Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Fuck the hour of the wolf. The deepest hours of night belong to the dragon – or at least they do tonight. Rhaenyra has lost all sense of time between this shot and the last: all she knows is the sting of salt in her nostrils and the burn of lemon juice in her eye as she finishes her suicide slammer. Beside her, Laenor screeches and capers away as Joffrey waves a second lemon wedge at his face.

“Craven!” Joffrey shouts over the pulse of deep house. His own eyes are streaming, and his voice is hoarse: they’ve been sequestered at the private bar for some hours now. “Come here, my darling, you’ve not even half finished your shot.”

“I yield, I yield!” cries Laenor, gesturing wildly at his cousin as she gasps and blinks away citrus tears. “Rhaenyra might be happy to ruin her make-up, but you can’t reasonably expect that I do the same.”

Rhaenyra takes his face in her hands and grins. “You’ve sweated your face half-off already, L,” she laughs, as she steadies herself against his body. “I keep telling you, cousin, you must use setting spray. You’re a hot and sweaty mess.”

He scoffs. “I tried to pinch yours earlier this evening, but as you may recall, you covet every drop of your precious Fenty like a firedrake,” Laenor snipes back. He loops his arm around her waist – to hold her upright, or himself, she can’t be certain – and wipes away the last of her mascara tears. “You are a needlessly excessive little reptile. Who the fuck shots top shelf Reposado with a nostril of salt? This is meant to be savoured, you heathen.”

Rhaenyra presses her lips to the shell of his ear. “Do shut up – or if you must continue flapping your lips, get me another of those.”

Joffrey, leaning close and watching their exchange, claps his hands together in delight.

“Marvelous,” he laughs, “Reckless Nyra is my most favourite playmate.”

Reckless, indeed. Rhaenyra lets her attention fall away from her cousin and his boyfriend: she disentangles herself and leans back against the sleek marble bar top. Below her, the dancefloor is a seething mass: the Saturday night crowd are in fine form, tangled, sweating, glittering. Lascivious, sinuous. She contemplates several lithe and writhing bodies, toying with the possibility of descending into the mass and losing herself there. She dismisses the thought. She is either too sober (unlikely) or too distracted to lose herself in sin. Her father’s news has her in a tailspin that can’t be curbed by a casual hook-up. Bloody waste of her tightly bound Manière De Voir leather corset and sheer crystalline mini, if you ask her, but she’s not one for half-hearted affairs of the flesh. No, Laenor, Joffrey, and tequila will have to do.

None of this slovenly nonsense had been a part of her weekend plans. Her Saturday morning had played out in the regular fashion. She’d woken at dawn and taken pleasure in the milky winter sunlight as she’d walked down Camden St to Bikram. Chakras aligned (or something), she’d picked up her favourite pretentious almond butter protein smoothie and walked home to take her time with an Aesop-scented wank in the shower. She’d been headed for the city limits in her BMW blasting Banks before 10am, self-satisfied and sipping an oat latte. Rhaenyra had received a non-specific but firm summons from her father the evening before – she suspected he was hoping for some ‘quality family time’. Typically, Targ-time was an event to be dodged, but she has not seen her two young half-brothers for some months and this morning she happened to be in the mood to play Cool Fun Sister for a few hours.

Of course, she thinks in the haze of the bar, it’s just like her sodding family to shit on a perfectly pleasant day, isn’t it? She’d still been buoyed by her residual post yoga-and-orgasm endorphins when she pulled into the Red Keep, her family’s largest estate, late morning. The vineyards, bare and grey this time of year, stretched far beyond the garden walls. The Targaryens, once kin to kings, had invested generational wealth wisely: real estate, shipping companies, large-cap stocks, the like. Viserys’ own legacy, and one of the jewels of Rhaenyra’s eventual inheritance, grew here and in vineyards across Essex, Sussex, and Wales: Averilla Yard was the name on the lips of the contemporary elite and sommeliers alike. Rhaenyra wondered if her father would be well enough for a walk among the trellises later: no matter their differences, father and daughter could always reconnect with talk of early frost, of soil acidity, of the next great reach for the company. She would ask him to take a stroll with her, she decided, so long as he was on his best behaviour today.

She’d breezed through the enormous wooden doors of the Keep, calling hello, delighting in the patter of her brothers’ little feet when they dashed to greet her. With Aemond and Aegon holding a hand apiece, she’d walked down the cavernous stone halls to the dining room where her father and his wife waited for her. One look at her father’s discomforted face and Alicent’s stiff shoulders and she’d understood that something was terribly amiss.

“What’s the matter?”

Viserys shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Gin-veined and thin-haired as he was, he looked older than ever as he glanced up to his daughter’s face and away again.

“Boys, Harwin is waiting for you at the stables,” he said to his young sons. “Off with you – and Aemond, please take greater care with Vhagar. You almost put out your eye last week. Your mother will throttle you if we’re required to spend another weekend in emergency.”

The three elder Targaryens watched one another carefully as the boys rushed from the room, shoving and shouting. Viserys beckoned towards his daughter. “Sit down, sweetheart, won’t you? And come and give your old father a kiss before you do,” he grumbled.

Rhaenyra deigned to obey – he drove her mad, the stiff old prick, but they’d reached a warm, if wary, truce in recent years. She kissed his pale head and fussed briefly with the dressings on the lesions on his forearm. “How is the pain?” she asked him, but he only muttered indistinctly and waived her off. Alicent, her best-friend-cum-stepmother (still weird, she thought, and gross), grimly met Rhaenyra’s eyes and pursed her lips, shook her head almost imperceptibly. Not good, then, but he’d be damned before he ever admitted to it. Rhaenyra surprised all of them – herself most of all – by moving to take her stepmother’s hands and kiss her warmly on the cheek. Despite the tension, or perhaps because of it, she was feeling magnanimous. No need to rankle Alicent today.

A few sun salutations and I’m a holy paragon, she thought wryly.

Still, her heart had given an uneasy thump as she’d taken a seat at the scarred wooden table, an heirloom passed down through her family over centuries of aristocratic (first literally, and more recently in the business sense of the word) reign. She absentmindedly traced the rough grain and smiled tightly at Clare, her father’s head-of-household of the last two decades, when she placed a delicate porcelain cup and a steaming French press before her. Rhaenyra eyed the cup suspiciously.

“Seven hells, you’ve brought out the Bernardaud china,” she mused. “Who died?”

Alicent snorted and fidgeted with her own cup. “Honestly, Nyra, a death in the family might be preferable to our news.”

Viserys had smiled tightly and reached to gently clasp his wife’s bitten fingers in his mottled fist.

“Perhaps not quite the moment for dark humour, my love, but indeed you have a point.” He sighed heavily and at last met his daughter’s eyes with a worried, level gaze. “It’s your uncle, Rhaenyra. Daemon has surfaced, at long last. Right here in London.”

Rhaenyra felt the cavernous room shrink: the cosy fire in the hearth was suddenly smothering. Three years of no word, beyond the occasional sordid report in the international tabloids (a wrecked luxury car in Athens, some disgraceful thing with a Russian model, clubs, drugs, reckless excess) and a single letter from her Uncle Corlys when Daemon had crawled to Driftmark for a week of convalescence. Nothing at all in the past 12 months. Not a peep. She had begun to think she would never hear from him, or of him, again. But he was here – is here, she thinks in the present – almost as though the years have not passed at all. As if his betrayal were a slate wiped clean.

Viserys watched her closely and reached toward her with his other hand. “Rhaenyra,” he said gently. “Tell me what you’re thinking. What you’re feeling.”

Well, I am either going to throw up, or throw something, she had thought. She had kept her face carefully blank, however, and had ignored the offered hand. “Well. What tidings does my dear uncle bring with him? Slander? Gossip? A declaration of war?”

Alicent’s face, usually so carefully benevolent, had curved into a sneer. “Nothing, or not yet. We’ve not heard from him directly, but he checked into the Mayfair penthouse last night.”

Rhaenyra turned a cool gaze on her father. “Exile obviously doesn’t include a ‘no access to family real estate’ clause then,” she said. Viserys gave her a helpless look. Ever the tender-heart, or at least where his adopted younger brother was concerned. Her eminent father, the mightiest of the Targaryen patriarchs. Fucking yeah right.

“Daemon clearly wants us to know he’s back in town. I expect he will send a herald sometime in the next few days,” her father replied. “I only wanted to warn you of his presence before you read it in the paper, or the socials, or heard through your own networks.”

“I’d best call the banners, then,” Rhaenyra replied wryly. “Rally all forces. Draw up the portcullises, and the rest.”

Viserys reached for his daughter again. This time she took the offered hand, taking pity if not comfort. “He cannot supplant you, daughter, you know this. He is no threat to your position with Averilla Yard, nor to your inheritance.”

“Not for lack of trying,” she bit back. “He’s a wily bastard, Father, and if he’s back in London, it can hardly be to wave the white flag.”

Viserys lowered his chin in defeated agreement. “We can only wait, for now.”

“Alternatively, you order security to storm the Mayfair flat, drag Daemon from his lair, and send him back to whatever louche squat he last crawled out from,” Rhaenyra suggested. At his hangdog glance, she sighed and acquiesced. “I know you won’t, Father, or can’t. You have a sentimental heart.” She squeezed his hand as she said the last, even as she thought, you old fool.

Old fool he may be, but Rhaenyra hasn’t forgotten Viserys’ wrath when Daemon’s last terrible game was uncovered three years previous. Daemon, still on the Averilla board despite the protestations of Hightower and Strong (and the rest), had been negotiating to secure rare and vital land south of Tuscany. The Aracce Deal was to be Averilla’s opening play to expand beyond the UK: it was Rhaenyra herself who had sensed international enology trends turning from classic yeast fermented Chardonnay and Pinot Noir to more novel, provincial appellations. Sustainable business practice and consumer palates demanded expansion into esoteric wines – skin contact, bottle fermentation, strange colours, visible sediment. The Targaryens needed land beyond their current borders: warmer climes, richer soils. Daemon, ever in her corner, had demanded that he be the one to close the Aracce Deal. Rhaenyra, sequestered at Oxford for her final year, had petitioned her father to allow it. Capricious as her uncle was, he was also her fiercest ally – if anyone was to win that land and secure her future with the company, it was him.

And yet – she'd come home between mid-term exams and found it had all gone to shit. Daemon, it seemed, had leaked word of the deal to the Triarchy, Averilla Yard’s closest rival, and the land had been snatched from under her nose. Rhaenyra had never seen her father so inflamed: Viserys, weakened by illness in his middle age, had towered over the hulking figure of her uncle, his usually placid face twisted with ire.

“You have betrayed me. You have betrayed your beloved niece,” Viserys had hissed.

Daemon had settled back into the leather chaise, his face impassive. “Would you hear my side, brother?”

“Your side! There is no your side. You leaked word of the deal to the Triarchy. You played me, the board, the company, your niece of one and twenty years, for fools.” Viserys shook his head in wonder. “And what for? I cannot even see a motive, Daemon, beyond your own love of games. Did you hope to stir conflict? Have you been longing for a battle?”

Her uncle’s face was bare of even contempt. She saw him glance to where she stood, frozen in the hall, but he did not acknowledge her beyond the tightening of his jaw.

“I am weary of you – weary of your clashes with Hightower, your face in the tabloids, your love of barely contained disgrace. You are a plague. Take your leave of us. The Mayfair place is closed to you, as are our family estates, the Saint Tropez house. All of it, besides what is yours alone.” Viserys turned from his brother and Rhaenyra saw grief in the lines of his face. “If you refuse to protect this family, I will protect this family from you. Go, now. I don’t want to see you.”

Rhaenyra had waited for her uncle to argue. To rage, to contradict the accusations. He would not – he could not – have a hand in hurting her. But he only got to his feet, languid, and sauntered to where she waited. He leaned close, intimate as a lover, and held her eyes.

“Farewell, my little dragon,” he murmured in Valyrian. “Take good care.”

Rhaenyra had held his arm in a frantic grip. “What is this, uncle? Tell me the truth of it. I will hear it from you.”

Daemon had gently loosened her fingers and leaned down to press a kiss against her forehead. She had snatched at the collar of his shirt and held him. “I know you well enough to know when you are performing, uncle. This cannot be the whole truth of the thing. Tell me the rest,” she commanded.  Don’t go, don’t go, not again. He twisted out of her grasp, moved her gently aside. Rhaenyra called to his retreating back. “Stay.”

Of course, he had not. He never did.

Three years on, Rhaenyra no longer recognises the naïve little girl who lowered herself to begging, nor the pale ghost she’d become in the first months of his absence. Instead, she had to resist the thought that she should throttle the stupid bloody devil herself. Far too rattled to maintain polite conversation, she had promptly excused herself and fled back to the city. The turmoil of her inner self was such that she could not even identify what she was feeling: some bilious whirlpool of rage, excitement, longing. Upon returning to her Camden flat, she’d called her cousin.

“Laenor. Get fucked up with me tonight.”

“Gladly. When do we begin?”

