let you. And the only way you leave me, the only way you ever leave me, is if you are dead. Do you understand? Dead."

He was tearing at your dress as he spoke, the silk that he had given you, the dress he had chosen, the dress you had worn to the puppet show, the dress Rhaenyra's tears had soaked through. You heard the fabric rip, felt the cold air on your skin, and you found what remained of your strength and pushed against him. Your hands were still pinned above your head, but you bucked your hips, twisted your body, tried to throw him off the way Dunk had thrown off the Kingsguard.

It was useless. It was always useless. He was stronger than you, heavier than you, and he had the advantage of gravity and rage and years of training in violence that you had never received. He pressed you back down against the stone, and his hand left your throat to grip your jaw, forcing your face toward his, forcing you to look into his eyes.

"Say it," he demanded. "Say you're mine. Say you belong to me. Say that no one else matters. Not your brother. Not anyone. Say it."

You did not say it. You could not say it. The words were locked in your throat, trapped behind the tears and the blood and the terrible, crushing weight of what was happening to you.

You tried to squeeze your legs shut, but his knee drove between them, forcing them wide. He was hard and the sight of his cock made your stomach turn.

"Look at it," he hissed, grabbing a fistful of your hair and yanking your head forward. "Look at what you made me do. This is your fault. If you had just obeyed—"

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. He pressed the head of his cock against your entrance, already sore and swollen from the first time, and you whimpered, a high, broken sound that seemed to please him. He held there, just barely breaching you, letting you feel the pressure, the promise of invasion.

"Please," you whispered, your voice cracked and raw. "Please, Aerion, please don't—"

He thrust.

The sound you made was not a scream. It was something worse, a choked, guttural sob that tore from your throat as he buried himself inside you in one brutal push. The angle was wrong, too deep, too dry despite the precum already coating your thighs. You felt every ridge and vein of his cock as it forced its way deeper, splitting you open, claiming space that did not want him.

He paused, buried to the hilt, and let out a low groan that was almost human. Almost tender. Then he began to move.

Not fast. Not yet. He fucked you slowly, deliberately, with a cruelty that made every inch of the motion deliberate. He pulled almost all the way out, then slid back in with excruciating leisure, watching your face contort with each stroke. His eyes were locked on yours, challenging you to look away.

You did. You turned your head, pressing your cheek against the cold stone, staring at a crack in the floor until your vision blurred. But he would not allow that. He grabbed your jaw, forced your face back to his.

"Watch," he commanded. "Watch me take what is mine."

His pace increased. The slow, torturous rhythm gave way to a sharp, punishing fucking that drove the air from your lungs with every slam of his hips. The wet slap of skin against skin echoed off the walls, mingling with your ragged breaths and his grunts. He leaned down, his chest pressing against yours, and bit your shoulder, not a kiss, a bite, hard enough to break skin. You cried out, and he licked the blood, humming in satisfaction.

"That's it," he whispered against your ear, his breath hot and uneven. "Make sound for me. Let the whole castle hear how much you hate it. Let them know who you belong to."

He drove deeper, harder, angling his hips to hit that spot inside you that made your back arch despite yourself. A spark of unwanted pleasure shot through your pelvis, and you bit your lip so hard you tasted copper. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He slowed down, grinding against that same spot, watching your body betray you as your hips began to rock in counterpoint to his thrusts.

"There she is," he breathed, almost reverent. "There's the whore underneath. You can't hide her from me. She wants this. She needs this."

"No," you gasped, but your body said yes, clenching around him, drawing him deeper. Hot shame flooded through you, hotter than the pain, as your cunt began to slick with something that was not blood. He felt it too, he groaned, his rhythm faltering, his grip on your hips tightening.

"I'm going to fill you," he snarled, his composure cracking. "I'm going to pour every drop of my seed into this worthless hole until you're pregnant with my heir, a son this time, and then I'll do it again. And again. And—"

He came without warning, a guttural roar tearing from his throat as he shoved himself as deep as he could go, his hips stuttering, his cock pulsing inside you. You felt the hot flood of his cum, felt it spill out around him, felt it mix with the blood and your own unwanted wetness. He collapsed on top of you, his full weight pressing you into the stone, his breath hot and ragged against your neck.

For a long moment, neither of you moved. Then he shifted, pulling out with a wet sound that made you flinch, and rolled onto his back beside you. The moonlight had moved, illuminating his face now haunted gleam in his violet eyes that looked almost like regret.

But you knew better. You knew he would do it again. And again. And again. Because in his world, you were already dead. You just hadn't stopped breathing yet.

He did not speak. Neither did you. You lay on the cold stone floor with your torn dress twisted around your body and your wrists still aching from his grip and your thighs slick with the evidence of what he had done, and you stared at the ceiling, and you thought of nothing at all.

After a long time Aerion rose to his feet. He straightened his clothes with mechanical precision, adjusting his doublet, smoothing his hair back from his face. He did not look at you. He did not offer you a hand to help you up. He did not speak a single word of apology or comfort or explanation.

"Your brother will stand trial," he said, and his voice was the voice of a stranger, flat and cold and utterly devoid of the passion that had consumed him moments before. "For striking a prince of the blood. The sentence will be severe. How severe depends entirely on you."

He paused at the door, his hand on the latch, his back to you.

"If you try to see him again," he said, "if you try to contact him, if you so much as speak his name in my presence, I will have him executed. Do you understand? His life is in your hands. Remember that."

The remainder of the night passed in darkness. You did not move from the floor. You could not move from the floor. The torn silk of your dress had dried stiff and crusted against your skin, and you had not bothered to cover yourself. There was no one to see. There was no one to care. The moonlight crawled across the stone floor inch by inch, and you watched it the way a corpse might watch the shifting of its own shroud, with a detachment that went beyond despair into something vast and empty and still.

Morning came grey and cold through the narrow window. The sky outside was the color of old iron, heavy with clouds that had not yet decided whether to rain. You heard the castle waking around you. Footsteps in the corridor. The distant clang of the blacksmith's hammer. Servants calling to one another in voices too muffled to understand. The tourney, you remembered dimly. The tourney was still happening. Lord Ashford's daughter still needed her champion. The world was still turning, indifferent to the ruin of your life.

Someone brought food. You heard the door unlock, heard the tray scrape against the stone as it was pushed inside, heard the door lock again. You did not get up to look at it. The smell of bread and broth turned your stomach. You had not eaten since the puppet show, since before the puppet show, since the garden when Rhaenyra had found the pink flower and you had believed, foolishly and desperately, that everything would be all right.

The morning wore on. The light shifted. The clouds outside the window thickened and darkened and began to spit a thin, miserable drizzle that streaked the glass like tears.

And then, sometime in the afternoon, you heard the commotion.

It started as a distant murmur, a disturbance somewhere in the lower levels of the castle that grew louder and more urgent as it climbed toward your door. Shouts. Running footsteps. The clash of something metallic hitting stone. You lifted your head from the floor for the first time in hours, your neck aching, your vision swimming. Something was happening. Something was wrong.

The door crashed open. It was not Aerion who entered first but a maester, an old man in grey robes with a heavy chain around his neck and blood on his sleeves up to the elbows. Behind him came two guards, household men in the pale grey of Prince Maekar's service, carrying between them a litter on which lay a figure you recognized only by the silver gold of his hair.

Aerion. He was unconscious. His face was nearly unrecognizable. His lip had been split anew, a fresh gash that ran up toward his cheekbone. One of his eyes was swollen shut, the skin around it purple and black and glistening with some kind of salve. His chest was bare beneath a makeshift bandage that wrapped around his ribs, and the bandage was soaked through with blood, bright red and seeping, the color of life escaping. His right arm lay at an angle that was not natural, and his breathing was shallow and labored and made a wet, rattling sound that turned your stomach even as it ignited something else in your chest. Something you did not want to name. Something you did not want to feel.

You scrambled backward on the floor until your shoulder blades hit the wall. Your torn dress bunched around your knees. Your hands came up in front of you, a defensive gesture that was pure instinct, the instinct of a woman who had spent the night being broken and had no more pieces left to give.

"What," you said, and your voice came out as a croak, barely recognizable. "What happened? What is this?"

The maester did not look at you. He was directing the guards to lay the litter on the bed, his hands already reaching for the blood soaked bandages, already issuing orders about hot water and clean linen and milk of the poppy. But one of the guards, a young man whose face was pale and shocked and streaked with someone else's blood, paused long enough to answer.

"Trial of the Seven," he said, and the words meant nothing to you. "The prince demanded it. Against the hedge knight."

"Trial of the Seven?" The phrase was foreign, nonsensical, a collection of syllables that refused to resolve into meaning. "What are you talking about? What trial? What hedge knight?"

The maester looked up from his work at last. "The hedge knight," he said, and his voice was clipped and efficient, the voice of a man who did not have time for explanations. "Ser Duncan the Tall. The hedge knight demanded a trial by combat. The prince escalated it to a Trial of the Seven. Fourteen knights in the lists. The hedge knight's side won, but the prince was wounded. Gravely wounded. We have done what we can for the immediate injuries, but when he regained consciousness briefly, he insisted, quite forcefully, that he be brought to you. He said he wanted you to be his primary caretaker."

The words washed over you in a tide of incomprehensible information. Trial of the Seven. Fourteen knights. The hedge knight's side won. Dunk's side. Dunk had won. Your brother had won. Your brother was alive and he had won his trial and he was free, he must be free, because if the hedge knight's side had won the trial then the gods had judged him innocent.