By her foggy calculations, she’s been drinking for at least six hours. Not long enough, evidently, given that her gut is still more emotion soup than inebriated delight. Laenor tucks another shot glass into her empty hand and Joffrey moves to lean against her other side.

“Now, Nyra, you’ve not told us what the special occasion actually is, this evening,” he says. “What are we toasting to?”

Rhaenyra rolls her eyes and throws back the tequila. “No toast, no celebration. Come on, you pair, I’ve just about had enough. I want to go somewhere else.”

Outside on Cowper Street, the night is so cold that Rhaenyra feels instantly sober. Joffrey and Laenor gambol and holler, jostling her and laughing, noticing her melancholy only after she hails a cab.

“Nyra! Where are we off to now, you little sneak?”

“Me, not we,” she says. “Stay. I’m going to become sad drunk or angry drunk if I keep this up. I’m going to head home and throw some temazepam on it, instead.” She ducks into the warm fug of the cab, but Laenor leans down and holds the door open a moment, ignoring the ire of the driver.

“Cousin, I’m worried about you – home before dawn? Hardly like you,” he jokes. She smiles wryly and he pushes on. “Will you tell me what this is about?”

Rhaenyra thinks to shake him off with one of her favoured deflections (work, Alicent) but the worry on his face whittles her down to honesty.

“It’s Daemon,” she confesses. “He’s back in town. Viserys told me this morning. I don’t know how to feel.”

“Seven fucking hells.”

“Yes, that about sums it up.”

“Do you want company, or do you want to be alone?” he asks. “Genuine, sober company. We’ll have a coffee, sober up, and I’ll rub your feet. Or whatever it is people do when they want to be sincerely comforting. Joff gives a stellar shoulder rub.”

His frank expression brings a smile to her face.

“Alone, I think,” she replies, and kisses his cheek. She waves to Joffrey, who gives them space as they confer. “I’m all right. Well – I'm drowning, a little, but since numbing it with expensive tequila isn’t doing the trick, some sleep and processing time might be just the thing. I’ll call you in the morning, okay? Once you’re up.”

Laenor pinches her cheek and closes the door softly behind her. The cab swerves into traffic. Reggae thumps through the tinny speakers and the driver grumbles about drunken fares. Rhaenyra sinks back into the musty seat and watches the colours of the night flash by. Searches for the moon. Wonders, for a moment, if he is thinking of her, as she thinks of him – rolls her eyes at her own stupidity. Foolish sentiment must run in the family, she thinks. Then: home, a pill, oblivion.

Chapter Text

Useful as sleeping pills are, Rhaenyra muses groggily, they make waking feel thick and sticky. She mentally resolves never to mix them with tequila in future. The morning feels like treacle: her head throbs, her mouth is dry, and she can’t, for all the shitting hells, form a coherent thought. She forces herself from the sweaty tangle of silk sheets and almost goes to her knees on the hardwood floor with the sheer force of her hangover. 

“Fuck.”

One thin, pitiful vomit, a scalding hot shower, and two Advil later, she begins to feel more like herself. She trails through her flat with her Egyptian cotton robe flapping open, aware of the pale hollow of her belly. It occurs to her that she neglected to eat anything much yesterday. Bloody amateur hour, she thinks to herself. Never drink a) on an empty stomach while b) having a menty-b about your estranged almost-but-not really uncle.
 
Her Camden flat – she has always insisted on referring to her sleek, 2500-square-foot penthouse with self-conscious irony – is only in mild disarray. Her Valentino heels are strewn across the entryway; her corset, dress, and thong trail through the kitchen. Her clutch (keys, wallet, lipstick all present and accounted for) open on the occasional table. An empty glass (she sniffs it – water, thank goodness, clever girl) on the countertop, popped blister packs of painkillers and sleeping pills by the sink. Sourdough toast, half-buttered and abandoned on her favourite handmade ceramic dish. She takes a ravenous bite as she surveys the flat. Hangover aside, she feels a surge of satisfaction at her ability to take care of herself. She places her dead iPhone on charge and turns her attention to her Gaggia. Carbs and strong coffee and she might just make it through the day. 

The methodical grind-weigh-tamp-pour soothes her. Here, in this kitchen, in this flat, she has a sanctuary: it is not her penthouse that’s breached by the enemy. Raise the portcullis and man the watchtowers, indeed. The thought pleases her, and she feels slightly renewed as she takes her steaming coffee and perches on her plush, golden velvet couch. 

Her phone, waking as it charges, pings quietly. Rhaenyra sips her coffee and reaches for it, remembering her promise to call Laenor, and is frozen for a moment when she sees the message on her screen. 

Today 6:36am 
Daemon🔪🔨🔫   
Nightjar. 6pm. Meet me.
 Daemon🔪🔨🔫
Gimlets are on me. 

“Are. You. Fucking. Mental.”

So, here arrives his raven, barely 24 hours after he slinks back to her kingdom under cover of darkness. Under the surge of her rage, a minute part of her purrs with pleasure. She will never ask for confirmation of the fact, but she is certain that Viserys would not yet have heard word from his brother. She always was the singular object of her uncle’s eye. 

The rest of her raises hackles and spits with indignation. Three years, and he has eight words for her, and the undoubtedly unshakeable certainty that she will come when he commands. Perhaps it is time to shake his sodding surety, she thinks, tossing her phone down in disgust. She settles back into the couch and seethes into her espresso. 

Her uncle – or rather, some distant cousin three times removed, no one really seemed to know his precise relation to her family line – is her first and fondest memory. In it, she is four years old and seated on his shoulders. His pale hair, so like hers, is tangled in her chubby hand – with the other, she is stroking the rough mane of a stallion. He is speaking to her in Valyrian, the lost language of her ancestral House. She is fumbling back with her own meagre grasp of the ancient patois. Before the Aracce affair, her father would fondly recount his long-abandoned ire at the fact that his daughter had grasped Valyrian faster than Modern English. In the earliest years of her life, he’d struggled to communicate with her while she held sustained, if stumbling, conversations with her uncle. 

Viserys’ love and tolerance of his adopted brother is legendary in this chapter of family lore. Raised together after the death of Daemon’s parents, the boys, initially impossible to tell apart, grew to be antithetical opposites, even while they remained thick as thieves. The king and his rogue prince; truth-speaker and trickster; centurion and satyr. As Viserys sought to protect the family legacy and solidify the name Averilla Yard, Daemon squandered his trust fund on fast cars, horseflesh, women. Indeed, Rhaenyra has always known her uncle to be wily, wild, unpredictable: here one day, in Barcelona the next, back in a week or a month or a year with some new bauble for his coveted, darling niece. For Daemon loves her above all else – once, he was her dark knight, her dragon prince, partner in all her crimes. If Rhaenyra was up to no good, it was Daemon who was behind it. It was Daemon, not Viserys, who had taught her to ride, to swim, to shoot. For her, Daemon hung the fucking moon and the shitting stars and the gods-damned sun. 

Banish the thought, she reminds herself firmly. Set all seven fucking Hells afire, more like. 

Somewhere along the way, as Rhaenyra grew and wizened, became bold and striking, Daemon had settled somewhat. Oh, of course he still drank and cavorted as he pleased, but he was home more often than not: she began to count on his presence on Christmas, at product launches, board meetings, her birthdays. Weekends and evenings were for Daemon, for rides in the countryside, for Scrabble by the fireside, for French films and discussions on poetry, cooking, squabbling, partying. The easy, avuncular affection he lavished upon her had become something closer to an easy equilibrium between them, an allyship that seemed perfectly natural, inevitable – they were, after all, similar in nature, reincarnations of their fierce and wilful ancestors. True dragons, Viserys would exult proudly when he was in a benevolent mood, conquerors of ages past. 

Until – well, until. 

Rhaenyra resists the urge to hurl her coffee mug against the wall. Needless destruction is Daemon’s tool, not hers – and she happens to like this cup very much. But she must move. Fuck the hangover. Her residual lethargy is burned away in the heat of discord. She slugs back a second espresso and shucks on her buttery leggings, laces her Hokas, chooses something thumping and angry to pulse through her headphones. Takes the clattering fire escape down to the quiet street.
She powers through her initial post-tequila run-regret: her stomach roils, head throbs, heart flutters through the first mile. While not usually one for self-masochistic behaviour, she takes pleasure in the obedient, mechanical kinesics of her body. Control. The strong bellow of her lungs, the lean muscles of her legs. The loamy scent of dark canal water, the taste of smoke and winter. For a while, she is only an object in motion. 

The straightforwardness of systematic physical movement helps her to sift through her tangled thoughts. If she can’t turn the feelings into sense, she thinks, she will revert to cold calculation. She is familiar with her uncle’s pattern – arrive without warning, delight her with a gift and his unwavering attention, drag her out to sea, and leave her to swim to shore alone. His appearance at Mayfair is, as her father believes, strategic. He will know that she knows. The commanding text is just like his usual summons. He may have considered a spontaneous appearance in her flat, his next most favourite magic trick, but correctly guessed that this would result in a head injury (his). He has set the trap and laid the bait, and he knows that she will both see the jaws of it and step into them, willingly. 

So, she thinks, she will do just that. The game is on again, and she has learned some new tricks during his absence.

 
By the time she stumbles into her shower, legs quivering and heart quailing, her resolve has hardened and cooled to steel. Games, is it? Let’s play then, uncle, she thinks viciously. 

Chapter Text

Today 2.53pm

Nyra 🐉: Morning L. Survive the night?

Laenor: Barely. Word from Uncle D?

Nyra 🐉: A text. Cheeky bastard.

Laenor: Cheeky! Leave on read?.

Nyra 🐉: Left on read. On my way to meet him.

Laenor: WTF

Nyra 🐉: Belly of the beast, and all that.

Laenor: Courage, Persephone.

Nyra 🐉: You know P had the hots for Hades, right?

Laenor: 😉   

Rhaenyra decides not to read too deeply into Laenor’s thinly veiled suggestion: he’d followed his wink with a barrage of tongues. Bloody buffoon. The joke was an old one – her cousins, Laena and Laenor, had teased her relentlessly about her teenaged crush on Daemon – and his supposed desire for her – since she was a girl of twelve. Targaryens have always kept it in the family, babe, Laena would intone, before quailing under the flurry of Rhaenyra’s fists. Rhaenyra maintains, stoically, that such a crush has never existed. Not even an itty-bitty little bit of panties-in-a-twist? Laenor would tease if he were here now.  She reminds herself to tell him that he’d better find some new material.

But enough of that. This next move requires precision, focus. Dressed in Dior, she feels ready for battle: under her rich black coat, she wears an immaculate black blazer, tailored to fit her narrow waist and cut-out to reveal slashes of her skin. Her trousers hug her lean thighs. Heels high and sharp as daggers. Her hair, like pale moonlight, is slick against her skull and braided down her back like a whip. Hermes lipstick on an otherwise minimalist skin base: she has buffed and moisturised and highlighted until she shines. She wants him to see her dewy youth and underestimate her; she wants him to sense her potency and be thrown off.

Fuck. Yeah. She’s back on her game. Princess and dragon both, she takes strong, sure strides in the direction of Nightjar. She feels like she could set the world afire with her will alone. Watch the fuck out, Uncle, she thinks fiercely.

Still, she pauses a moment at the mouth of the speakeasy. Wipes damp palms on her coat. It seems impossible that he is right here, right in this moment, after all this time. When she pushes the door open, he will be there – this feels, she thinks, rather like sticking her head into a lion’s mouth.

Nothing to be done about that. She pushes the door open before she can think too hard about it.

Nightjar is almost empty this early in the evening: a skulk of stuffed suits in a back corner, a lone man checking his watch and taking nervous sips of a negroni. As she descends the staircase into the candlelit gloom, she scans the room: pressed tin ceilings, bentwood chairs, rich leather, dark-stained oak and glass cabinetry. Whiskey, red wine, gin bottles reflect the cut-crystal chandeliers. Opulence and sin. Precisely Daemon’s preference of venue: glittering with all the filthy glamour of the Jazz Age, it reeks of excess and exclusivity. She refuses to admit that it is also just exactly to her own taste.

It takes her a moment to spot him: she has automatically looked for him in the bar’s shadowed corners when he is right there, quite plainly, seated at the bar. Unlike him not to lurk in a dark corner, being bloody roué that he is. She is relieved to note that she still has the upper hand: he doesn’t appear to have seen her yet. He is tapping an idle finger against a crystal glass half-filled with clear liquid. Rhaenyra squares her shoulders, schools her face to her very best politely blank expression, and strides across the bar, her heels striking impressively on the wooden floor. He turns just as she reaches him, and at the sight of his face alone she is momentarily struck by the urge to forgive him for everything, fuck, more than that, pretend it never happened at all. The feeling of completeness that she feels when she is with him. Part of her is struck by the wonder of him: the sharp, pale planes of his jaw, his shadowed eyes, his hair like snowfall. Her own reflection, shining darkly.

Instead, she takes her time sliding out of her coat and draping it across an empty chair. She feels his eyes on her.

“Hello, Uncle.”

“Niece.” His voice is curling smoke. He taps his glass once more and slides a second drink along the bar to her. “This was colder ten minutes ago. The tardiness is new,” he says.

Rhaenyra has run purposely late. He would have expected her to be precisely on time, as she always is – she wants him restless.

She takes a slow sip. Perfection: navy strength, hold the lime. Just as she likes it. She gives him a small, appreciative nod.

“You remembered,” she replies. Ignores his jibe.

A small smile flickers across his mouth. “Of course.”

He lounges in his chair and watches her without shame. She sees his eyes linger on her mouth, the tailored suit, the slick braid. Sizing her up, drinking her down. Rhaenyra had almost forgotten his habit of devouring with his eyes, and the particular way he does this to her and her alone: thinks momentarily of Laenor’s stupid fucking winking emoji. Tongues.

No, not that, that can fuck off.

Focus.

He expects her to squirm. Instead, she tilts her chin and settles back in her own chair, assessing him. He is dressed simply in dark trousers, dark jacket, dark shirt, unbuttoned to that she can see the hollow of his throat. The family crest on his golden signet ring; a second golden band, unfamiliar to her, on his thumb. Versace watch – hardly here to play the beggar, then, she thinks wryly. He is otherwise almost unchanged: his hair is shorter and his face leaner than she remembers, but his body has the same powerful build, predatory stillness. And that sodding calm, inscrutable expression. Patient and calculated, until he is not.

Daemon is in no rush this evening, though. He seems quite content to bask in the coolness of her gaze; she had hoped he would feel pressed to reveal his agenda, but he is unhurried, and she finds herself catching the impatience she had intended to inflict. She does her best not to show it.

“Well, out with it,” she murmurs. “What the fuck do you want?”

He startles her with a laugh. “Gods, Rhaenyra. Only you can turn the word fuck into something like politeness.”

She bites the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. If she gives him an inch, he will crack her open like a nut. Hold your fucking ground, Rhaenyra, she scolds herself. It’s been five minutes. Hate his guts for at least as long as it takes him to reveal his machinations.

Daemon takes a sip of his gin, swallowing his laughter. “You would want to get right to the heart of the thing, wouldn’t you? No small talk.”

“You hate small talk, and so do I,” she reminds him.

“Don’t you wish to know how your poor old uncle has fared during his banishment?”

“Not particularly,” Rhaenyra replies, and she hears the brittle edge in her voice. “The tabloids kept me up to date, for a while. I expect you’ve been up to much the same as always. You’ve become predictable in your old age.”

Daemon laughs softly. His gaze is unrelenting. “I’m flattered to know you’ve kept tabs on me.”

She scoffs, tossing her braid over her shoulder. “Hardly. You’re easy news for lazy journos, Uncle, and your front-page appearances are difficult to miss.”

“Ah. Debauchery sells, I suppose.”

“Yes, Daemon, and you have enough of that for all of us,” she sighs. “Out with it. Before I tire of you.”

He smirks. “You could never.”

The sinuous, rounded vowels of High Valyrian startle her: it has been so long since she has used the dead language. Still, she chooses silence as her weapon. Let him keep his fusty old Valyrian.

Daemon settles back in his chair. “All right, you minx, I concede. You win.” He throws back his gimlet and gestures to the bartender for two more. He nods at her drink. “Finish that.”

Rhaenyra feels her skin prickle with irritation, but she complies: holding his gaze, she finishes in two swallows. The gin sets a fire in her skin.

The gin, not the way his lips part softly as he watches her.

The bartender sets another two gimlets before them, and Daemon leans forward in his seat. “Right, then, little dragon, the heart of the thing. What does the name Stepstones mean to you?”

In spite of herself, Rhaenyra feels her chest go tight with excitement. “A lot, as I’m sure you know. Yarra Valley, Australia, perfect climate and acidity for Montepulciano and Sangiovese. It’s land gone to seed – used to be a functioning vineyard, but word is owner Creghas Drahar is looking to sell – or not. The Triarchy have been hovering around it, along with others, but no one seems to be able to touch Drahar.”

“Good girl, you’ve done your research already,” he smiles. She stuffs down the momentary bloom of pleasure at his praise. Fucking hell, her traitorous body would have her in thrall. “Yes - old Crabfeeder, they call him, did you know that? Peculiar old bastard. Unwilling to use the land, unwilling to sell. Happy to hole up in his little cottage.”

Rhaenyra is nonplussed. “Yes - I’ve kept an eye on it, but Averilla Yard has made no approach. The Board has deemed it ‘outside of scope’. Hightower and the rest are entrenched in tradition: ‘heritage, ancestry, and provenance’ are preferrable to expansion and innovation, I’m told.”

“Your impressions have gotten better.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Stepstones is a risk,” Rhaenyra snarls. “As was the Aracce Deal. Father and the Board have been...reluctant...to take any further chances since that last.”

Daemon drinks deeply. “Ah.”

“Yes.”

“Ever pressed Hightower on the Aracce affair?”

“I couldn’t even guess at what you infer, Uncle. Talk plainly.”

He runs his index finger around the lip of the glass. Lively blues music fills the brief silence that falls between them.

Then he says, “I bought it.”

“Stepstones?”

“The very one.”

Rhaenyra gapes, all pretence of aloofness dropped. “You bought it. From Drahar. Who is not selling.”

“Yes.”

She feels her lip curl. So that’s what this is about. “And you mean to hold this over me? You’re cunning, Uncle, and reckless perhaps, but rarely cruel.”

“Never cruel, Princess, never to you,” he says softly. “I mean to gift it to you. Stepstones is yours.”

Rhaenyra slips into Valyrian without thinking about it. “Mine?”

Daemon leans closer: she is submerged in the familiar scent of him, of flame and vetiver. His gaze is fevered. “Yours.”

“This is certainly more extravagant than your usual baubles, Daemon,” she murmurs. “A vineyard on the other side of the world. Whatever will I do with it?”

His smile is wicked. “Burn it, for all I care, little dragon. But – preferably, come with me, find someone with your passion for esoteric flavour, to build it, staff it, and turn the thing into your crown jewel. While you stand to inherit the existing estates, they will always belong to your father. Take this and make it your own. Fuck the Board, fuck Hightower especially.” He brushes along her cheekbone with his knuckle. “You are a Targaryen. Take what you want. Show them your teeth, you little beast.”

Rhaenyra settles back in her chair. Sucks her lower lip into her mouth. Rolls her eyes to the ceiling. This gift – what a gift, an opportunity, to have something all her own. She hardly feels the need to prove herself, but she has chafed against the Board’s bit of late.

He watches her every movement. Predictably, her anger at him has evaporated – he always was so easy to forgive, and gods know she has missed him. Ally and worthy playmate. He has done this thing for me, she muses, whether to torment or to please. Likely both.

The time and money he must have spent. The uncharacteristic commitment and focus. For her. Solitary and self-sufficient she may be, but she does enjoy being worshipped. Perhaps she will have him on his knees before this is done. He’s right: she is the blood of the dragon, and what she desires, she will have. All right, then.

“So,” she says, finally. “This is your new game. And you’ve set all the pieces precisely where you wish them to be. Clever Daemon.”

For the first time this evening, she has unsettled him, and he frowns. “Game?”

Rhaenyra barks a laugh. “Peace, Uncle. I will play.”

He holds his palms up in surrender. “No game, Rhaenyra. An apology, if you like, though one is hardly needed—”

“Enough,” she says. “I said, I’ll play. I’m not sure of your design yet, Daemon, but I’ve grown much since we last spoke. I’ll unravel you with time.” The frustration on his face makes her smile.

I’d forgotten how much it amuses me to goad him, she thinks fondly.

“You’ve begun with the upper hand,” she tells him, “So the next move is mine. I suspect you’d hoped to find me overcome by your generosity?” The disgruntled glance he gives her tells her she is right. “You’d hoped to whisk me off across the globe – tonight, was it? I hope you’ve not bought tickets.”

“Rhaenyra—”

“Father is recuperating at the Red Keep with Alicent and the boys. We’ll visit the Keep tomorrow. You will postulate yourself to Viserys: only when you have humbled yourself before him, will I consider your offer,” she commands. “Be ready, early. I’ll collect you from Mayfair at 9am.”

He opens his mouth to speak, and she slides two fingers under his chin to snap it shut. He gives her a look like he would like to swallow her whole and spit out her bones. Smiling, she finishes her drink and gathers her coat. “It’s been a pleasure, Uncle.” She pauses and smiles. “I missed you,” she tells him, sincerely.

Daemon only watches her shrug into her coat with hooded eyes. “And I you, little dragon. Ñuha vīlībagon mēre.” My fierce one.

Rhaenyra smirks. You have no idea, you sneaky tosser, she thinks as she turns her back on him. Just you wait.

Chapter Text

Rhaenyra sleeps the gluttonous, dreamless sleep of the victor and wakes at dawn, crackling with energy. She dutifully runs her usual circuit, breathing fog in the cool grey of morning. At home, she lays her yoga mat out on her private roof terrace and rolls out her aching muscles. She showers, dresses (cashmere, vintage Levi’s, well-weathered RMs, Balenciaga puffer), and finds that by the time she is ready, it is still too early to leave.

She fires up the Gaggia and then sits down to her usual Monday morning ritual: switch on BBC, browse the Financial Review, check on Averilla Yard, noting year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter percentage changes. Looking good. Then, a skim of the foodie tabloids: Gastronomé, Tart, Olive, Decanter, Harper Review. Nothing much to report, she is pleased to note, only a smattering of stellar reviews of Averilla’s 2009 Premiere Cuvee, newly re-released and selling like wildfire. No word of Stepstones – but Daemon being Daemon, he’d have kept that card close to his chest. For now.

 After a moment’s pause, Rhaenyra types new terms into the search bar. Her gut twists in anticipation as she scans The Daily Mirror and TMZ for signs of him. Bit early for any word, but the 24-hour news cycle demands vigilance. This, she knows from experience. Too her immense relief, there is nothing of Daemon.

She is contemplating hitting the refresh button, torn between reasoning that to do so would be either prudent or paranoid, when her door buzzes. Her gaze snaps to the clock and she frowns. 7.45am. Who, at this hour—

She gets up to check the camera and of course it’s him, giving her a silly little wave.

“Clever, clever fucking Daemon,” she hisses. Of course, he would claw back control like this: heavens forbid he permit his upstart of a niece squire him to the countryside. She is more annoyed with herself for not anticipating this than she is with him for doing it.

His voice, smooth as silk, crackles through the intercom. “Surprise, darling. Are you going to buzz me in, or are you going to force me to interact with the concierge?”

“Neither,” she snaps. “I’m dressed. Down in a jiffy.”

He is lounging against a sleek Porsche with a coffee in each hand, looking, she thinks grudgingly, devastating. Minimalistic gold-rimmed Prada sunglasses, Lora Piana sweater, simple waxed jacket. Can he do nothing wrong, she thinks with annoyance. He’s even good at being a conniving prick.

He has dressed, she realises, as she has – for comfort, style, and for riding. His boots, she recognises from the last time they took Caraxes and Syrax out together. The very same pair, she realises, as her own – he'd gifted her a matched pair on her 15^th birthday after she’d told him that she liked his. He notices her noticing. He is looking at her as though she has done something that amuses him.

“I knew you were late on purpose,” he says in the way of greeting. “Awful creature – were you trying to make me doubt you’d show?”

Rhaenyra rolls her eyes – twice now in 24 hours, she realises, when she’d thought she’d dropped the childish habit years before.

“Another toy of yours, is it?” she asks, gesturing to the Porsche. “Don’t you know only menopausal women drive these now, Uncle? The 90s were thirty years ago.”

“Maserati is in the shop.”

She makes a show of walking around the vehicle, knowing without looking at him that he is taking great pleasure in watching her. She turns and grins.

“Ah! A Turbo, at the very least. You’re not quite ready to be put out to pasture, then,” she quips. He laughs.

“Very good,” he says, and holds out a coffee. When she takes it from him, he uses his free hand to snatch her arm and pull her to him. His mouth brushes her earlobe, and she freezes.

“Oat milk, of course, for your poor tender belly,” he whispers, teasing, and roughly kisses her cheek before he releases her.

Rhaenyra turns and climbs into the Porsche with as much dignity as she can muster. Daemon, settling himself in the driver’s seat, gives her a crafty wink.

“Lyka, zaldrīzitsos,” he entreats. Peace, little dragon. “I may have ignored your preference for today’s travel arrangements, but I intend to obey your weightier commands. I wore my very best grovelling pants – do you see?”

Rhaenyra tries and fails to suppress her smile. The car is full of the smell of him; she restrains herself from giving in to the urge to bury her face against his shoulder. Her younger self would not have resisted, she thinks.

“Fine,” she concedes, “But I get to choose the radio station.”

“Fine.”

She goes very still when he leans across her and snakes his arm between her legs – but he only fishes a white pastry box from under her seat. He opens it with a flourish.