But Aerion was on your bed with his ribs crushed and his arm broken and his face beaten into something barely human, and he had asked for you. Even after what he had done to you on this very floor. Even after the things he had said, the things he had called you, the violence he had visited upon your body. He had regained consciousness long enough to demand that you, and no one else, be the one to care for him.

You stared at the maester. The maester stared back at you, and something in his expression softened, just slightly, at whatever he saw in your face. Perhaps it was the bruises on your wrists. Perhaps it was the torn dress. Perhaps it was the way you sat huddled against the wall like a wounded animal that had learned to expect only more pain.

"I have done what I can for the immediate wounds," the maester said again, more slowly this time. "The prince will live, though his recovery will be long and painful. But he needs constant care. Someone to change his bandages, to administer his medicine, to watch for fever. He asked for you. Given his condition and his royal status, we are not inclined to refuse him."

You looked at the figure on the bed. The man who had raped you on the stone floor less than a day ago. The father of your daughter. The monster you loved. The prince who had promised to execute your brother if you so much as spoke his name. He lay unconscious and broken, his breath rattling in his chest, and you were being told that you would be his caretaker. That you would sit by his bedside and change his bandages and mop his brow and listen to him breathe.

The absurd cruelty of it was almost beautiful, in its way. A kind of poetry written in blood and bruises and the particular viciousness of men who believed they owned the women they had purchased.

"Leave us," you said, and your voice did not sound like your own. It sounded like the voice of someone much older, someone who had survived worse things than this and would survive worse things still. "I will care for him."

The maester hesitated. "My lady, there are instructions I must give you regarding the dressing of his wounds. The risk of infection is significant, and the milk of the poppy must be administered precisely. Too much will stop his breathing. Too little and the pain will be excruciating. Do you understand?"

"I understand," you said, though you understood nothing. You understood only that your brother was alive and free, and the man who had destroyed you was lying broken on your bed, and you were supposed to heal him. You were supposed to sit beside him and tend his wounds and keep him alive so that he could continue to own you, continue to threaten you, continue to hold your brother's life in his hands like a coin he might spend on a whim.

The maester gave you his instructions. You listened with half an ear, nodding in the appropriate places, filing the information away in a part of your mind that was still functioning, still capable of processing data and making decisions. Change the bandages every four hours. Watch for red streaks radiating from the wounds. Administer the milk of the poppy in doses measured by the small copper cup on the bedside table. If he wakes, give him water. If he develops a fever, send for the maester immediately.

And then they were gone, the maester and the guards, and the door was closed, and you were alone with him.

You stood in the center of the room for a long time, staring at the bed. At the rise and fall of his chest beneath the bloodied bandages. At the hand that lay limp and pale against the silk sheets, the hand that had struck you across the face, the hand that had pinned your wrists above your head, the hand that had held your chin and forced you to look into his eyes while he destroyed you.

You could let him die.

The thought came to you fully formed, as if it had been waiting in the back of your mind all along, biding its time. You could let him die. The maester had left you with the milk of the poppy and precise instructions about dosage. You could administer too much, or too little. You could neglect to change his bandages and let the infection take hold. You could hold a pillow over his face while he slept and press down until the ragged breathing stopped forever. There was no one else in the room. There were no guards at your door, not anymore. You could end this. You could end him. You could free yourself and your daughter and your brother with a single act of will.

You looked at the copper cup on the bedside table. You looked at the pillow beneath his head. You looked at your own hands, still bruised, still crusted with your own blood, still capable of doing what needed to be done.

And then you crossed the room, and you sat down in the chair beside his bed, and you began to prepare the first dose of milk of the poppy with hands that did not tremble at all.

If you let him die now, his father would investigate. There would be questions. There had been a maester here, and guards, and they had seen you alone with him. If Aerion died under your care, the blame would fall on you. You would be executed, or worse. And Rhaenyra would have no mother at all.

Not yet. But the knowledge was there now, a small cold seed planted in the dark soil of your heart. Not yet. But someday, perhaps. Someday, if the opportunity presented itself, if the circumstances aligned, if you could be certain of escaping the consequences. Someday, you might be free of him.

—

The days that followed blurred together like watercolors left in the rain. You were not permitted to leave the room. Aerion made that clear the first time you asked, your voice carefully neutral, your eyes on the floor. He had been awake for perhaps an hour, propped up on pillows that you had arranged behind his back with your own hands, his broken arm splinted and bound, his ribs wrapped tight in fresh linen. His face was still a ruin of purple and black and sickly yellow green, his lip still split, his eye still swollen half-shut. But his voice had lost none of its edge.

"Leave?" He had laughed, a humorless sound that turned into a wince as his ribs protested. "Why would you need to leave? Everything you require is here. Food will be brought. Water for washing. Fresh bandages from the maester. You have no reason to go anywhere."

"Aerion, please. I only want to see Rhaenyra. Just for an hour. Just to hold her and know she's all right. She must be so frightened. She's only two years old. She doesn't understand why her mother disappeared."

His expression had darkened, a cloud passing over the sun. "The child is fine. She is being cared for by the nurses. She does not need you hovering over her like a hen with one chick. What she needs is a father who is not an invalid, and what I need is a caretaker who does not spend every waking moment asking to leave."

"Aerion..."

"Enough." The word was a door slamming shut. "You will stay here. You will tend to my wounds. You will keep me company. You will not leave this room unless I give you permission. Is that understood?"

So you stayed. You woke when he woke, which was often, his sleep broken by pain and fever and the strange, feverish dreams that made him thrash and cry out in the darkness. You changed his bandages with the careful precision the maester had taught you, peeling back the old linen, examining the wounds for signs of infection, applying the salves and poultices with gentle fingers. You fed him broth when he could eat, spooning it into his ruined mouth one careful measure at a time. You helped him with the bedpan when he needed it, a humiliation that made his jaw tighten and his eyes go cold, as if his body's weakness were a personal insult you had somehow engineered.

You did all of this in silence, for the most part. He did not want conversation. He did not want to be soothed or coddled or reassured. The man who had craved praise like a drug, who had turned toward your words like a flower toward the sun, was gone. In his place was a creature of pure, distilled bitterness, a man whose humiliation had curdled inside him until it became something toxic.

He had lost. That was the core of it, the wound beneath the wounds. He had been beaten by a hedge knight in front of half the nobility of the Reach, and then he had demanded a Trial of the Seven, the most sacred and dramatic form of combat the gods permitted, and he had lost that too. His side had lost. The gods themselves had declared against him, had declared in favor of the dirt-smeared giant who had loosened his tooth and spilled his blood and stolen his dignity. Aerion Targaryen, the prince who had burned a man alive for making a joke, the prince who had broken a puppeteer's fingers for telling the wrong story, the prince who believed with every fiber of his being that he was a dragon in human form, had been brought low by a nameless hedge knight with hay in his hair and dirt under his nails.

And you, who had witnessed the beginning of that humiliation, had become the vessel into which he poured all his bile.

"I should have you hanged for being related to that oaf." His hand shot out and closed around your wrist, hard enough to make you freeze. "Why would a brother fight like that? Why would a brother look at a sister like that? Tell me the truth. Was he your lover before he was your brother? Did you share a bed in the slums of Flea Bottom, before I found you?"

The accusation was so vile, so utterly, grotesquely wrong, that for a moment you could not speak at all. You could only stare at him, at his swollen face and his blazing eyes and the jealousy that was consuming him from the inside out like a fire that would not be quenched.

"He is my brother," you said, and your voice was quiet and steady and utterly without the rage that was boiling in your chest. "My brother. My blood.Nothing more. Nothing less. I have never lain with him. I have never wanted to. The very thought is disgusting to me, and it should be disgusting to you too."

Aerion held your gaze for a long moment. Then he released your wrist and turned his face away.

"Finish the bandage," he said, and said nothing more for the rest of the day.

Sometimes, rarely, they brought Rhaenyra to see you. It was never for long. Ten minutes, fifteen, never more than half an hour. A servant would bring her to the door, and she would run across the room on her unsteady two year old legs, bewildered relief of a child who did not understand why her mother had vanished from her life. You would scoop her up and hold her against your chest and breathe in the smell of her, that particular sweetness of soap and milk and sunshine that you had missed like a severed limb.

"Mama," she would say, her small hands patting your face, your hair, your shoulders, as if reassuring herself you were real. "Mama, where did you go? I looked for you. I cried and cried but you didn't come."

"Mama was taking care of your father," you would say, and your voice would be steady even though your heart was breaking. "Your father is very sick, sweetling. He needs Mama's help. But Mama loves you. Mama thinks about you every moment. Do you understand? Every single moment."

She would nod, her small face solemn, and then she would launch into a breathless account of everything she had done since she saw you last. The bird she had seen on the windowsill. The game the nurses had taught her. The dreams she had dreamed. You drank in every word like water in a desert, memorizing the cadence of her voice, the animation of her expressions, the way her tiny hands moved when she was telling a particularly exciting part.

And then Aerion would stir in the bed behind you, and the servant would step forward, and Rhaenyra would be lifted from your arms.

"No," you would say, every time, reaching for her even as the servant pulled her away. "Please, just a few more minutes. Just a little longer. She's only just arrived."