“Still your favourite?”

She gasps with delight and bites into the pan au pistache.

“La Bouche?”

“Of course.”

“I may forgive you yet,” she mumbles around a mouthful of buttery pastry and pistachio cream.

“Do. Take pity on an old man.”

She gives him a kindly pat on the knee, scattering pastry flakes over him and the upholstery. He frowns.

“Don’t you sully my grovelling pants,” he warns. “Beastly thing. Clearly no one has enforced your house-training in my absence.”

She settles into her seat and takes another bite. “Just drive, will you?”

They reach the city limits in comfortable silence, and only when the trappings of urban living give way to rolling green do they speak. As they pass through wool country, their conversation begins to bridge the years between their last meeting: they speak of newly acquired tastes, of her first years officially with Averilla, their family, music, books. Simple things, perhaps, but Rhaenyra knows that it goes deeper: she is delighted to find that their tastes are still the same, that their conversation flows naturally as water. She has not lost him, after all, only endured an extended pause in his company. The larger hurt can wait. She is content to enjoy him for a while longer.

They reach the Keep faster than she would have liked, and as the tyres of the Porsche crunch over the gravel drive, both fall silent. Pale, wintry sunshine filters through the naked oaks that line the driveway. The Keep squats on the hill, and beside it, the long, weathered, stone-gabion winery stretches its hoary length against the bare vineyards. Beyond it, the stables: converted from a crumbling edifice that dates to the 1850s.

She glances at her uncle in time to catch the ease that softens his face. He glances at her and smiles.

“You look contented, Uncle.”

“I’ve missed the comforts of home.”

“Funny,” she muses, “I’d never imagined you were particularly comfortable here.”

He only looks sideways at her with that same smile, unreadable as ever.

She sees the faces of her half-brothers pressed against the enormous glass picture windows in the dining room and grins.

“They’ll be over the moon that you’re here,” she tells him.

“That makes two of them.”

“Take your allies where you can,” she cautions, and opens the door to get out into the crisp morning. She breathes deeply: frost, woodsmoke, cut grass, horse manure. Home.

Daemon, tipping his face up to the sun, seems to share her feeling. She watches him, the artfully hewn lines of him, a pale prince carved in stone. She starts, resettles the armour of her features into an insouciant expression, when the great wooden entryway crashes open and his nephews come boiling out, all noise and elbows and kicking feet.

“Uncle Daemon! Nyra!”

She swings a squirming Aemond onto her hip and noisily kisses his cheeks. “Hello, small man,” she laughs. “Shouldn’t you be in kindergarten?”

Her father’s voice startles her. “Clare was just about to take them to school. This is a surprise, daughter.” She turns and sees him barring the doorway. His face is piqued: jaw set. “Brother.”

“Father,” Rhaenyra calls. She sets Aemond on his feet and he capers away to wind himself around his uncle’s legs. “Daemon has a proposal for us to consider.”

“Something completely indecent, I expect,” Viserys grunts. He jerks his head at his adopted brother. “You may as well come inside – I expect you will anyway, with or without invitation.”

Daemon smirks and gestures for her to lead the way.

Chapter Text

“So,” says Viserys as Alicent helps him settle into the Eames by the fireside. “You’ve sought out your you niece and twisted her back around your finger, Daemon. How like you.”

Rhaenyra, perched on the edge of the cumin-coloured leather sofa, stiffens, and Daemon touches her knee with a soothing finger.

“You do her a disservice, brother,” he replies. “I am here on her bidding – though pleased to return home at last.”

Viserys scoffs. “I’m sure you’ve had a terrible time.”

Daemon levels him with a look. “I won’t deny that I’ve taken my share of pleasures in the years of my exile – and more besides. I won’t deny what I am.” He gives Rhaenyra a sly, sideways look that she can’t discern the meaning of. “I have also, despite your worst assumptions, been helping to usher in your heir’s legacy.”

Rhaenyra gives him a sharp look and he closes his mouth at her silent demand. Viserys watches them carefully.

“The other thing, first,” Rhaenyra commands.

Daemon nods minutely. “Yes.”

Viserys’s face becomes incredulous when Daemon stands and bends on one knee on the flagstone flooring. Alicent, standing behind her husband with one hand on his shoulder and the other across her abdomen, looks at Rhaenyra with a question in her eyes – her friend smirks in reply. Daemon bows his head in supplication.

“I lay my sword at your feet, dear brother,” he murmurs. “Along with my humblest apologies and deepest regrets. My exile has served as a reminder of my loyalties to this family, to your heir, to the Targaryen name. I wish only to return and serve you, and your daughter, humbly.”

Rhaenyra’s lips quirk at her uncle’s farcical melodrama – and yet, she notes, underneath his mockery lies sincerity. This is Daemon doing his very best to be deferential, she realises. Viserys, disgruntled as he is, appears to have the same revelation.

“Get up, Daemon,” he blusters. “I’m hardly Aegon the Conqueror – there is no need for such theatrics.”

Daemon stands, warily eyeing his brother, and steps forward to aid when Viserys gets to his feet. The old patriarch pulls his younger brother close, and they stand for a moment, foreheads together, heads bowed, eyes closed. Alicent widens her eyes at Rhaenyra, who smiles and shrugs. She knows her old friend understands, though she will be exasperated with her husband for giving in so easily. The blood of old Valyria brings them together, no matter the conflict that draws them apart.

When everyone is seated again, Daemon lounging about like he owns the place, Viserys veritably beaming, they return to the matter at hand.

“Now, all this talk of service, and legacy,” her father says. “Tell me plainly. What do you speak of?”

Daemon looks to Rhaenyra, who gestures for him to take the lead. “Stepstones,” he begins. “The vineyard. I heard word of its rumoured sale while in Rome – some other magnate bemoaning its unattainability. I knew Rhaenyra would have her eye on it: precisely the kind of land she need acquire to pursue her dreams of modernisation of Averilla Yard. I took a sojourn to Australia – dreadful place, far too hot, crawling with convicts – and manage to procure a meeting with Drahar. Took a bit to lure him out, but he was pleasant enough in the end. Wasn’t looking to sell, some nonsense about gentrification and industrialisation in the Yarra, but I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He sold it to me.”

Rhaenyra wonders if she is the only one who suspects Daemon’s ‘offer’ involved threats of violence. He’s mellowed somewhat in the last half-decade, but he is hardly one for knowing the limit.

“He’s giving it to the company, Father,” she interrupts. “To me. My very own arm of Averilla Yard – and at no risk to the company. The Board needn’t even know, yet, if you wish it.”

Viserys leaned forward in his chair. “And what will you have in return, brother?”

Daemon smiles good-naturedly. “Only this. Family. Permission to remain.”

Viserys looks to his daughter and quirks a sceptical brow. She shrugs a shoulder.

“This, I can give you. I’d expected you to ask more – permission to return to the Board, perhaps. This is not what you want?” Viserys asks his brother.

Daemon shakes his head. “My time away has helped me to understand that I have no place among your sycophants, brother. I prefer my own pursuits.”

Rhaenyra corrects him. “That, and he wishes to accompany me to Stepstones. To be a part of its establishment.”

Now Viserys frowns. “I won’t have you across the world, Rhaenyra. We operate the other estates remotely – you can surely do so with Stepstones. We will make connections, find the right people to be on the ground.”

“We’re in agreement, Father,” she soothes him. “I have no desire to leave my family. But I want to see the place: and I will need to travel there with some regularity, as I do the other estates.”

Viserys nods reluctantly. “You can take Lyman with you, or Beesbury,” he says, naming board members. Rhaenyra snorts.

“Beesbury won’t survive the journey,” she laughs, thinking of the frail old fool her father names. “And Lyman will fight me on any proposal I put forward, simply for the enjoyment of being a blithering idiot.”

“Now, Rhaenyra—”

“I will take Daemon with me. He knows the business; he knows his wine” - this, with a meaningful look in her uncle’s direction - “and he will advise me truly. Capricious as he is, he would never seek to harm me.”

Her father sighs, long and loud, but the look he gives them both is fond. “This is all very nostalgic: the pair of you ganging up on me to get what you want. If Daemon is capricious, daughter of mine, you are his fiendish enabler.” He chuckles at the matching delighted expressions on their faces. “Fine, I will sanction your request. With conditions,” he adds, when their delight turns to triumph. “One, you do not have indefinite leave. Rhaenyra, you have already committed to the Averilla Yard Gala in a fortnight’s time – you will attend. And you will bring a date – I know you’ve ignored my request thus far, but you will do it.”

Rhaenyra groans childishly, then beams and looks to Daemon. “Be my date, uncle?”

“Not your uncle, Rhaenyra, it’s not proper. I had Jason Lannister in mind, capable young fellow —”

“Oh gag, Father, Jason Lannister would take himself as a date if he could, and Daemon isn’t actually my uncle, as you well know. Honestly, if I hear one more time about the size of that sodding rock Lannister is to inherit, or the size of anything else for that matter —”

“Fine, fine, not Lannister, but not Daemon either,” Viserys interrupts, holding up has palm to silence her. “Daemon, you may bring a date, but by the gods if she’s not dressed appropriately, I will send her home.”

“Understood, dear brother.”

“Two: you, Daemon, you will comport yourself sensibly. With the dignity of someone your age – and with the vigilance of someone charged with protecting my daughter and heir. Any of your usual nonsense – affairs, property damage, brawling – and I will have you tossed out for good,” Viserys orders. “Is that understood?”

Daemon, humbled by brevity, nods. “Of course. I will swear to it.”

“Not necessary – just do it.”

Rhaenyra claps her hands together once, loudly, and looks around at her family with satisfaction. “Marvellous. We’re each in agreement – now if we’re finished with all this fucking talking, I’d like to take Syrax out before lunch.”

Chapter Text

Rhaenyra breathes in the musk and loam of the stables: sweet hay, manure, dirt. She clucks her tongue and hears Syrax’s high whinny. Her horse is tethered outside in the yard – Harwin must have seen her arrive and guessed at her intentions. She calls a greeting to the stable manager and he emerges from Veraxes’ stall, beaming.

“Princess.” He uses her nickname fondly. He has known her since she was a girl, and he a boy of only a few years older. He is, objectively, gorgeous, and she has enjoyed herself with him in the dark of the stables, the empty rooms of the Keep, more than once.

“It’s good to see you,” she says, taking one of his enormous, calloused hands. He starts to reply, and then something behind her catches his eye.

“Daemon,” he calls. “Welcome home, ser.”

So gracious, Rhaenyra thinks wryly. She turns and sees her uncle leading Caraxes, halter-less, into the stables. The great blood bay stallion is a menace: he has bitten both grooms and her nephews alike, and yet Daemon leads him with nothing but a hand on his great slab of a shoulder.

“Ride with me, niece,” Daemon entreats in Valyrian, full well knowing that Harwin won’t understand a word. Cheeky, pernicious prick. “It has been too long since we last did this.”

“The fault is not mine, uncle,” she teases. “I would be delighted – please try not to slow me down, though. I imagine you and Caraxes are both a bit stiff in the joints.”

He laughs darkly and turns to saddling his mount. Rhaenyra pats Harwin consolingly on the arm and goes to her own horse, who squeals happily when she sees her rider. Rhaenyra buries her face in Syrax’s golden mane and peaks around her horse to watch Daemon. Something wobbles behind her ribcage when she sees him press his own face against the stallion’s neck and run his strong hands along Caraxes’ flank. They are forces of nature both: dragonknight descendant and his great brute of a horse. Rhaenyra feels her face heat, and something stirs in her gut.

Hungry, she tells herself, though she chooses not to name what for.

When they are mounted and started up the rise behind the Keep, Daemon turns to her.

“That poor boy is smitten with you,” he drawls.

Rhaenyra smiles noncommittally. “Many boys are smitten with me. I am heir to the Targaryen fortune.”

“More than that, little dragon. How many of these boys have you had while I’ve been away?” he smirks. “Girls? We share the blood of the dragon – it would make sense that we share the same greediness.”

“Some of us understand the concept of self-restraint, Uncle,” she replies. She can feel him watching her intently.

“Liar. You’ve had that boy, at least,” he presses. She glances at him and sees a muscle jump in his jaw.

“Once, twice, perhaps,” Rhaenyra replies airily. “I’m not one for notches on the bedpost, Daemon, and I imagine you’ve had to lose that habit out of fear of reducing your own bed to splinters.”

He guffaws and she sees that she has shattered his brooding mood. She tosses her pale hair and Syrax, sensing the change in her energy, dances underneath her. “Now, are you going to continue to ask after my virtue, or are you ready to resign yourself to being completely fucking obliterated by me and Syrax?”

She doesn’t wait for his response, only wheels Syrax around and urges her into a thundering gallop. The sharp sting of cold drags tears from her eyes and the sheer joy of speed has her whooping. Syrax is a tightly coiled spring, released – she flies over the hills as though on wings. Distantly, she hears the thunder of Caraxes behind her, the great bellows of his breath, but she and Syrax are smaller, fleeter. When Syrax breaks from the cover of trees, Rhaenyra sits deep in her saddle and flings her arms out wide, soaring along with her horse, transcendent in her joy. She hears Daemon laughing behind her – he loves her best when she is at her wildest, even if she is a damned cheat.     

They return, reluctantly, only when the horses are lathered in sweat and blowing hard. Rhaenyra revels in the sweet ache of her thighs as she rubs her horse down. She turns Syrax over to Harwin for a proper grooming and meets Daemon as he closes Caraxes in his stall. Like her, he is flushed and windswept from the ride. He slings his arm around her shoulders and draws her against him. He smells of horsehair and winter. Sweat. Rhaenyra’s mouth waters.

“Lunch, I think, little dragon. Perhaps we could persuade your father to crack a vintage to celebrate the reunion of the family,” Daemon says. “I’m in the mood for something rich, are you?”

“Fucking ravenous, Uncle,” she agrees.

Chapter Text

They leave for the city in the late afternoon. Daemon, in the mood to make her laugh, winds the windows down and speeds the Porsche through the narrow laneways, turbo engine whistling when he accelerates hard along stretches of straight road. Rhaenyra shakes out her braid and lets her hair tangle in the wind; she is fuzzy on the two glasses of Brut drunk over lunch. The afternoon is cold enough to snap in her mouth. She bares her teeth to it, reaches to seize it in her hands.

Back on the highway, Arctic Monkeys blast on the radio as Daemon weaves recklessly through traffic. Rhaenyra leans back in her seat and eyes him boldly.

“This is hardly in line with my father’s condition of treating me with due care,” she drawls. “Naughty, irresponsible Daemon.”

His grin is wolfish. “I am yours to command, Princess, not your father’s.”

“So long as what I command is to your liking.”

She is still feeling feverish when he pulls up to the curb outside her Camden flat. He notes her glassy eyes and flushed cheeks.

“Shall we go out?” he asks. “You’re not in the mood to be cooped up.”

“On a Monday night?”

“Why not? It’s certainly never stopped us before,” he reminds her. While he’s not wrong, his presumption rankles her – despite his obedience today, she suspects that she is somehow being dealt an unfair hand in this game of theirs. “Besides, darling, we’ve had a win.”

“Conditional surrender, more like,” she corrects him, but she knows already that she’s giving in to his sway. “All right, you randy old goat, let’s go out. Go wash the horsehair off you and come back in an hour. Shall I send a car for you?”

He tsks at her cheek. “Watch your tongue or I’ll teach you a lesson. Don’t bother with the car.” He flicks his fingers at her. “Out. You could do with a wash yourself.”

Resisting the urge to stick her tongue out at him, Rhaenyra obeys. She watches him go: sees him wave in the rear view before he pulls into traffic.

Rhaenyra catches her own febrile, elated face in the entryway mirror when she enters her flat, and the sight gives her pause.

Fuck. Fuck.

She hasn’t felt quite like this since she was a teenager: the dizzy, breathless state he winds her into, like the terrified euphoria of a controlled freefall. And that feeling in her gut, that hunger...

Only two things for it: a cold shower, and Laena.

She calls her cousin on the Echo automation system as she shivers under an icy stream.

“Babe!”

“Laena, I am in such deep shit.”

“Where are you? Your voice sounds strange,” Laena says.

“Cold shower.”

There is a pause, and then her cousin’s fluting laughter comes through the speaker. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with our dear old Uncle Daemon, would it?”

“Laenor told you.”

“Babe, yeah, obviously.”

Rhaenyra groans.

“Tell my everything, Nyra.”

She does, leaving out a few key details, but she knows Laena picks up the subtext. Her close relationship with Daemon is certainly no secret – hence the relentless teasing – and her wicked cousins have certainly never discouraged their union. Rather, they delight in the sordidness of it: while there is no familial relationship (well, a substantial one, anyway), their age difference alone is just delicious enough to keep them both heavily invested.

“Honestly? You sound happier than you have in, oh I don’t know, three years?” Laena teases when Rhaenyra has finished her retelling and is wrapped in her robe. “You’re always happiest when you’re a little out of your depth. It’s like hearing you come alive again. It’s...nice.”

Rhaenyra bites the inside of her lip and surveys her own reflection in the mirror. Coming alive...indeed, she feels a little like she is waking from a long winter hibernation. She hasn’t felt – oh, what hasn’t she felt? Devious, mischievous. Playful. Joyous. After his betrayal (well, alleged, or so he hints, she thinks), she has instinctively quashed all the parts of her that are most like him. She feels more wholly herself than she has in years. But, as the saying goes, beneath great pleasure lurks great pain – and Daemon is the only person in the world who has ever rendered her vulnerable. She reminds Laena of this fact. “You know how it goes. He comes sauntering in when he pleases and sets everything on fire.”

“Including your—”

“Laena.”

Laena laughs. “Okay, sure. You are being a tad melodramatic, though, cuz. He’s always taken care of you.”

“In his way.”

“In his way,” her cousin concedes. “I’m loving this for you, personally. I agree that you should be careful. I’d hate to see you hurt again – gods, Rhaenyra, those were some awful months – but to purchase Stepstones for you? Very un-Daemon-y in the realms of commitment. But then he has always been devoted to you.”

Rhaenyra brushes her off. “When it suits him.”

“Sure, whatever. But what does he stand to gain from this? Beyond you,” Laena presses. “And what do you think he meant about Hightower?”

“Who knows, honestly. Distracting me from the issue at hand, I’d say, but if he’s got something to say about it, he can come out with it himself. I’m not going to follow him down that rabbit hole.”

“Oh, Alice,” Laena says fondly. “Go out. Use this opportunity to make amends. And – Rhaenyra, you’re not a girl anymore. If you’re going down that rabbit hole, you’re going armed to the teeth. You’re one of the biggest, baddest women I know. Show him. Laenor and I – and Ali, in her way – have got your back if Daemon does any setting-on-fire.”

“Thank you – gods, you’ve got me all watery.”

“Wear something sexy, and send me a photo,” Laena requests, and hangs up before Rhaenyra can retort.

Right, then. That she can do.

Feeling more reinvigorated, her faith in herself restored, she sets about following Laena’s instructions. She cues Halsey on the Echo and sings along as she twists her hair into an elaborate topknot. In her (stupidly, unabashedly, enormous) vanity closet, she rifles through her favourite couture: Baleciaga? Prada? Camila Coehlo? She settles on a shimmering metallic sheath: translucent, but just opaque enough that the shape of her body is a coy suggestion. She chooses her silky nude Coco de Mere satin set for underneath – let him think she has nothing on but her dress. Distraction, deception: as their game becomes more complex, she must add more refined weapons to her armoury.

She does a quick fit check in her floor length mirror. Perfection. The lustrous fabric of her dress drifts over her skin like smoke. She sucks in her cheeks, stands with her heads on her hips, and then grins at herself. She looks like a sexy wraith ready to party with the Underworld elite. She sends a (very cringy) Snapchat to her cousins, singing along with Halsey and dancing a silly jig in the mirror.

And I think you make me a maniac

But you don’t know

And I’m thinking damn, if these walls could talk...

She is smirking at the aptness of the lyrics when the buzzer sounds. She presses the intercom.

“Come up, I’m still dressing.”

Her phone buzzes.

Today 7.16pm

Laena 🐲: fucking HOT!!!!

Laenor: get some Uncle D

Laenor: don’t dance like that tho

Laenor: for all our sakes

Laenor: DO NOT

She hears the front door close as she moves to the bathroom to apply her eyeliner. Siren, cat, or doe eye? Siren, obviously. She draws sharp, black lines like blades and calls out to him. “Make yourself at home – and make me a bloody drink, will you?”

She switches her playlist over and mouths along with the new song, waxing down the few stray baby hairs at her temples. As she stands back to admire her handiwork, he ambles into her room, a drink in each hand. He leans against the doorway and moves his gaze slowly over her body. Gods, he could flay her alive with that look.

“Gevie,” Daemon says quietly, before she can scold him for his intrusion. Beautiful. “Here - vermouth and soda. Heavy on the vermouth, of course.”

“I hope you used the Saison.” She takes a sip and finds that he has – nods with satisfaction and raises her glass to him. “Gevie.”

“I know what you like,” he murmurs. It sends a little shiver through her. She covers by standing back and surveying his outfit.

“A velvet blazer, Uncle?” she critiques. “Very brave.” It does, in fact, look divine: cut so closely to his muscular bulk that it barely contains him. She wants to run her fingers over it.

“Fortune favours the bold.”

That look he is giving her, his complete lack of shame, is nothing short of smouldering. She takes a large swallow of her drink. Fuck, that is strong.

“Right. That’s enough clever idioms, thank you. Let's get quite drunk.”

He holds out his hand to her. “That’s my girl.”

She lets him choose their first bar with the caveat that they walk there. The main drag is only a street away from her flat, and she wants to see him in stark contrast to her grungy little biome: the juxtaposition between his sleek, dangerous elegance and the grubby chicken shops, tattoo parlours thumping heavy metal, graffitied speakeasys, and tinny jazz clubs. Elated by the novelty of a Monday night out, Rhaenyra revels a little in the minstrelsy of the street: she stops to gasp at a man twirling fire, tosses notes at the feet of a busker with a tambourine. Daemon follows behind her, taking her hand to pull her on when she lingers too long. She senses his impatience, a restlessness, though it doesn’t feel directed at her: rather, he seems only to want her attention on him and nothing else.

They stop at an upscale cocktail bar, chrome, glass, elaborate cocktail menu (she resists the urge to order something served in a bubble of smoke), suits with vapes. The bartender makes them dirty martinis in a Cartier silver shaker. She curls her tongue around the olives in her drink, the clear liquid so cold and strong that it seems to evaporate in her mouth before she can swallow. She makes dry jokes about sleazy stockbrokers and boarding-school-boys-who-become-lonely-middle-aged-men-in-bars-on-Mondays until he relents and demands that she take them somewhere else.

She takes his hand and leads him to one of her favourite haunts: a tiny, brutalist cocktail bar in a converted 1800s public toilet. He is, as she was on her first visit, delighted at the vague grossness of that fact. He slides one of his legs between hers in the tight booth. They are sipping mezcal, aperol, yellow chartreuse; they are talking with the ease that they always have, of travel, of poetry, of nothing at all. His eyes never leave her face. All her senses are heightened: every brush of his knee on hers makes her skin prickle with gooseflesh, the lighting oversaturated, music too loud. She forces him up to dance with her in a tight corner when James Young plays on the thumping sound system. Their hips bump, shoulders touch, fingers twine and untwine, as they circle one another. The unspoken thing between them is edging into deliciously painful focus. She mouths the lyrics and winds her arms around his waist. Feels his groan when she grinds her hips against him.

Don’t you know that I

Don’t you know I want you so bad

And every night I call for you

Rhaenyra does her best to take him to the rave-slash-disco club that she and her cousins frequented as students, but he sees the crowd of punked-out teens-and-twenty-somethings thrashing under an enormous disco ball and catches her around the waist before she can dart inside.

“It’s my turn to choose,” Daemon reminds her. “Wait. I’m calling the car.”

A sleek black sedan pulls up within minutes. “Your very own car, uncle. Are you trying to impress me?”

“That depends. Are you impressed?”

She hums quietly. “Tragically for you, I’m not.”

His thigh is pressed hard against her own. His face is unreadable, saturnine, in the shifting streetlights. “I’ll have to work harder, then, little dragon.”

They stop on a winding, narrow street. He tangles his fingers through hers and leads her down a gloomy alleyway: there, he raps a tricky knock on a dark wooden door. Something coiling and serpentine is whittled into it: she is peering closely at the carving when the door opens, and Daemon draws her through the inky throat of a narrow entryway.

Her eyes adjust in the half-light. They’re in a room bordered with plush, velveteen chesterfields; cherry and gold fixtures, heavy brocade hangings, lush plants so burdened with fleshy blooms that they look obscene. There are men and women in silk, fur, Amarni, Valentino. She can hear groans and whispers from behind the curtains. The men and women not in opulent clothing are in no clothing at all.

She gives him a bored look. “A kink club. What’s next on your guided tour of debauchery, Daemon? An opium den?”

Daemon laughs softly. “Patience,” he chides – yet he is coiled with barely contained urgency. He spins her around and guides her onward with his body. His hands ghost over her waist. She thinks of those powerful hands running along Caraxes’ muscled flank earlier in the day, and trembles.

He notices. “Are you nervous, little dragon?”

Rhaenyra straightens her shoulders and looks gamely over her shoulder. “It will take more than this, uncle.”

He encloses the nape of her neck in the cage of his fingers and pushes her into a new room. Here, a small audience is gathered on low couches: on a low-lit stage, a man is slowly, teasingly, tying a woman with a series of complex knots. He has bound her knees apart: she is opened to the audience, at once beautiful and vulgar, an alien plant blooming, pink. “And now, Rhaenyra?” Daemon asks. The heat in his makes her feel touched all over. She knows that he is watching her watch the spectacle. Feels him draw a finger lightly down her spine. Sometime between the alleyway and here, he has unwound her hair. He gathers it in his fist, tugs gently, releases it.