"Prince's orders," the servant would say, and the door would close, and you would be alone with him again.

The nights were the worst.

During the day, Aerion was mostly manageable. Irritable, demanding, prone to dark silences and darker accusations, but manageable. You could distract yourself with the work of caring for him, the constant rhythm of bandages and medicine and meals. You could count the hours until the next time Rhaenyra might be brought to you. You could lose yourself in the small, finite tasks that kept your hands busy and your mind from wandering to places it should not go.

But at night, when the candles burned low and the fire died to embers and the only sound was the soft, labored rhythm of his breathing, the monster in him stirred.

It started on the fourth night. You had been dozing in the chair beside his bed, your neck cricked at an awkward angle, your body aching for the comfort of a proper mattress. You were dreaming of the garden, of Rhaenyra's laughter, of pink flowers crushed beneath bare feet. And then a hand closed around your forearm, and you were jolted awake with a gasp.

Aerion was looking at you from the bed. His eyes were fever bright in the near darkness, and his hand was hot and dry against your skin. The blanket had slipped down to his waist, and you could see the bandages around his ribs, the splint on his arm, the bruises that spread across his torso like storm clouds. But you could also see, in the shadows beneath the blanket, the unmistakable evidence of his arousal.

"Come here," he said. His voice was hoarse, rough with pain and desire in equal measure. "I need you."

"Aerion," you said carefully, "you're injured. The maester said you need to rest. You could reopen your wounds. You could..."

"I don't care what the maester said." His grip on your arm tightened. "I've been lying in this bed for four days. I've lost everything. My pride. The hedge knight walks free, and I am trapped in this room like a cripple. The least you can do," and his voice hardened on the words, "is give me this."

"You're not well. Please, just wait until you're stronger. I promise, when you're healed..."

"When I am healed, I will take what I want anyway." He pulled you closer, and you could smell the sourness of his breath, the stale sweat of his unwashed body, the cloying sweetness of the milk of the poppy that still lingered on his tongue. "But I want it now. I have spent four days flat on my back like a turtle overturned, watching you flutter around me with your careful hands and your careful voice and your careful eyes that never quite meet mine. I know what you think of me. I know what you think when you look at me. You think I'm a monster. You think I got what I deserved."

"No," you whispered, but it was a lie and you both knew it.

"Yes," he said. "You do. And I don't care. You can hate me all you like, in the privacy of your own mind. But you are mine.Now. Come. Here."

He could not be rough with you, not in his condition. His broken arm lay useless at his side, and his bandaged ribs prevented any sudden movement. But he did not need to be rough to make you feel the weight of your captivity. He directed you with his voice, that voice you had once praised and soothed and loved, telling you where to touch him, how to move, what he wanted from you. He could not take you the way he had on the stone floor, could not pin you down and force himself inside you while you sobbed and pushed at his chest. But he could make you take him in your mouth while he lay back against the pillows with his eyes half closed and his hand tangled in your hair. He could make you straddle him carefully, carefully, moving with the slow precision his injuries demanded, while his one good hand gripped your hip hard enough to bruise.

"That's it," he murmured, his voice thick with pleasure and pain and the strange, twisted satisfaction of ownership. "That's my good girl. My sweet girl. You know what I need. You always know what I need."

"Now you should rest." He was already drifting, the exertion combined with the milk of the poppy pulling him back toward unconsciousness.

"You're the only one," he mumbled, his voice slurring with sleep. "The only one who stays. The only one who doesn't leave. Don't leave me. Promise you won't leave."

You did not promise. You dried your hands on a cloth and returned to the chair beside his bed, and you watched him sleep, and you thought about the copper cup of milk of the poppy on the bedside table, and you thought about what it would be like to be free.

—

The servant came for you on the seventh day. You were sitting in the chair beside Aerion's bed, your hands idle in your lap for the first time in what felt like years. He was sleeping deeply, the milk of the poppy dragging him down into a place where even his dreams could not reach him.

The door opened without a knock. You turned, expecting another servant with a tray of food, another maester with fresh bandages, another summons from the nurses saying Rhaenyra was crying for you and would not be soothed. But the woman who stood in the doorway was not a servant you recognized.

"Prince Maekar requests your presence," she said. Her voice was flat, neutral, the voice of a woman delivering a message she did not fully understand. "You are to come with me immediately."

You stared at her. Prince Maekar. The man who had called you a whore to your face, who had forbidden you from speaking to his children, who had looked at you for years with an expression of cold, unwavering contempt. He had never once spoken to you directly, had never acknowledged your existence except as a problem to be managed. And now he was summoning you?

"Prince Maekar," you repeated, and your voice came out uncertain, almost afraid. "Why would Prince Maekar want to see me?"

The servant's expression did not change. "I was not told, my lady. Only that you are to come at once. Prince Aerion is sleeping. He will not miss you. Please, follow me."

You looked back at the bed. Aerion's chest rose and fell in the slow, steady rhythm of deep sleep. His good hand was curled loosely on the pillow beside his face, his fingers twitching slightly as he dreamed. If you left and he woke to find you gone, there would be consequences. There were always consequences. But the servant was watching you with her sharp grey eyes, and something in her manner told you that this was not a request. This was an order, delivered with the full authority of the man who ruled Summerhall.

You rose from the chair. Your legs were unsteady beneath you, your body still aching from the nights of sleeping in chairs and on pallets, from the strain of lifting and turning and tending a man who outweighed you by half.

The castle was quiet at this hour. The afternoon light slanted through the narrow windows, casting long shadows across the stone floors. You had not been outside Aerion's room in seven days. The world seemed larger than you remembered. Brighter. More dangerous.

The servant led you through corridors you did not recognize, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, until you stood before a heavy oak door banded with iron. She knocked twice, a sharp, deliberate rap that echoed in the silence.

"The woman is here, my prince," she said.

A voice from within, muffled by the door, said something you could not make out. The servant pushed the door open and gestured for you to enter.

You stepped inside. The room was small, sparsely furnished. A table. A few chairs. A narrow window that looked out over the castle's eastern wall. The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers, casting the room in shadow and flickering orange light. And standing near the window, one hand braced against the wall for support, a thick piece of wood tucked under his other arm to hold him upright, was your brother.

Dunk.

You stopped in the doorway as if you had walked into a wall. Your heart seized in your chest. Your breath caught in your throat. Your hands flew to your mouth, pressing against your lips as if to hold in the sound that was trying to escape, a sound that was half sob and half scream and half something that had no name at all.

He looked terrible. His face was a mess of bruises, purple and black and yellow-green, one eye swollen nearly shut, a gash across his cheekbone held closed with clumsy stitches. His lip was split in two places. His left arm was wrapped in a sling, and the piece of wood under his right arm was a crutch, crude and hastily made, the kind a maester might fashion for a patient who refused to stay in bed. He was leaning heavily on it, his massive frame listing to one side, his shoulders hunched with exhaustion and pain. He looked like a man who had been through a war and had only barely survived.

"Y/N," he said, and his voice was exactly the same as it had been when he was eight years old and lifting you from your mother's deathbed. Cracked. Hoarse. Full of a desperate, aching tenderness that made your chest splinter into a thousand pieces.

One moment you were standing in the doorway with your hands pressed to your mouth, and the next you were in his arms, your face buried in his chest, your shoulders shaking with sobs you had been holding back for years. His good arm wrapped around you, pulling you against him, and you felt the crutch fall away, felt him stagger and brace himself against the wall so he would not fall. He was so big. He had always been so big. Even broken and bruised and barely able to stand, he surrounded you, enveloped you, made you feel for the first time in longer than you could remember that you were safe.

"I've got you," he said into your hair, and his voice was breaking, splintering, cracking into pieces that sounded like your mother's laugh and your father's name and every promise he had ever made you. "I've got you. I've always got you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I looked for you. I looked everywhere. They told me you were dead. They told me they found your body in the river. They said you were burned beyond recognition. I believed them. Gods forgive me, I believed them."

"I didn't know," you sobbed into his chest. Your fingers were twisted in his tunic, gripping the rough wool as if he might disappear if you let go. "I didn't know they told you that. I thought you were still looking. I thought you would find me. I waited for you. Every night, I waited for you. I never stopped believing you would come."

"I'm sorry, i believed them. I believed you were dead, and something inside me died with you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, little sister. I should have kept looking. I should have known. I should have..."

"Stop." You pulled back just enough to look up at his face, at the tears that were cutting tracks through the blood and the bruises. "Stop apologizing. You searched for me. You believed what they told you. Any man would have believed it. I don't blame you. I have never blamed you. I only ever wanted you to know I was alive. I tried to send word. I tried so many times. But Aerion..."

You stopped. The name hung in the air between you like a curse. Dunk's expression darkened. His good arm tightened around your shoulders. "Aerion," he repeated, and the word came out like a growl. "What happened to you, Y/N? Where have you been all these years? How did you end up here, with him?"

You pulled away from him gently. Your legs were shaking. You found a chair and sank into it, and Dunk lowered himself awkwardly onto the edge of the table, his injured leg stretched out in front of him, his crutch clattering to the floor. He did not take his eyes off you. He watched you the way he had watched you when you were children, with that fierce, protective intensity that had once been the only thing standing between you and the darkness of the world.

"They sold me," you said, and your voice was quiet and hollow and did not sound like your own. "The men who took me. They sold me to a brothel on the Street of Silk. A high end place, for lords and merchants. The madam... she was cruel. She said I was special. She said I would make them very rich."

Dunk's hands tightened on your shoulders. His face had gone very pale beneath the bruises, and his jaw was clenched so hard you could see the muscle jumping beneath the skin.

"And then," you continued, "Aerion came, he bought me and never left me"

And then you told him about Rhaenyra.

"Her name is Rhaenyra," you said, and your voice softened on the name, the way it always did. "She's two years old. She looks like her father. But she's kind. She's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. She's the only good thing that has come out of any of this. And she's the reason I can't leave."

Dunk was silent for a long moment. His face was unreadable, a mask of bruises and exhaustion and something that might have been grief. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough.

"I'll take you away," he said. "Both of you. You and the little girl. I'll find a way. I have friends now. A prince and a lord. We can protect you. We can hide you somewhere Aerion will never find you."

You shook your head. The tears were streaming down your face again, hot and silent, dripping off your chin and onto your hands. "You don't understand. He would never let me go. He would hunt me down like a dog. He would burn cities to the ground to find me. He told me... the night after the puppet show, when he came to my room, he told me the only way I would ever leave him was in a shroud. He meant it, Dunk. I have seen what he does to people who defy him. I have seen him cut a servant's hand for spilling wine on him. I have seen him laugh while a man burned alive. If I tried to run, if I took Rhaenyra and disappeared, he would never stop looking. And when he found me, and he would find me, he would kill me. He would take my daughter and he would kill me, and Rhaenyra would grow up without a mother, raised by a monster who would teach her that cruelty is strength and kindness is weakness and love is just another word for ownership."

"He would have to go through me first," Dunk said, and his voice was hard, the voice of a man who had faced seven knights in single combat and emerged victorious. "I lost you once. I believed you were dead for years. I mourned you, Y/N. I sat in that alley and I let the darkness take me because there was no light left in the world. And then I found you again, alive, here, in this place, with that man. I am not going to lose you again. I don't care if he is a prince. I don't care if he has a hundred Kingsguard. I will find a way to get you out of here. I will find a way to keep you safe. I swear it. I swear it on our mother's grave. I swear it on everything I am."

"Dunk." You reached out and took his enormous hand in both of yours. His knuckles were swollen and bruised, the skin split and scabbed over. The hands that had lifted you from the mattress where your mother had stopped breathing. The hands that had carried you into the cold morning while the other whores watched with pity. The hands that had promised you silk and lemon cakes and a world where no one would hurt you. "I want to believe you. I want to believe there is a way out of this. But you have to understand what you're risking. He will kill you. He will kill you without hesitation, without a trial, without anything but the cold satisfaction of removing an obstacle. And if you die, if you die trying to save me, I will have nothing left. Nothing. Do you understand? You are my brother. You are the only family I have in this world besides my daughter. I cannot lose you again."

He squeezed your hands. His grip was gentle, impossibly gentle for a man who had killed knights and broken bones and fought his way through horrors you could only imagine. "You won't lose me," he said. "I promise you, little sister. You won't lose me."

—

You ran. Egg had barely finished speaking before you were out the door and flying down the corridor, your heart pounding so hard you could feel it in your teeth, your lungs burning with every breath. You did not care if anyone saw you. You did not care if there were questions. All you cared about was getting back to Aerion's room before he woke, before he realized you were gone, before the fragile illusion of your obedience shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces.

You reached the door to Aerion's chamber and paused, pressing your palm flat against the wood, forcing yourself to breathe. You could not go in looking like a woman who had just run across half the castle. You could not go in looking like a woman who had been crying in her brother's arms. You smoothed your hair with trembling hands. You wiped the tears from your cheeks. You arranged your face into the careful mask you had worn for years, and you pushed open the door.

Aerion was still asleep. He had not moved since you left. His breathing was slow and steady, his bruised face relaxed in the depths of his drugged slumber. The milk of the poppy still held him in its grip. The bandages on his ribs were unrumpled. His splinted arm lay exactly where you had arranged it. He had not woken. He had not called for you. He had not noticed your absence at all.

You closed the door behind you and leaned against it, your legs threatening to give way beneath you. You had made it. You had made it, and he did not know, and you were safe. For now. For this moment. For as long as you could keep the mask from slipping.

You returned to the chair beside his bed and sat down, and you waited.

Days passed. Aerion healed. Slowly at first, then with the stubborn, grinding determination of a man who refused to be seen as weak for a moment longer than absolutely necessary. The bruises faded from black to purple to yellow-green. The swelling around his eye went down until he could open it fully again. The split lip closed, leaving a thin white scar that tugged at the corner of his mouth when he spoke. The ribs were slower to mend, the maester said, and he would need to be careful for weeks yet, but the splint came off his arm and he began to flex his fingers, to test the range of motion, to push against the limits of his own body the way he pushed against everything else in his life.

By the end of the second week, he could walk with a stick. You were the one who helped him take his first steps. His arm draped over your shoulders, his weight pressing down on you until your knees buckled, his breath harsh and labored against your ear. You walked him across the room and back again, step by agonizing step, your body bearing the burden of his in a way that felt like a metaphor for everything your life had become.

"Good," he said through gritted teeth when he finally lowered himself back onto the bed. “That's good. I'll be out of this room by the end of the week.”

"My father is sending me away," he had said, and his voice was flat, toneless, drained of its usual fire. "Lys. A city of whores and perfumed merchants. He calls it self reflection. A chance to contemplate my actions and return a better man. But we both know what it really is. Exile. He cannot bear to look at me. He blames me for Baelor's death, even though it was his own blow that killed him. He blames me for everything."

You had not known what to say, so you had said nothing. That was safest. That had always been safest.

"You and the girl will come with me, of course, Lys is said to be beautiful. Warm. The sea is the color of sapphires, and the women walk around in silks so fine you can see their skin through the fabric. You will like it there."

You would not like it anywhere he was. But you had smiled, because that was what you did, and you had told him that Lys sounded lovely, and you had turned away to prepare his next dose of medicine so he would not see the despair in your eyes.

After that, things shifted slightly. Perhaps Aerion felt guilty for uprooting you. Perhaps he was simply trying to secure your loyalty before the journey. Whatever the reason, he began to allow you to visit Rhaenyra in the nursery. Not for long, not unsupervised, but every day. Every single day, you were permitted to leave his chamber for an hour and go to your daughter.

It was the only thing that kept you sane. You would sit in the nursery with Rhaenyra on your lap, her small body warm and solid and alive against your chest, and you would listen to her chatter about the games she had played and the songs she had learned and the dreams she had dreamed. You would brush her hair and sing to her in the soft voice you used for no one else. You would tell her that you loved her, that you would always love her, that there was nothing in the world she could do that would make you stop loving her. And you would try very hard not to think about the fact that in a few weeks, a few months at most, you would be on a ship to Lys, and the only world Rhaenyra had ever known would disappear behind her forever.

It was on one of these days, when you returned from the nursery with Rhaenyra's laughter still echoing in your ears, that everything fell apart.

You pushed open the door to Aerion's chamber and stopped dead in the doorway. There were two guards in the room. Between them, kneeling on the stone floor, was the servant. The one who had come to you days ago. The one who had said Prince Maekar requests your presence. The one who had led you through the corridors to the room where Dunk was waiting.

She was barely recognizable. Her face was a swollen mass of bruises, her lips split in three places, her nose broken and crusted with dried blood. One of her eyes was swollen completely shut, and the other stared at the floor with the glassy, unfocused gaze of someone who had retreated so far inside herself that she might never find her way back out. Her dress was torn, stained dark with blood and sweat and things you did not want to name. Her hands, folded limply in her lap, were missing three fingernails.

You knew, in that moment, that you were going to die.

Aerion was standing by the window, leaning on his stick, his back to you. He did not turn when you entered. He simply stood there, silhouetted against the grey afternoon light, his shoulders rigid, his free hand clenched into a fist at his side.

"Close the door," he said. His voice was calm. Too calm. The calm of a sea that had gone flat and glassy in the moment before a tidal wave.

You closed the door. Your hands were shaking so badly you could barely grip the latch.

"Aerion," you said, and your voice came out as a whisper, thin and reedy and full of the terror you could not hide. "What is this? What happened to her?"

Now he turned. His face was the face you had seen on the stage of the puppet show, cold and cruel and utterly without mercy. His violet eyes were dark with a rage that had been simmering for days, waiting for this moment, and his mouth was a thin hard line that made the scar at the corner of his lip stand out white against his skin.

"Is it true?" he asked. His voice was still calm. Still quiet. Still terrible. "Did you betray me? Did you see that treasonous bastard of your brother?"

Your heart stopped. Your blood turned to ice. The world narrowed to the space between you and him, the fire in the hearth, the broken woman on the floor.

"Aerion, please, let me explain..."

"Did you see him?" He did not shout. He did not raise his voice at all. But each word was a hammer blow, driving the breath from your lungs, the strength from your legs. "This woman, this servant, has told me everything. How she came to you while I was sleeping. How she led you through the castle. How my father, my own father, arranged for you to meet your brother in secret behind my back. Is it true? Answer me. Is it true?"

Your mind raced, scrambling for a lie, a deflection, anything that might save you. But the servant was kneeling on the floor with her fingernails torn out and her face beaten to pulp, and you knew that whatever you said, whatever excuse you offered, he had already made up his mind.