She only quirks an eyebrow at him. Goading, daring. “Is this supposed to be turning me on?”

His mouth trails along her jaw. “You tell me.”

“I would think you would know the difference between a woman who is aroused and one who is not by now, Daemon,” she teases, but she hears her own breathlessness and knows she is giving herself away.

She feels the edge of his grin against her mouth. “Come.”

They move again through a dark hall to a room that dazzles her after the murk: red lights burn brightly while a nonbinary person in leather gently lashes a nude man on a saltire cross. Daemon pauses only a moment, sensing that she is amused when he wants her excited, and draws her deeper into an erotic labyrinth. She can hear people fucking behind each door that they pass. She watches the undulation of his broad shoulders. Feels the roughness, the largeness, of his hand over her small fingers. Senses that she is getting further out of her depth with every step.

As the hall opens into a cavernous chamber, she has a sense of vaulted ceilings, elaborate sconces, above her in the groaning gloom. Diaphanous curtains shroud squirming flesh. Rapid, tribal drumbeats thrum along her tingling skin, and her lips part with the ecstasy of it. Her restraint is falling away, replaced by the sybaritic urge to touch, taste, grab, lick, bite. All around her, writhing bodies do just that: in pairs, in trios, in masses of flesh to tangled that she cannot discern exactly where one person ends and another begins. She thinks of the sinuous coiling of snakes. She looks and looks: peers with wide eyes, drinks, gulps, at the depravity, the decadence.

“And now, little dragon?” Daemon’s voice is gravelly against her ear. “Is this doing the trick?”

“Of turning me on, or making me nervous?” she murmurs back. He spins her to face him. They are as close as they can be without touching. Their bodies roll to touch and away again. Approach and retreat: in this way, they flirt around want in the gloam.  

“Both, I imagine. This must seem exotic to you. More so than the fumblings of that homely stableboy, at the very least.”

“Ah,” she breathes. “We’re back to this. You’ve never had fatherly notions about who I fuck, Daemon – please don’t start now.”

“Fatherly was not my intention.” When her back bumps against a wall, she realises that cornering her has been his aim: she has asked all night, and he is answering. He uses his knee to part her legs. She sees his gaze drop to the shadows there. She grabs desperately at the familiar ground as it falls away from her.

“What, then? Jealousy?” she breathes.

He reaches out to run his thumb over her lower lip and she opens her mouth to him involuntarily. He slides his thumb into it: she runs her tongue over the rough pad. Closes her mouth. Sucks. His eyes flutter half-closed.

“Not jealous,” he chokes out. “Protective. You should know that sex is a pleasure. You should know how to take what you want from it. Do you know how, little dragon?”

No. Yes. I don’t know. Tell me. Her senses are so flooded by stimuli that she can’t form a straight answer in her mind, let alone with her mouth.

“I don’t—”

“You don’t,” he agrees. “Come here. Let me show you.” He pushes his body against hers and – at fucking last – his mouth ghosts over the whorl of her ear, her throat, his tongue a mere suggestion, and when she gasps, he takes her chin gently in his teeth. When she puts her hand on his chest, he draws back, eyes searching her face – is she pushing him away or drawing him closer? In the darkness, his face is statuesque, the harsh lines of it pitched in shadow.

Rhaenyra doesn’t know which of them moves first, but suddenly the space between them is gone and they are kissing gently, then urgently, with the clashing of teeth. She kisses, and kisses, and loses herself for a moment in the softness of his mouth, the firmness of his fingers around her throat. Her hands stroke along the velvet of his jacket until she finds the buttons and pops them one-by-one. Her fingers creep under his shirt, searching the hardness of him, his artful form. When she tries to undo his belt, he laughs and spins her around so that she is flush against the wall.

“No,” he scolds. “It’s still my turn.”

The rasp of his calloused hands on her ass alerts her that he has drawn her dress up over her hips. She feels him grind against her and he groans.

Pinned as the is, she cannot touch him, cannot kiss him, cannot see him. She whimpers as her nipples, the sensitive flesh of her belly, grazes on the rough wall. He presses against her and bites her, hard, on the shoulder. Slides rough fingers into her mouth. Muzzles her until she nips his palm. Dominating, demanding. Through the haze of her want, she realises that he has robbed her of power in one fell swoop.

“No,” she whispers in Valyrian, intimate, urgent. “It’s my turn now.” She twists in his grip, and she notes a flicker of irritation on his face – experienced as he is, she realises, he is accustomed to submission. Bloody fool, she thinks, if he expects that of her.

“Do you want to stop?” he asks her. In response, she draws him back to her with a fistful of his shirt. She reaches up to first stroke her fingers through his silky hair and then grips it in her hands, forcing her tongue into his mouth, crying out when he forces his back into hers. She grinds herself against his thigh and he makes a guttural sound, low in his throat. She feels his hand loosen its bruising grip on her hip and slide to the dampness between her legs, and, with him firmly where she wants him, she takes hold of his hair and forces him back.  

His face is flushed with lust: eyes fogged, lips parted and panting. “Rhaenyra?”

“So,” she says, her Valyrian laced with amusement and desire both. “I do have something that you want.”

He watches her closely. Places his fingers, wet with her need, in his mouth. “It seems to me that the want is mutual.”

She smirks. Suppresses her shivers at sight of him tasting her. “Clever Daemon.”

“Rhaenyra, what are you—”

“I told you, it’s my turn,” she murmurs. “I know you like to have the upper hand, uncle. You manoeuvre the pieces so well. But I told you – this time, I am choosing to play your game, but I will play it my way, not yours. You’ve just given me the most delicious advantage.”

His face is a rictus of anger and scalding arousal. “I don’t want to play games, I want to —”

“Daemon,” she whispers, leaning close so that she speaks against his lips. “Don’t be a sore loser.” He steps back, bewildered. She brushes her dress down, smiles, and gives him a firm, platonic kiss on the cheek. “Can’t wait to do this again soon. I’ll text you.”

He splutters something unintelligible, but she has already started walking away from him. She moves quickly through the club, dodging reaching hands, beckoning bodies. She begins to laugh wildly when she breaks out into the freezing dark. Daemon’s car is still waiting on the winding street – let him endure the indignity of a cab home, she thinks – and as she slides into the back seat, she directs the driver to her flat. Something like hysteria is bubbling in her chest, and that hunger – he has made her ravenous. Her mouth waters for the taste of him.

By the time she exits the lift into her flat, she is running. She neglects to even remove her heels as she sprawls back into the luxurious softness of her enormous bed, drags her dress up to her armpits, and shoves her hand into the damp mess of her lingerie. She comes with his name on her lips.

She falls asleep with the smell of him, like pine and bushfire, on her skin.

Chapter Text

Today 2.16am

Daemon🔥: You are a vindictive, impertinent little witch.

…Then, grudgingly:

Today 2.53am

Daemon🔥: Very well played.

*

In the morning, Rhaenyra rushes into the sleek glass tower that is TARG Headquarters. Her father keeps offices in the city: it takes a small army to run the TARG investment portfolio, and the highrise, located in a prime spot downtown, is family-owned real estate from generations back. It is here, alongside the corporate aspects of the family legacy, that the Board of Averilla Yard, the marketing team, and the rest, come to toil.

Despite the dark circles under her eyes and her uncharacteristic air of mildly hungover disarray, Rhaenyra is in an excellent mood. She has left Daemon on read – partly for the fun of it, partly because she is still composing a clever, cutting reply. Her leather cigarillo pants and silk shirt give her the feeling of luxurious and untouchable utility. World-breaker, man-eater.  

In her offices on the tenth floor, she asks her assistant to book two seats on the next available flight to Melbourne and requests that she is delivered her usual 10am espresso. Then it is all (mostly) business: Rhaenyra flies through her overflowing inbox, untangles some tricky shipping issues (product transit has never quite been the same since the pandemic, she bemoans), attends a Hangout with the team on the ground in Wales, and thinks of Daemon. She shovels down her lunch during a meeting with the marketing team, firming up timelines for the soft launch of Averilla’s 2022 Pinot Noit for midwinter, and thinks of Daemon. Ducks to the bathroom for a quick wank: she thinks of the texture of silky, snow-white hair in her fingers, the vibrating susurrus of his groans, and comes with such intense force that she has to smother her own cries in her palm.  

Of course, she will tell anyone who asks (specifically two very nosy cousins, pox on them) that she has this entire situation entirely under control, thank you very fucking much.

In the early afternoon, her assistant emails her the tickets for her flight: 15 hours from how she will be sipping on Dom in first class. She forwards the tickets to Daemon and shoots him a text.

Today 1.17pm

Rhaenyra: start packing.

She pauses before sending, adds a little witch emoji, and grins.

She leaves the office at 4pm and catches an Uber to Bikram in Camden Town, where she is meeting Laena for an evening class. She embraces her cousin, gorgeous with her silvery braids and matching Lulu’s.

“Fucking hell, Nyra,” laughs Laena, holding her at arms length. “You’re glowing. I take it last night went well.”

“A lady never tells,” smirks Rhaenyra.

“Totally unfair. I want to know every filthy detail.”

Rhaenyra only smiles cryptically and settles into sukhasana.

Halfway through the session, Laena stabs her ribs with a finger. “You’re burning up,” she whispers. “It’s like stretching next to a furnace.”

“This is hot yoga.”

“Yeah, but you’re literally boiling,” Laena complains. “You’ve got a hot little box. Stop blowing all that heat my way, it’s very distracting.”

Rhaenyra gives her a caustic look and then carefully schools her face back to softness.

“Figuratively boiling. And I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

At home she takes a short nap. She has never had an issue sleeping on flights, but she likes to get the jump on new time zones when she travels. Her alarm shocks her awake in the hour before midnight: she showers, eats, and quickly packs her Milano capsule suitcase. It feels strange packing light cotton clothing and sandals when London is only weeks away from snow, but the Yarra will be steaming this time of year. She slides back into her leather cigarillos – a somewhat desperate attempt to maintain her sense of pragmatism and purpose, she admits – and layers cashmere and a coat over a filmy t-shirt – no matter the Australian heat, she always feels chilled on long haul flights.

Her phone chimes.

Today 11.19pm

Daemon🔥: Quick reminder – no broomsticks in carry-on.

Daemon🔥: I’ll pick you up in an hour.

Rhaenyra: thx for the PSA.

Daemon🔥: THX?

Rhaenyra: LOL

Daemon🔥: Seven hells.

She is waiting for him at the curb when his driver arrives shortly after 12am. Daemon ducks out of the car and takes her luggage for her, eyeing her sideways.

“Hello, pants.”

He is dressed for comfort in a soft jumper, loose pants, and sneakers. She remembers the firmness of him from last night and her mouth waters.

“I hope you remembered your circulation socks,” Rhaenyra feigns worry. “The risk of DVT at your age...”

He clicks the boot shut and quirks his brow at her. Keeping his distance, she notes with some amusement. She sees that his fists are loosely clenched. He notices her notice. Tucks his hands into his pockets. Uncertainty and Daemon are generally nonsynonymous – how toe-curling-ly delightful to be responsible for his rare discomfort, she thinks.

“Your concern is very touching. Come, mēre dōna.” (Sweet one). “If we hurry, I might just have time to pick some up from the airport pharmacy.”

Rhaenyra hasn’t travelled abroad with her uncle since she was a child, and she notices, with some pleasure, that he is similarly attentive to her even though she is grown. He takes her bags, along with his own, to check-in; tucks her ticket into the inner pocket of his jacket; checks that she has brought along her preference of snacks; offers to buy her the novel she flicks through while they kill time in the newsagency. He loads her carry-on into the overhead compartment, offers her his spare sleep mask when she notices that she’s forgotten her own, orders her a Champagne when the stewardess buzzes past. She suspects that he is attempting to claw back some sense of control by shifting the dynamic: she the child, him the valiant protector. Fine, let him have that, if it will soothe his sodding ego.

When their drinks arrive, he clinks his flute against hers.

“To the name Targaryen,” Rhaenyra jokes, “Our next big venture.”

“To us,” he says quietly, and holds her eyes as he sips. He leans in and tucks a loose strand of snowy hair behind her ear. She realises that it’s the first time he’s touched her since –well. Since touching her. “And to your pants. Did you wear them to drive me fucking insane?”

Rhaenyra gives him a coy look. “I would never seek to torment you, uncle.”

He chuckles darkly. “The seatbelt lights have just turned off. I can think of a few ways you could relieve my torment.”

Rhaenyra pops a melatonin pill on her tongue and swallows it with her next sip of Champagne. “I’m sure you’re already a member of the Mile High Club, Daemon, and I’m afraid I can’t swing the dues this moment. Wake me when we arrive in Doha, will you? There’s a good boy.”

She thinks she feels him press a kiss to her crown before she drifts into sleep. She refuses to feel pleased about it.