"It was not my choice," you said, and your voice cracked on the words. "The servant came and said your father wanted to see me. I did not know it was a trick. I did not know Dunk would be there. I went because I was afraid to refuse. Please, Aerion, you have to believe me. I did not seek him out. I would never..."

"Liar." He spat the word like a curse. "You have been lying to me since the moment you saw his face in the pavilion. You have been lying to me while you changed my bandages and brought my medicine and performed your little duties like the devoted whore you pretend to be. All this time, you have been dreaming of him. Planning with him. Scheming behind my back. Did you think I would not find out? Did you think I would not have you watched? Did you think I was stupid?"

"No, I never..."

"Be silent." He took a step toward you, and the stick thumped against the stone floor like a death sentence. "I have listened to your lies for years. I have listened to you whisper that you loved me while your eyes were always looking somewhere else. I have listened to you promise that you were mine while your heart belonged to another. I am done listening. Now you will listen to me."

He gestured to one of the guards. The man stepped forward, his face still grim and impassive. You barely had time to register the movement before his gauntleted hand cracked across your face.

The blow sent you sprawling to the floor. Your head hit the stone with a crack that made stars burst across your vision. The taste of blood filled your mouth. Your ears rang with a high, thin whine that drowned out everything else. You tried to push yourself up, but your arms would not hold you, and you collapsed back onto the cold stone, gasping.

"Take her away," Aerion said, and for a moment you thought he meant you. But the guard was already hauling the servant to her feet, dragging her toward the door, her head lolling on her broken neck. The other guard followed, and then the door closed, and you were alone with the dragon.

Aerion stood over you. The stick thumped against the floor as he took another step closer. You could see his boots from where you lay, the fine black leather, the silver buckles shaped like dragon wings.

"Let me tell you what happens now," he said, and his voice was soft, almost gentle, the voice of a man explaining something to a child. "You are going to Lys with me. You are going to share my bed and warm my sheets and perform your duties as you have always done. You are going to smile and praise me and tell me that I am magnificent. You are going to be exactly what you have always been. My whore. My property. My thing."

He lowered himself slowly, painfully, until he was crouching beside you. His hand came down and gripped your chin, forcing your face up toward his. His fingers were cold and hard and utterly without tenderness.

"If you ever see your brother again," he said, "if you ever speak to him, if you ever so much as learn his whereabouts and fail to tell me, I will not kill you. No. Killing you would be a mercy, and I am not feeling merciful. What I will do is make you pray for death. Every single day, you will pray for it, and it will not come. Do you understand?"

You tried to speak. No words came out. Only a thin, animal whimper that you barely recognized as your own.

"And Rhaenyra," he continued, and your blood turned to ice water. "If you betray me again, if you give me even the slightest reason to doubt your loyalty, I will take her from you. Not just for a few days. Not just to the nursery. I will sell her. Do you understand? I will sell her to a brothel the moment she has her first bleeding. She will spend her life on her back with strange men between her legs, just like her mother before her. Just like the whore who whelped her. That is what happens to the daughters of traitors. That is what happens to the children of women who forget who they belong to."

"No." The word tore out of you, a desperate, animal sound. "Aerion, no, please, she's your daughter, she's your blood, you can't..."

"I can do whatever I want." His voice was flat. Final. The voice of a god passing judgment. "She is mine. You are mine. Everything you have, everything you are, exists because I allow it. Your life is a privilege. Your motherhood is a privilege. Your identity as a mother, as a daughter, as anything other than what I tell you to be, is a privilege. And privileges can be revoked."

He rose to his feet with a grimace of pain, leaning heavily on his stick. He looked down at you, crumpled on the floor at his feet, and his expression was utterly without pity.

"Your only duty is to me," he said. "You are not a mother. You are not a sister. You are not a person with a past or a family or a soul. You are my whore. That is all you have ever been. That is all you will ever be. Everything else, every moment you have spent with Rhaenyra, every breath you have taken as a free woman, has been a gift. A gift that I gave you. A gift that I can take away."

He turned to the guard who remained. The man had been standing motionless by the door, his face a mask of professional indifference. He had watched the whole thing without flinching. You wondered, distantly, how many women he had seen broken on the orders of the men who paid him.

"Incapacitate her," Aerion said. "I want her unable to walk. Not permanently. I still need her to be able to perform her duties. But I want her to remember, every time she takes a step, what happens when she forgets who she belongs to."

The guard stepped forward. You saw him coming, saw the purpose in his eyes, and you tried to scramble backward on the floor, your heels slipping against the stone, your hands clawing for purchase. It did not matter. He was on you in three strides, his hands closing around your ankle, and you heard yourself screaming, heard Aerion's voice saying something you could not understand, and then there was a sound like a branch breaking in deep winter, and your leg exploded into white-hot agony.

The world went away for a while. When it came back, you were still on the floor. The guard was gone. Aerion was still standing over you, leaning on his stick, watching you with an expression that was almost curious. As if your pain were an experiment he had conducted and he was evaluating the results.

"The maester will come to set the ankle," he said. "You will tell him you fell down the stairs. You will not mention the guard. You will not mention this conversation. You will not mention your brother or your disobedience. You will smile, and you will thank me for my concern, and you will continue to perform your duties. Is that understood?"

You could not speak. The pain was too much. Your leg was a column of fire, and every heartbeat sent a fresh wave of agony through your body. But you managed to nod, a tiny, jerky motion of your head, and that seemed to satisfy him.

"Good," he said. "I am glad we understand each other."

He limped to the door, his stick thumping against the stone with every step. He did not look back at you as he left. He did not offer you a hand to help you up. He simply opened the door and disappeared into the corridor, and you were alone.

Dunk had promised. Dunk had sworn on your mother's grave, on everything he was. And Dunk had never broken a promise to you. Not once. Not ever.

You held onto that ember as the darkness closed in. You held onto it as the pain in your ankle pulsed and throbbed and dragged you toward unconsciousness. You held onto it as the door opened and the maester's voice exclaimed in shock and you heard yourself saying, over and over, the lie Aerion had given you. Fell down the stairs. Fell down the stairs. Fell down the stairs.

And when the maester's hands began to work on your ankle, when the world went white with pain and then mercifully black with oblivion, you held onto it still.

The first thing you registered was warmth. A slow, honey thick warmth that had nothing to do with the pale sunlight trying to bleed through the cheap blinds. This heat was specific, localized, and moving. It was a mouth. Soft, barely there pressure planting a lazy trail up the knobs of your spine.

You kept your eyes closed, breathing in the scent of stale weed, faded cologne, and something that was just clean skin and sleep. Bobby. A hum vibrated in the back of your throat, a sound caught between a sigh and a moan, as his lips traced a path to the space between your shoulder blades. His warm hand splayed possessively over the dip of your waist beneath the rumpled sheet. The only thing you wore was the memory of the night before, a pleasant, heavy ache in your limbs and the faint impression of his teeth on your lower lip. You were both naked, tangled up in each other and a mess of charcoal grey cotton.

You felt the mattress shift, the lean, solid weight of him pressing a little closer, and then his lips were on your shoulder. It was a wake up call you’d become dangerously accustomed to.

Finally, you stirred, a sleepy sigh escaping you as you shifted onto your back. The sheet slipped, and the cool air of the room was a shock against your skin. You blinked your eyes open, and he was right there, propped on one elbow, looking down at you. The weak morning light caught the angles of his face, that highly defined, angular facial structure that was too sharp to be just pretty.

“Morning,” he murmured, his voice a low, sleep roughened rasp. His nose brushed against yours as he leaned in. His hair was a tousled mess, falling forward onto his forehead.

“Morning,” you whispered back, your voice still thick with sleep. You didn't fight it when he closed the distance. The kiss was slow, deep, a lazy exploration that tasted of sleep and the last, faint ghost of mint. His full lips were soft, patient, a perfect counterpoint to the hard, sharp lines of the rest of him. When he finally pulled back, just a fraction of an inch, his eyes were still closed, his lashes dark gold crescents against his cheekbones. "Was starting to think you were going to sleep all day."

"Tempting," you murmured, already feeling the pull of the real world, the mental checklist of assignments and shifts waiting for you. “I’m so tired,” you hummed, the words a barely audible vibration against his jaw. You didn’t want to think, didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to do anything but dissolve back into the sleepy, satiated haze. You turned in his arms, presenting your back to him again, and grabbed his arm, a silent, demanding gesture. He understood immediately, wrapping it tightly around you, his hand coming to rest on your stomach. He let out a short, soft laugh, a puff of air against your hair. "Okay, okay. Message received." pulled you flush against his chest, tucking his knees behind yours. You were encased in him, a small spoon in a shell of sharp bones and lean muscle. You closed your eyes, letting the steady thump of his heart against your spine lull you. This, you told yourself. This was the part you liked. The quiet after, where he was just a warm, solid presence, and all the complications of your lives were held outside the door.

For a while, there was only the sound of your breathing and the distant, irritated chirp of a bird outside the window. His thumb traced idle, meaningless patterns on the soft skin of your belly, a gentle, almost hypnotic motion.

“So,” he said, his voice a quiet rumble that vibrated through you, “how’s that project been going? The big one. The one that’s been making you bite everyone’s head off.”

You groaned, the sound muffled by the pillow. “Good, I guess. It’s just… stressing me out. Feels like it’s taking over my entire life.” You didn't mention that your increasingly frequent escapes with him were the only thing keeping you from a full blown meltdown.

"That sucks, baby," he murmured, and the word 'baby' sent a tiny, treacherous thrill right through your middle. His hand, the one that wasn't pinned under you, moved. “Well,” he murmured, and you felt him smile against your hair, a slow, knowing curve. “That’s why I’m here, right?” His hand slid from your stomach, fingers trailing a light, teasing path down to your thigh. He gave the bare flesh a gentle, reassuring squeeze. “Stress relief.”

You snorted softly, a sound somewhere between amusement and deflection. You didn't take the bait, just continued to trace idle patterns on the back of the hand you were holding. He ran his palm in a slow, soothing the curve of your thigh, his thumb tracing a lazy, circular caress on your skin. The touch was meant to be comforting, but it was also a test, a quiet probing to see if the mood of the night before could be rekindled.

“You know,” he continued, his tone shifting, becoming a touch more casual, the way someone does when they’re trying to mask something that actually matters to them, “we could go out this weekend, y’know. A change of scenery. I could take you out to dinner. Someplace that’s not a drive-thru or your kitchen.”

And there it was, the other game. The one he kept trying to play, and you kept refusing to learn the rules to. The bubble of sleepy contentment popped. You forced your eyes open, staring at the slice of light on the wall. Your body, which a moment ago had been liquid and pliant, began to tense.

“Dinner?” you repeated, as if he’d suggested a trip to the moon.

“Yeah, dinner. It’s a thing people do. They eat food, at a table, and they, like, talk.” His voice was still light, but you could feel the new tension in the arm wrapped around you.

This was the point where you always started to pull away. You shifted, gently disentangling yourself from his grip. This time, he didn’t fight it, his arm falling slack as you sat up, keeping the sheet clutched to your chest. You swung your legs over the side of the bed, your back to him. The floor was a warzone of discarded clothes, your jeans tangled with his black t-shirt, a lone sneaker by the door.

“I… uh, I’m pretty busy this weekend, actually,” you said, your voice coming out a little too flippant as you began to reach for your things. “College stuff. You know how it is.”

“Right. College stuff.” His tone had changed completely. The teasing warmth was gone, replaced by a flat, clipped edge. You heard him sit up behind you, the rustle of sheets. “You’re always busy with ‘college stuff.’ Except, apparently, when you’re not too busy to hit me up at eleven o’clock at night.”

You flinched, the accusation hitting its mark with sniper like precision. You grabbed your underwear from the floor and started to pull them on under the sheet, the movements jerky and hurried. “That’s different.”

“Is it?” You could feel his gaze on your bare back, and you imagined those striking blue eyes had lost all their post sex softness, sharpening into that intense, unblinking focus. “What’s so bad about going on a date with me, Y/N? Huh? You always do this. Every single time I try to… to just be with you outside of a bedroom, there’s an excuse. An essay, a shift, you’re tired, you’re just about to wash your hair. It’s a greatest hits album of brush-offs.”

You stood up, pulling on your jeans with sharp, angry tugs. “Because I just don’t want to date, Bobby! That’s not what this is.” You zipped them up, the sound final and loud in the suddenly quiet room.

You could feel the question coming before he even spoke it, a deadly, fragile silence that expanded to fill the entire apartment.

His voice, when it came, was quiet. Dangerously quiet. “You don’t want to date anyone? Or you don’t want to date me?”

You finally turned to face him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed now, the sheet pooling around his hips, leaving his torso bare. The morning light carved his body out of light and shadow, accentuating the lean, defined muscle. He was a work of art, all sharp angles and fair skin. The look on his face was one of pure, frustrated hurt, his strong jaw set, his full lips pressed into a thin line. The intense brow was furrowed, and his eyes, they were fixed on you with a vulnerability that was almost too painful to witness.

“Come on, Bobby. Don’t act like this,” you said, your voice softening despite yourself. You hated this part. You hated feeling like the villain. “Let’s not act like, before this arrangement of ours, you didn’t have a different girlfriend almost every other week. You were the king of no strings attached. The whole reason this works is because we’re on the same page.”

“It’s not the same,” he said, his voice rising, cracking with an intensity that froze you in place. He stood up, not caring that he was naked, and took a step toward you. His hands were clenched into loose fists at his sides. “Those other girls? They weren’t… it was just something to do, a way to pass the time. You’re different. You’re so different, Y/N, and you know that. You’re smart, and you’re funny, and when you’re not biting my head off for trying to be nice to you i can't stay away from you. You can’t tell me you don’t feel it.” He was right in front of you now, close enough that you could smell his skin, see the small, pleading furrow between his brows. “Just give me a chance. One real chance. That’s all I’m asking for.”

His plea hung in the air, raw and honest. It would be so easy. So terrifyingly easy. You could just say yes. You could let him take you to dinner, let him hold your hand on a street not littered with your own clothes. You could let your carefully constructed walls down for a guy who was always a little bit high, a guy you’d written off as a fun, temporary distraction, but you knew the look in his eyes. You’d seen it before on other faces, right before everything went to hell. The look that preceded “I love you” and was inevitably followed by “Who were you with?” It was a trap, a beautiful trap.

You were done picking up your things. You had your bag slung over your shoulder, your keys clutched in your hand. You had an armor of busyness and cynicism, and you put it on now like a shield. You reached up, placing your hands gently on either side of his face. His skin was warm, the stubble rough against your palms. You felt the tension in his jaw muscles as he looked at you, waiting.

“Bobby,” you said, your voice soft but final. You looked into those crystal blue eyes, a color so vivid it seemed manufactured. “I like what we have. It’s easy. It’s fun. Let’s not overcomplicate it.”

You saw the light in his eyes die a little, the hope crumbling into a resigned, weary disappointment. He knew this script. You’d made him rehearse it a dozen times.

“I’ll see you,” you whispered, and then you pressed a soft, chaste kiss to his lips. It was a full stop kiss, a seal on the conversation, a goodbye for now. You didn't let it last pulling your hands away before he could respond, before his full lips could part and say something that would completely undo you.

___

Time didn't work here, that was one of the first things you'd learned, one of the many cruel rules of this place, you'd been navigating by the sickly, jaundiced light that hummed from the fluorescent panels on the ceiling, a constant, maddening buzz that had burrowed into your skull and made a home there. You slept when your body collapsed, woke when the adrenaline spiked, and walked. You just kept walking. Endless, repeating rooms of damp, yellowed carpet and wallpaper the color of old bruises.

You'd gotten good at hiding, at holding your breath. At pressing yourself into the corners where the buzzing fluorescent hum was loudest, hoping it would mask the sound of your hammering heart. Some of them looked almost like people, if you didn't look too closely. A woman in a stained dress who turned and had three noses clustered on her face like a grotesque flower. A tall, lanky man shape with four perfectly blue eyes, blinking out of sync, who had passed within feet of your hiding spot, his head swiveling on a neck that was too long, too smooth. You'd stared at the damp carpet and not breathed, not thought, not existed until the sound of its dragging footsteps faded. Other things were worse because they were utterly alien. Scuttling, skittering shapes glimpsed at the end of long corridors. The sound of something large and wet breathing in a room you decided not to enter. The screaming. Sometimes, in the deep distance, you heard screams that were unmistakably, horrifyingly human, and they always, always sounded like him.

Bobby. His name was a wound you kept touching, a raw nerve you couldn't stop probing with your tongue. Every time your exhausted mind drifted, you heard it again. The sound he'd made when that thing had seized him. His scream had echoed down the endless corridors, a sound of pure, primal terror that had shattered into wet, choked gurgling. Begging. He had been begging for help. The sound of your name, torn from his throat, you cried every time you thought about him. At first, it had been violent, gut wrenching sobs that left you curled on the damp carpet, gasping for air that tasted of mildew and old dust. Now, the tears came silently, a hot, steady leak from your eyes that you'd wipe away with a grimy hand as you kept walking. You replayed the last morning in the real world on a constant, torturous loop. The warmth of his bare chest against your back. The desperate plea in his voice. You're different, Y/N. The way you'd placed your hands on his sharp, beautiful face and kissed him goodbye like he was a problem to be managed instead of a person who was trying, so earnestly, to love you. The guilt was a physical thing, a sharp, acidic lump in your throat that you couldn't swallow down. You'd give anything, anything, to take back that morning. To say yes to the damn dinner. To tell him he mattered. Because he did. He had. And now he was just a fading scream and a trail of blood.

On this day—was it a day? the lights never changed, the buzz never stopped—you were moving with a purpose born of pure, desperate stubbornness. You were trying to find the wall. The spot where you'd all come through. If you could just find it again, if it was still there, maybe you could get out. Maybe you could find help. Maybe you could wake up from this.

You were in a long, wide corridor you didn't recognize, lined with doors that were just painted onto the walls, fake promises. The carpet squelched slightly under your worn sneakers. And then you heard it. Footsteps. Fast, erratic, a stuttering, uneven rhythm. Not the dragging shamble of the entities. Something running, human.

Your body reacted before your brain did. You dove behind a protruding wall, pressing your back against the cold, slightly damp surface. Your heart, that traitorous organ, slammed against your ribs like it was trying to escape your chest. You clamped a hand over your own mouth, stifling the ragged gasp of your breathing, and slowly, agonizingly slowly, peered around the corner and the world stopped.