*

Melbourne is shockingly hot: but dragon-children crave the heat, and Rhaenyra feels livened by the hard beat of the early morning sun on her skin. They arrived in the city late last night: she had been delirious with fatigue by the time Daemon guided her into a cool bedroom, tucked her into a palatial bed. She’d half expected him to crawl in beside her – had been disappointed when he hadn’t. He is still abed in his own quarters: while she has, as she always does, woken with the dawn, and is basking on the seething patio of the high-end Fitzroy terrace house. She has spent the morning roaming the house and the surrounding street, curious as a stranger in a strange land and greedy for new sights. The terrace, a triple-arched, Hawthorn brick façade, is nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac back from Gertrude Street. It is styled in a way that pleases her: idiosyncratic in its neutral palette and sharp black accents. Tuscan marble and recycled wood both; a squat fireplace in a narrow library; polished concrete floors and rugs plush enough for her to curl her toes in.

Her bedroom interests her most of all: the antique silk wall hanging; clothes, already hanging in the closet, that are precisely her size and style; her favourite Aesop products in the bathroom; a bespoke perfume (smoke, sandalwood, leather, cardamom) that she applies after her shower. The bedroom, the house, is a shrine to her – she sees Daemon’s hand in every detail, his careful eye, her eclectic taste.

Very. Fucking. Interesting.

She is weighing this in her mind when Daemon steps onto the patio in a loose pair of cotton pants. From behind the safety of her sunglasses, she can examine his delicious form, the size of him. The absence of slack between muscle and skin. He notices her scrutiny and grins lazily.

“Good morning, darling,” he greets her. “Did you sleep well?”

“I imagined that I’d be waking in the suite my assistant booked for us,” she replies. “I do adore room service.”

“Ah.”

“You bought a house. And a vineyard.” Both question and statement.

Daemon runs his hands through his tousled hair and squints at her. “Coffee before interrogation?”

“I like the order of my agenda just fine.”

Daemon huffs exaggeratedly and flops down in the chair beside her. She follows the trail of pale hair from his navel to his waistband. Fucking hell, does he mind?

“Eyes up here, princess,” he scolds. “We’ve established that I bought the vineyard, for you. Yes, I also happened to purchase a house.” For you. “It seemed prudent. I knew it would take time for me to acquire Stepstones, and I knew that, when I did, you would require somewhere comfortable to live on occasion.”

Rhaenyra struggles to hide her pleasure. “It’s a very lovely house.”

“I know how you covet pretty things.”

“As do you, uncle.”

He looks at her fondly. “Yes.”

“It’s...” she stumbles. All of a sudden, the enormity of his generosity is bewildering. Daemon has always showered her with gifts, but not of this scale – fine golden jewellery, silk dresses, riding boots, yes, but not this. This...this speaks of a larger game than she can decipher, despite the hours she has spent turning it around in her mind this morning. Again, he has outmanoeuvred her. She feels inexperienced and out of her depth. She is momentarily disconcerted by the immensity of her desire, so quickly and baldly exposed. What manner of creature would worship and deceive her both?

Daemon notices her discomfort and seems to take pity. “Consider it three years’ worth of gifts, with interest.”

“Huh. In that case, it’s not nearly enough.” The lightness in her voice is forced.

“What more do you desire?”

Seven hells, if only he knew.

“That’s a very brave question, uncle,” she quips. She pokes his thigh with her toe. “Are you in a generous mood?”

Daemon catches her foot and drags her closer. “Always,” he purrs. “Are you going to be very good?”

“Filthy old man.”

He chuckles, and then his face settles into an expression of uncharacteristic levity. “Rhaenyra. You have always been my dearest one. You are the blood of my blood – the gods saw fit to make each of us in the other’s image. To give you this thing – your desires are my desires. It is never too much. Don’t you know by now? I would pluck the very moon from the sky and place it in your hands, if you were to wish it.”

Rhaenyra turns her head away so that he cannot observe the effect his words have on her. She doesn’t doubt his sincerity; doesn’t believe him for a moment.

“What a splendid party trick,” she scoffs. “Do you ever get tired of showing off?”

“I aim to please, zaldrīzitsos,” he murmurs, “Now - we have a big day ahead of us. Let’s get you fed and caffeinated. I won’t have you grouchy.”

*

They are on the road out of Melbourne an hour later. In addition to the vineyard and the house, Daemon has also acquired an obscenely large Land Rover Defender: Rhaenyra can’t resist making remarks about middle-aged crises and overcompensation. He rolls his eyes and expresses disappointment at her lack of originality.

“It’s hardly my fault that you’re a walking stereotype, Daemon.”

 As they leave the city on the plainlands behind them, Rhaenyra hums along quietly to the song on the radio and gazes, spellbound, at the passing landscape. This is high country: gums silvery blue, pestilent camphor laurels, rattling yellow grass, the shimmer of a heat mirage ever-present on the horizon. She falls in love with the simmering beauty of it all. The land looks ready to combust and indeed, she sees great blackened swathes of forest all along the winding road. There are signs with fire danger warnings posted intermittently along the highway: alarmingly, all arrows point to the word EXTREME. She makes exclamations: the novelty of it, the strangeness, the tragedy.

“Fire is part of the natural cycle, here,” Daemon says. “It burns decay, regenerates the forest. New things grow from the ash. Very in line with our family lore, is it not?”

The Defender growls its way through Wurundjeri country. Rhaenyra first mistakes Stepstones for another heat mirage: gradually, she begins to make out the rustic, weather-beaten remains of a barn left idle, crouched in rows of bare trellis. A rough-rendered stone house and dairy in the shade of oak trees. She is besotted with it before Daemon has even turned into the rocky drive.

“This is mine?” she squeaks.

Daemon laughs, delighted. “All yours, sweetling.”

As they turn the Defender in front of the barn, a narrow, hunched finger ambles stiffly out from the little cottage. Daemon parks and climbs out, calling a greeting. Bloody charming when he wants to be, she thinks.

“Drahar. You’ll be pleased to know that you’re not to be cursed with me, this time. I’ve brought someone for you to meet.”

Rhaenyra steps into the scorching heat and moves to where Daemon towers over the small and twisted man. At the sight of him, she is first taken aback, and then, strangely, immeasurably saddened: his face, his neck, his arms, are whorled and pitted by angry burn scars. On his left hand, he has only a thumb and the reddened stump of a single finger. He moves like a man in pain. So, this is what all the rumours are about, she thinks, only a man who has seen tragedy and wishes to be left in solitude.

“Creghas,” Daemon says. “May I present my dear niece, Rhaenyra.” She hears the jab, despite his pleasant tone. Resists the urge to kick him.   

Drahar catches the foul look she gives her uncle and smiles lopsidedly. His voice is hoarse and kind. “This is she. I’ve heard so much about you, darlin.” As with all Australians, he speaks so quickly that his words garble together, the only reprieve his drawn-out vowels.

“It’s lovely to meet you. This place – this is the most beautiful place,” she gushes. She knows she sounds like a posh, excited little girl – but fuck it, this is a dream. Since the Aracce affair she has barely dared to hope that one day she would have something like this for herself. How sweetly Daemon gives – just as bitterly as he takes away.

Drahar gazes at the barn, the trellises, the yellowed rolling paddocks that stretch for miles. His weathered face, where unburned, is heavily lined from years of squinting into the harsh sun. “She’s a beauty, love. I’ve been searching for the right person to take over. Your uncle – couldn't bloody turn him away, hassled me for two fuckin years before I caved.” He blushes. “Ooh, sorry love.”

“That’s quite fucking all right,” she replies, and he erupts into laughter. Daemon catches her eye and winks.

Drahar chuckles. “Anyway - it’s yours. Grandkids have had enough of me lurking out here alone – worried I’ll take a fall. I’d be insulted but at my age they’re not wrong. Decided to sell – none of them need the worry of the upkeep. Prefer an inheritance. Send their own kids to uni, you know, avoid property taxes.” He turns his squinting eyes on her. One pupil is blown wide and milky, sightless. “Your uncle tells me you’ll take good care of it.”

“It’s my dream, a place like this,” Rhaenyra tells him quietly. “I promise to care for it. Swear it on my mother’s name.”

“Good girl. Look – you two be all right on your own? I’m clearing out the cottage, but you can wander where you want.”

“Fine, Creghas.” Daemon shakes Drahar’s good hand and offers Rhaenyra his arm.

“Wait,” she tells him. “Go on a way without me, will you?” He gives her a questioning look. “Go on, don’t be nosy. I’ll only be a minute.”

Drahar waits until Daemon is out of earshot, sensing that her business is with him.

“My uncle,” Rhaenyra begins. “We...we had a feud, of sorts. I’ve not seen him in three years, and now this. I... what I mean to ask is...”

“Why did I sell it to him, and no one else?” Drahar prompts. Rhaenyra gives him a tight nod. Drahar puffs out his cheeks.

“Not an easy answer,” he says, and Rhaenyra’s gut twists. “It was never about money, although your uncle did his research – came in higher than the others. I’ve grown attached to this place. It was my life’s work for so long, and then a home. How do you give a place like that to some fast-talking, money-grubbing wanker? Daemon wasn’t like the others – but even then, to give this land to the bloody British – no offense, love, but I’m a republic man myself, and with Invasion... Didn’t feel right at first.”

Rhaenyra listens intently. She waits for him to place the next piece of the puzzle in her waiting hands.

“So what changed your mind?”

“You did,” Drahar says simply. “I asked him what he wanted with it – a gift, he said, an olive branch. For her happiness, he said.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s bigger than anything else in the world, darlin,” Drahar’s voice is gentle. “One day, when you’re an old bugger like me, you’ll understand that.”

Chapter Text

They spend the afternoon walking the grounds. Rhaenyra can barely contain her delight: her mind is already turning the wheels on an airtight proposal to put forward to the Board. Underneath the elation, though, flows a tumultuous undercurrent: she has been a whirlwind since Daemon returned to London, and now, in the bright heat of the day, in the steady rhythm of walking the vineyard, the bigger hurt wakes and rears its head. None of it makes sense to her: why leak the Aracce Deal, disappear with no word, only to give her an even greater gift? She has walked into the jaws of the trap, only to lose sight of the teeth. As a child, she had always delighted in her uncle’s tricky ways, his subtle cruelties, the games for only two players: but as a woman, she sees the toxic push-and-pull of a bored and restless man. How to articulate to him, to herself, what she wants: worship, stability, chaos, savagery, devotion.

If Daemon notices her happiness turn to brooding, he doesn’t comment. He paces behind her, a dog to its master, answering questions when she asks them, watching, watching.  

As the simmering blue afternoon fades into purple dusk, he procures a flashlight from the boot of the Defender and, for the first time that day, takes her hand.

“There is one last thing I wish to show you,” he tells her. “Come.”

He leads her into the gutted old barn, and she breathes the petrichor of old stone, musty stillness, rusted iron. Daemon murmurs for her to watch her feet, shining the torch beam along a clear path between bricks and rotting beams. The light illuminates a grimy trapdoor. He bends down and wrenches it open, unsettling motes of dust.

Rhaenyra eyes him warily. “Faintly menacing. What will I find down there, uncle? A crypt?” Quirks a cheeky brow. “A sex dungeon?”

He only beckons with a tilt of his head.

There are narrow stone stairs descending into loamy darkness. Their footsteps echo as the stairs open to a low-ceilinged basement: a maze of crumbling stone, tomb-worn. It takes her a moment to understand that the maze is in fact rows of bottles, hundreds of them, glinting in the torchlight.

“A cellar,” Rhaenyra murmurs. She hears the sharp strike of a match – Daemon lights thick candles lined on a rudimentary sconce. He slides a bottle from the closest bracket, blows off a fine layer of dust. There is a corkscrew on a low wooden bench – he uses it to twist the bottle open. Holds the cork under her nose for her to smell. Liquorice, plum. When he holds the rim of the bottle to her lips, she gamely holds his gaze and tips back her head so he can pour a short measure of wine into her mouth. He watches the muscles of her throat when she swallows. The wine is full of savour – mulberry, red spice, the aniseed she smelled on the cork. She hums with appreciation.

“Does it please you, dārilaros?” Daemon asks.

“It’s good,” she smiles. “Balanced, complex.”

“It’s the last of Drahar’s wines – they've been aging down here for eight years, at the very least. You’d have to inventory them, but...”

“But perhaps enough for a boutique line,” she finishes. “Something to pique interest as we bring Stepstones back to its former glory.”

“Precisely.”

“This, too, belongs to me?” she asks.

“Yes.”

Rhaenyra shakes her head. “I don’t quite know what to say.”

Where the fuck are the teeth? When does the trap spring shut? Rhaenyra wishes Laena were here. Wishes, even, for Viserys, for Alicent. Someone to anchor her in the ever-rising storm of questions.