It was Bobby.

He was there, maybe thirty feet away, moving fast down the corridor with a limping, frantic gait. His crop top was torn, a long, jagged gash across the front, and the sleeve had been ripped off completely, used as a makeshift bandage wrapped tightly around his forearm. The white fabric was stained a dark, rusted crimson. There was blood on him. Dark smears on his exposed torso, a streak of it across his sharp jawline, matted into his hair. He looked battered, hollowed out, his already sharp features now gaunt, the high cheekbones cutting even more severely against his fair skin. But he was moving. He was on his feet. He was alive.

Tears were spilling down your cheeks before you even made the conscious decision to move. A choked sob, a mangled version of his name, tore from your throat. "Bobby...?" It wasn't a yell. It was barely a whisper, ragged and raw, the fear of alerting the entities overriding the sheer, overwhelming shock of seeing him. You were already running, your legs moving before you could think, propelled by a relief so profound it felt like being unmade and remade in the span of a single heartbeat.

He stopped dead. His head snapped toward you, and you saw his whole body go rigid, coiled like a wounded animal that had just heard a twig snap. His blue eyes, those intense, focused eyes you'd memorized a thousand times over, found you. For a long, suspended moment, he just stared. His full lips parted slightly. His brow, furrowed in something that looked less like recognition and more like... confusion.

Then you crashed into him. Your arms wrapped around his neck, your body slamming into his with a force that made him stumble back a step, his bad leg buckling slightly. He was solid. He was real. He was warm. The feel of him, the scent of sweat and blood undid you completely. You sobbed against the bare skin of his shoulder, your fingers digging into the fabric of his torn shirt, clinging to him like he was the only solid thing in a world that had dissolved into nightmare.

"Oh my god, oh my god, Bobby," you were babbling, the words tumbling out between heaving, ugly sobs that shook your entire body. "I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead. I heard you scream, I saw the blood, and I ran, I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry." The apology kept spilling out, a dam finally breaking. "I thought about you every second. Everything I said that morning, it was all bullshit, I was just scared, I was so scared of how much I—" You cut yourself off with another sob, pressing your face into the curve of his neck. "I'm so happy to see you. I'm so happy you're alive. I'm never leaving you again. Never."

His arms, after a long, suspended beat, came up and wrapped around you. It was hesitant at first, almost mechanical. Then his grip tightened, his hands fisting in the dirty fabric of your shirt at your back. He held you so tightly it was almost painful, his body trembling against yours. You could feel the frantic, rabbit fast beat of his heart against your chest.

"Can't believe you're real," he mumbled, his voice a hoarse, strange rasp, scraped raw. It was so different from the low, teasing murmur you remembered. It sounded like he'd been screaming. Or maybe just not talking at all. "Can't believe... you're... no."

You pulled back just enough to see his face, to touch him, to prove to yourself that this was actually happening. You cupped his face in your hands, your thumbs tracing the sharp, prominent ridges of his cheekbones, smearing through the grime and dried blood. His skin was clammy, a cold sweat sheen on his forehead, but it was his skin. His eyes. God, his eyes, that beautiful, piercing light blue, they were darting back and forth, scanning your face like he was reading a document he'd been trained to distrust. There was a wildness in them, a fractured, feverish light that hadn't been there before.

"I'm real, Bobby. I'm here. I'm right here," you whispered, your voice cracking with the force of your emotion. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm not leaving you ever again. I swear. I swear on my life."

You leaned in and kissed him. It was a desperate, tear salted kiss, a frantic press of lips meant to communicate everything you'd been too scared to say in the real world. I'm sorry. I was wrong. I need you. I think I— You poured every ounce of your relief, your guilt, your desperate, terrified hope into that kiss, your hands sliding from his cheeks into his matted hair, and he kissed you back.

At first. His lips, dry and cracked, moved against yours with a kind of stunned, automatic response. His hands on your back tightened. Then his grip shifted. His fingers slipped under the hem of your shirt, finding the bare skin of your waist. They pressed in, hard. Not the familiar, possessive squeeze of a lover. Something else. Something searching. Palpating. Like he was trying to feel the bones underneath, the muscles, the solid architecture of a human body. Verifying.

"Can't believe it," he mumbled against your lips, the words vibrating with a strange, unhinged intensity. "You're real. You feel... you feel real. But you're not. You can't be."

"Bobby," you gasped, pulling back slightly, your hands moving to his shoulders. A flicker of unease, cold and sharp, cut through the overwhelming relief. His hands were still under your shirt, his fingers digging into the flesh of your waist with a bruising pressure. "Bobby, stop. Hey. Look at me. It's me. It's Y/N."

"Y/N," he repeated, but the way he said it, it wasn't a name. It was a word he was testing, tasting for poison. He shook his head, a jerky, birdlike motion. "No. No, I've seen you. I've seen you so many times. You're never real. You're one of them. You're another trick."

"What? No. Bobby, no." Your voice was rising, the unease curdling into genuine fear. Not fear of him—no, it was fear for him. You could see it now, the full, horrifying picture. The wild, unfocused dart of his pupils. The way his jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek. The tremors wracking his lean frame. He hadn't just been injured. He'd been alone. Alone in this nightmare, hunted, terrified, his mind slowly grinding itself down against the endless, buzzing silence. "It's really me. I'm not a trick. I'm not one of those things."

"That's what the last one said," he hissed, his voice dropping to a ragged, paranoid whisper. His hands on your waist tightened, his fingers pressing so hard into your skin you knew there would be bruises. "The one with my mom's voice. The one that had Kat's face. They all say they're real. They all feel real, for a second, and then—" He broke off, a shudder running through him. His striking blue eyes, those eyes you'd spent so many mornings waking up to, were fixed on you with a desperate, shattered intensity. "Prove it. Prove you're real."

"How?" you whispered, your own tears still streaming, mingling with the grime on your cheeks. "Bobby, how? I don't know how to prove it. I'm just me. I'm the me who thinks about that morning every single second I'm in this place and wishes I could take it all back." Your voice broke, a sob hiccuping through the words. "Please. Please believe me. I'll say yes. To the dinner. To everything. I'll say yes, I promise, just please—"

Something flickered in his eyes. A crack in the paranoid wall. His brow furrowed, and for just a moment, he looked like Bobby again. The Bobby who'd kissed you awake. The Bobby who'd asked, with his heart in his throat, for one real chance. His lips parted. His hands on your waist loosened, just slightly.

"Y/N?" It was a question this time. A real one. Tentative.

"Yes," you sobbed, reaching up to touch his face again. "Yes. It's me. I'm here."

But the moment shattered as quickly as it had formed. His eyes darted to something over your shoulder, a flickering light, a shadow that wasn't there and the walls slammed back down. His face twisted, the paranoia surging back with a vengeance. "No. No, you're doing it again. You're all doing it again. Making me believe. Making me—" His voice cracked, a sound of pure, anguished terror. "You're not taking me again. You're not!"

His hands seized you. Before you could react, before you could even draw breath to scream, he moved with a desperate, wiry strength you didn't know he had. His arm locked around your neck, not in an attack, but in a panicked, desperate restraint. The crook of his elbow pressed against your throat, his other hand clamping down on the back of your head, holding you in place.

"Bobby—" you choked out, your hands flying up to claw at his arm. The pressure was immediate, terrifying. Your airway constricted, a high, thin wheeze the only sound you could make. You kicked, thrashed, tried to twist in his grip, but he held on with the unyielding strength of pure, animal terror.

"Stop moving," he snarled, his voice ragged in your ear. "Stop it. Stop pretending. Stop being her. I won't let you. I won't let you trick me again."

Spots were blooming in your vision, dark flowers unfurling at the edges of the sickly yellow light. Your struggles were weakening, your limbs growing heavy and uncoordinated.

—

The first thing you registered was the buzzing. That damned, eternal fluorescent hum, drilling into your skull, pulling you up from the black depths of unconsciousness. The second thing was the pain. A dull, throbbing ache in your throat, a raw tenderness that flared every time you swallowed. The third thing was that you couldn't move.

Your eyes flew open, and panic, cold and immediate, flooded your veins. You were lying on a bed. A real bed, with a thin, stained mattress and a metal frame that creaked when you shifted. It was pushed against a wall covered in that same sickly, yellowed wallpaper, and the room around you was small, almost claustrophobic, lit by a single, naked bulb dangling from a wire in the ceiling. But you couldn't move. Your wrists were bound to the metal headboard above your head with strips of torn fabric, your ankles similarly tied to the foot of the bed. The restraints were tight, digging into your skin, but they weren't painful.

You thrashed, a surge of animal terror overriding the pain in your throat. "Help—" The word came out as a broken croak, your voice shredded. "Help!"

"There's no one to help."

The voice came from your left. You turned your head so fast a sharp pain lanced down your neck and there he was. Bobby. He was sitting in a wooden chair pulled up to the side of the bed, just a few feet away. He'd changed his clothes somehow—or found new ones. A plain grey t-shirt, a little too big, hanging off his lean frame. The bandage on his arm had been replaced with fresher fabric. He'd washed the blood off his face, he was just sitting there. Watching you. His eyes were fixed on your face with an unnerving, unblinking focus. They were red rimmed. Exhausted and utterly, terrifyingly calm.

"Bobby," you breathed, the relief and the fear tangling into a sickening knot in your stomach. "Bobby, it's me. It's Y/N. Please. Please let me go."

He didn't move. Didn't blink. His full lips, chapped and pale, were set in a flat, unreadable line. He tilted his head slightly, like a dog hearing a strange noise. The motion was too fluid, too detached. It wasn't him. It wasn't the Bobby you knew.

"You look like her," he said quietly, almost to himself. His voice was a hoarse, ragged thing, stripped of all its old, teasing warmth. "You sound like her, too. The last one sounded like her. But it wasn't. It tried to... it got close. Got too close before I knew."

"Bobby, please, I'm not a trick," you said, your voice cracking. You tugged uselessly at the restraints, the fabric burning your wrists. "It's really me. I swear to you. I swear on anything. I'm real. I'm Y/N."

He leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees. His eyes never left your face. "Are you real?" he murmured. "Like her?"

He turned his head, looking toward the corner of the room. Your eyes followed his gaze, and your blood turned to ice. There was a figure standing in the corner. A woman. It was you. It had your face. Your hair. Your body, dressed in the same grimy clothes you were wearing. But it was wrong. The face was doubled, two versions of your features laid over each other at a slight, sickening offset. Four eyes blinked out of sync, wet and staring. Two mouths, one slightly above the other, hung open in a slack, vacant expression. Two noses, a confused jumble of cartilage and flesh. It just stood there, perfectly still, its arms limp at its sides, staring at nothing. Staring at you.

A scream clawed its way up your throat, but all that came out was a strangled, wheezing gasp. You jerked against your restraints, your heart slamming against your ribs so hard you thought it might crack bone.

"I met her two days ago," Bobby said, his voice still that low, detached monotone. He was looking at the thing in the corner with a kind of weary familiarity, like it was a stray cat he'd decided to tolerate. "She found me. I thought... I thought it was you. At first. She doesn't talk. Doesn't do much of anything, really. Just stands there. Watches." He turned back to you, and his expression flickered, a crack in the calm mask. Something desperate and broken swam beneath the surface. "She's kept me some company."

"Bobby," you whispered, your voice trembling, tears spilling down your cheeks. You forced yourself to look away from the monstrosity in the corner, to focus on him. "Bobby, look at me. Please. Look at me. That thing... that's not me. That's a monster. I'm me. I'm the real one. Please. You have to believe me."

Something shifted in his face. A muscle in his jaw jumped. His brow, that strong, defined brow, furrowed deeply. For a moment, just a moment, he looked like Bobby again. Confused. Hurting. Lost.

"Why did you reject me?"

The question came out of nowhere, quiet and raw, and it hit you harder than any blow.

"Bobby..."

"No." He stood up abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor with a harsh screech. He began to pace, a short, agitated track back and forth at the foot of the bed. His hands came up, raking through his hair, pulling at the light brown strands. "No, you don't get to just—you don't get to say my name like that and make it all—" He broke off, a frustrated, guttural sound tearing from his throat. He wheeled on you, and the calm mask was gone entirely, replaced by a raw, bleeding anguish. "Why did you reject me? Every time. Every single time. I was right there. I was right there, Y/N, and you just... you kept pushing me away like I was nothing."

"I didn't—I didn't think—"

"Exactly!" The word exploded out of him, and you flinched. "You didn't think! You didn't think about me. You didn't think about what I wanted. You just decided. You decided I wasn't serious. You decided I was just some—some stoner, some fling, some guy who wasn't good enough to be seen with you in public."

"That's not true," you sobbed, the tears flowing freely now. "That's not—I was scared, Bobby. I was scared that if we got together, I'd end up like the other girls. Just another week. Just another face. I didn't think you were serious about me. I thought I was just... I thought I was just convenient."

He stopped pacing. He stood at the foot of the bed, his chest heaving, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. The thing in the corner didn't move. It just kept watching with its four unblinking eyes.

"You're lying," he said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, trembling whisper. "You always lie. You lied that morning. You lied every time you said it was just casual. You lied every time you said you didn't feel anything. It's your fault." His voice cracked, splintering into something jagged and broken. "It's all your fault. You're the reason I'm here."

"That's not true," you pleaded, pulling uselessly at the restraints. "Bobby, that's not true. I kept telling you not to go. I told you it wasn't safe. I told you to stay away—"

"I did everything for you!" he shouted, and the sound echoed off the close, yellow walls. The entity in the corner twitched, its doubled mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Bobby didn't notice. His eyes were wet now, tears tracking down his cheeks. "Everything. You think I wanted to work at that stupid furniture store? You think I wanted to follow Clarke around with a camera filming his bullshit? I did it for you. I did it so I could be near you. Because you wouldn't let me near you any other way. You wouldn't give me a chance. You refused. Every time. And I just... I kept trying. Like an idiot. Like a pathetic, desperate idiot."

The guilt was a physical weight on your chest, crushing the air from your lungs. "Bobby, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was wrong. I was so wrong, okay? I should have said yes. I should have given you a chance. I wanted to. God, I wanted to. I was just—I was a coward. I was terrified of getting hurt, so I hurt you instead. And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

He stared at you, his face a wreck of conflicting emotions. Rage. Grief. Exhaustion and underneath it all, a desperate, flickering hope that he was desperately, furiously trying to smother, he moved closer, his body casting a shadow over you as he stood beside the bed. His hand came up, trembling violently, and touched your face. His fingers were cold, rough with grime and dried blood. But the touch was gentle. So gentle. His thumb traced the curve of your cheekbone, the same way you'd traced his a thousand times before. A shiver ran through you, your breath catching in your throat.

"You're so soft," he murmured, almost to himself. His voice had changed again, the raw anguish smoothing into something quieter. Darker. Possessive. "You've always been so soft. I used to think about it all the time. The way your skin felt under my hands. The way you'd sigh when I touched you. I thought about it every time you left."

"Bobby..." you whispered, your heart hammering against your ribs. This wasn't relief. This wasn't the reunion you'd imagined. His hand slid from your cheek down to your jaw, his fingers tracing the line of it with a slow, reverent pressure. He was looking at you the way someone looks at a painting they've stared at for too long, searching for flaws, for proof of forgery. His thumb brushed across your lower lip, and you felt the slight tremor in his touch, the barely contained violence of his desperation.

"I held her," he said, his voice still that low, detached murmur. He didn't look at the thing in the corner. He didn't need to. "Your copy. The first time I found her, I thought... I thought it was you. I held her. I talked to her. I told her everything. Everything I never got to say to you." His jaw tightened, the muscle jumping beneath his fair skin. "But it wasn't the same. She didn't feel right. She didn't smell right. She didn't... she just stood there. Empty. Like holding a doll. Like holding a corpse."

"Bobby, please, you're scaring me," you breathed, the tears still streaming down your cheeks, soaking into the dirty mattress beneath your head.

He didn't seem to hear you. His hand moved from your face, trailing down the side of your neck, his fingers light, almost exploratory. You flinched, a fresh wave of fear coursing through you. He paused, his eyes flicking up to meet yours. That intense, focused gaze was back, but it was wrong. It was the focus of a man who had been broken and rebuilt himself around a single, obsessive point.

"I kept thinking of you," he continued, his voice dropping to a ragged whisper. "The whole time. When I was running. When I was hiding. When that thing had me and I thought I was going to die. I thought of you. Your face. Your voice. The way you'd wrap your arms around me and pull me closer in the morning, like you didn't want me to know you needed it. The way you'd always leave anyway."

His hand reached your bound wrists, his fingers curling around the fabric restraints. He didn't loosen them. He just held them, his thumb pressing against the frantic flutter of your pulse.

"I won't let you leave me this time," he said, and his voice hardened, the broken anguish giving way to something resolute. Something unhinged. "You always leave. You always find an excuse. An essay. A shift. You're tired. You're busy. You don't want to date. You don't want me. But you're not leaving this time. You can't. There's nowhere to go. There's no door. There's no morning. There's just... this. Just us."

"Bobby, I'm not going to leave," you said, your voice cracking with desperation. "I told you. I'm not going anywhere. I want to stay with you. I want to be with you. That's what I was trying to say before. I was wrong. I was so wrong. Please. Please just untie me and we can—we can figure this out together. We can find a way out. Together."

He stared at you for a long, suspended moment. His face was a ruin of warring emotions, hope and suspicion, longing and terror, love and something darker, something that had grown in the dark, empty spaces of his fractured mind. Then he smiled. It was a small, sad, terrible smile that didn't reach his eyes.

"You say that now," he whispered. "But you'll change your mind. You always do. As soon as you're free, you'll run. You'll find a reason. You'll find an excuse. You'll leave me alone again. Alone with her." He jerked his head toward the corner, toward the silent, watching thing with your doubled face. "And she's not you. She'll never be you. But I won't let you go. Not this time. Not ever again."

He leaned down, his face inches from yours. His breath, warm and slightly stale, ghosted across your lips. His hand tightened on your bound wrists, his knuckles white.

"I did everything for you," he said again, the words a mantra, a wound he couldn't stop pressing. "And you're going to stay. You're going to stay right here. With me. Until you prove it. Until I know. Until I'm sure."

"Until you're sure of what?" you whispered, your voice barely audible.

His full lips brushed against your forehead, a mockery of a kiss. It was cold. Possessive. Nothing like the lazy, teasing kisses he used to plant along your spine in the morning.