Daemon settles back against the wooden bench. He drinks deeply and sets the bottle down. He is death incarnate in the gloaming: lips bloody with wine-stain, eyes hollowed to sockets. Something in her face stirs him. He pushes off the bench and approaches her slowly, like a man trying not to spook a horse. She can smell the wine on his breath when he takes her waist in his brutal hands and presses close.

“Are you happy, Rhaenyra? I can’t read you, mēre jorrāeliarza.” His rich Valyrian pours into her ears like honey, or poison. Dear one, beloved – she feels mocked, she feels desired. Reluctant to give up the safety of high ground, Rhaenyra leans around him and snatches the wine from the bench. She gulps down mouthfuls, and in her haste, it spills from her mouth. He watches it run over her chin, seep into her shirt. Before she can speak, he bends to lick at the stickiness, his tongue slick over her chin, down the column of her throat. She feels his teeth scrape her clavicle; the soothing suck of his mouth.

“Daemon—”

“I want you,” he says. His voice is breathy, unlike she has ever heard it. “Fuck the game, Rhaenyra, you win, you win. I want you. I will have you in any way. Tell me how you’ll have me.”

The idea that he would concede victory this soon...laughable. Conniving, randy bastard. Her heart squeezes painfully at his words. She wants to scream, to rage. She is already wet. She wants him. She wants him.

“Kneel,” she hears herself say. “There, in the dirt.”

He obeys, slowly, holding her gaze. God, the sight of it: he is a brutish, gleaming thing. He is going to burn her alive with his feverish eyes. Rhaenyra steels herself. She grips his chin in her hand, digging her fingernails into his flesh. He endures in silence.

“I don’t understand any of this,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to play. I can’t decipher what you want from me.”

“Rhaenyra,” he murmurs. She grips him savagely to silence him.

“Don’t talk,” she commands. “I grow tired of your cunning words.”

She releases him and steps out of reach. Tries for an expression of contemptuous boredom as her fingers go the buttons of her shirt – very likely fails. He watches her work each button open. Watches as she drops the shirt to the floor. Irreverent. He is quiet and motionless while she takes off her clothes. Drinks in her naked form in the candlelight. His eyes are half-lidded with need as she steps close to him.

“Touch me.”

He tilts his chin questioningly. Rhaenyra, high as she is with him in thrall, feels too shy to give him the precise language of what she wants. She covers, as she is wont to do, with a smart remark. “You’re a clever man, uncle, I’m sure you can figure it out.”

He reaches to curl one hand around her thigh, gripping hard enough to bruise. With the other he grips her ankle. He bends forward in prayerful supplication and presses kisses to her filthy toes, one foot and then the other. The narrow bones of her feet. Sucks hard on the inside of her ankle. Electricity crackles along the very ends of her nerves. His open mouth drags slowly up the inside of her leg, pressing wet kisses into her flesh. She seems the gleam of his saliva in the candlelight. When he reaches the apex of her thighs, he draws back to meet her eyes. She sees he is aflame with holy desire, a burning offering at her altar. Her own touch is hesitant – her fingers flutter against his lips and he leans forward to taste them, drawing them deep into his mouth, holding her thumb between his teeth. He slides his hand between her thighs and with a single finger, draws a line through the aching centre of her. She feels heat ripple below her abdomen and gasps, reaches out to steady herself against his shoulder. He watches her face keenly to gauge the most precise points of her pleasure as he first strokes his fingers against her, then draws circles around her clit, dragging a soft moan from the depths of her throat.

“More,” her Valyrian is husky, pleading. “More.”

He wrenches her roughly against his face and his tongue replaces his hand. Rhaenyra tips her head back and closes her eyes: sees sunbursts as he laps at her like a man starving. His tongue is broad, obscene. He groans deep in his chest. His fingers dig into the meat of her thighs.

Desire makes her brave and, before he can make her lose all sense, she presses her palm to his forehead and pushes him back. He is slicked with her, his face, his hands. She has never loved him, hated him, more than she does now. She wants to claim him, consume him. Smite him to ash.

“Lie on the floor,” she demands. He obeys without question. Rhaenyra straddles his hips, feels his hardness straining into her. To have him like this, prone and powerless beneath her, is intoxicating. She loves him. She fucking hates him. She presses her fingers into his mouth. Hooks her fingers over the ridges of his teeth, streels his jaw apart. Drags a fingernail along the roof of his mouth, presses her thumb into his tongue. He takes it all without protest. She pulls his hair. Forces his face into the dirt. Pinches the taught flesh of his stomach. He watches her with a kind of reverence. She scrubs her palm in the dirt and smears it on his shirt. She digs her fingernails against the bones of his ribcage as though to crack him apart. She wants to claw through flesh and blood and curl herself in the cave of his heart. She wraps her grimy hands around his throat. Something wild is rising in her. She wants to tear to pieces. She wants him whole.

“My fierce one,” he whispers. “Violent little rogue. Look at you, Rhaenyra. You are as a dragon yourself: claws and scales and teeth. I see the beast that you are, not the lamb you try to be.” She doesn’t silence him this time – she tightens her hands around his neck. He watches her intently. “Let me show you how I care for you. Let me worship you.”

Daemon cups her ass and urges her forward. Shimmies her until she is seated above his face. The hard, earthen floor bites into her knees. The pain is exquisite. “Have you done this before?” he asks, and she shakes her head no. Not this thing: hers have been fast, fumbling encounters with inexperienced boys. Made timid again by his sagacious tongue, her own naivety, but her response makes him groan. “Fuck, Rhaenyra, the lessons I will teach you...”

Instead of finishing the thought, he drags her down onto his face, and her anger is lost to the darkness: he buries his nose in her, chases inside with his tongue. She fists her hands in his hair, grinds his head hard against the floor as she chases her peak. He bites hard on the inside of her thigh in remonstration but in her frenzied state, it only spurs her on: he notes her pleasure at pain and reaches up to twist her nipple as he works her with long strokes of his tongue.

When she comes, she is obliterated: the world is light and flame and a high ringing in her ears. Distantly, she notices as he gathers her against him so that she does not simply collapse on the cellar floor. He is saying her name, softly, like a chant.

Rhaenyra comes back into her body in stages. She is in the cage of his arms. Daemon is disarranged as she has never seen him: soiled with filth and dust, his hair muddied with it, her pleasure smeared on his face and chin.

“Have I pleased you, princess?” he asks again in Valyrian, as though their shared tongue will wring the answer from her. “Are you happy?”

She turns against his chest. She feels pleasure and pain both: it is magnificent, it is torment.

“You are my happiness, Daemon,” she replies resignedly. Hopes he misses the wobble in her voice. “Now - take me home.”

He draws her up, kisses her again so that she may taste herself on his tongue.

“I think I quite like it when you command me."   

Chapter Text

Trickery, seduction, cruelty, cunning: these are Daemon’s tools of war. In this next round of their game, Rhaenyra’s weapon of choice is avoidance.

She curses her own cowardice as she pretends to sleep through the car ride home. She is attuned to the weight of his hand on her thigh as they drive. When they pull into the underground garage at his terrace house, she excuses herself to shower. She buries her face in her hands under the hot spray. If she was a crier, now would be the time to do it, she thinks, but she can’t quite force her body to do the necessary leaking. Instead, she is cyclonic. Those tussling winds of want and fury. Her tears dissolve into smoke. She aches to believe him and fall into the fairy tale of it. Rhaenyra has always been her own knight in shining armour: he, the cruel prince she’s dreamed about since girlhood. Seven shitting hells, how easy it would be to settle into the lie, even for the short time before some new shiny thing caught Daemon’s restless eye. Whatacunt.

And the exquisite, filthy pleasure of it. Where the fuck will she find that again? How could anyone ever compare – this glory, this delicious drowning.

Her phone chimes as she is towelling off.

Today 7.18pm

Daemon🔥: Popped out to get us something to eat. Thai?

Rhaenyra: Sure.

Daemon🔥: Same as always?

Rhaenyra: 👍👍👍👍👍👍

She winds her damp hair into a tight braid: dresses in tights, Jacquemus sweater, her comfiest Saint Laurent espadrilles. Sad girl clothes, she thinks wryly. Stuffs the rest of her luggage in her Milano suitcase: leaves behind the wardrobe of beautiful clothing he has chosen for her. As she packs her toiletries, her eye catches on the perfume he made for her. She decides, against her better judgement, to take it with her.

Outside it has cooled enough for her to pull on her coat. She waits for the Uber to the airport in a fine mist of rain. Four seasons in a day, Melbournites claim, and the weather is certainly putting it on for her. If she were less distressed, she would laugh at the perfectly timed melodrama of the rain. Very chick flick: all she needs is Taylor Swift warbling in the background. She plugs in her headphones and cues Sabrina Claudio instead. The problem with me is you… 

Daemon calls her just as she pays for her ticket to Heathrow. He would bloody ring, wouldn’t he. She reminds herself to tease him, when they speak in some distant future, that only boomers use the call function. She puts her notifications on sleep mode and heads to the lounge, where she orders a martini, straight, with a twist of lemon. Drinks it too quickly.

Part of her wants him to come after her: she amuses herself with a very Ross-and-Rachel themed fantasy of him bursting onto her flight, begging her to stay. But that is not him, and to have him chase her would be to acknowledge that she is running away. She tries to tell herself that she is still playing the game: attack and retreat. She knows better. She’s sure he does, too.

When her flight is called, hours later, she carries her own luggage onboard and stands on tiptoe to slide her bag into the overhead compartment. Realises she has left behind his spare sleep mask. She orders her own champagne. A second. Watches passengers file past, starts every time she sees a flash of pale hair. Platinum blonde, ash white. A flight attendant calls for seatbelts, window shades. The cabin lights dim. The pressure and release of take-off. He is receding far below her. A pill. Oblivion.

*

Her mind is a steel trap, her body a well-oiled machine, for the rest of the fortnight. She wakes. Eats. Runs. Works. Ignores the text he sends on Saturday night. Drinking and in the mood for stirring trouble, likely. She’s sure that he won’t want for playmates. She spends her own weekend brooding in the flat, barefoot and drinking whiskey, pouring over her proposal for the Board, blasting Jaira Burns and bülow over the sound system. She wears his perfume every day. Her thigh is bruised with his bite, his fingertips: she covers the marks with tights, pokes at them to feel their sting.

Rhaenyra tires of her melancholy by Thursday of the following week. The meeting she schedules with her legal team to comb through the Stepstones contract buoys her: the property is, to Daemon’s credit, indeed purchased in her name. No sly clauses, no apparent loopholes. Hers, not Averilla Yard’s – her uncle has even left her the choice between conglomerating the portfolios and striking out alone. Additionally, her proposal for the development of the vineyard is strong: she will have the place operational and profitable within seven years, she is certain. A cellar door for tastings in the old cottage, a small kitchen, perhaps a micro-fromagerie. The barn is perfect for functions, weddings, conferences. In time, a restaurant, if expansion demands. The old dairy can be converted, easily enough, into accommodation. Simultaneously chic and rustic, authentic and exclusive, high-end and homely.

She drives out to the Keep after work. While Viserys reads her drafted proposal in his office, Rhaenyra curls on the leather couch with her nephews. Aemond sits happily in her lap, turning a little wooden dragon in his hands, while Aegon dances back and forth across the family room. He is learning to fence and desperate to show-off his newfound skills to his aunt. In true Targaryen fashion, he refuses to acknowledge he wants her approval. Rhaenyra takes comfort in the soapy smell of Aemond’s hair, his soft warm weight. Alicent is stretched out on the opposite end of the couch: the two women share a rare, conspiratorial smile when Aegon makes light of his aunt’s encouraging remarks.

Rhaenyra helps her stepmother (ugh, weird) put the boys to bed: kisses their soft, moon-bright heads. There is an ease between herself and Alicent that she’s not felt for years. Her old friend seems to notice it, too, and hesitantly takes Rhaenyra’s hands in her own.

“It’s been good to see you with more regularity, Nyra,” says Alicent, oddly formal, painfully sincere. Rhaenyra smiles and squeezes her hands.

“I’ve missed you, too,” she whispers.

They snuggle into the couch, Rhaenyra with a glass of red, Alicent with a cup of earl grey, for she is pregnant again. Yuck, obviously, but finer details aside, Rhaenyra is thrilled for her.

“I’m praying for a girl, this time,” Alicent confides, running her hand over her still-flat belly. “I don’t know if the house can withstand another wild boy.”

“The Blood of the dragon runs thick,” Rhaenyra intones, imitating her father’s sombre, reverential voice. They giggle.

“And you, Nyra?” Alicent presses. “You seem well, all things considered.”

And this is how, after all these years of frostiness between them, Rhaenyra finds herself confiding in her oldest friend. No need to give her the porn-y details, she figures, but if there is one person who has no loyalty to Daemon, it’s Alicent. When she finishes, all but pulling out fistfuls of her own hair in her renewed frustration, Alicent is contemplative.

“He’s un-fucking-believable,” Rhaenyra rages. “For her happiness?! What does that even fucking mean? Daemon told me to burn the place to the ground, if it pleased me. I’m sure he hoped I would. That’s precisely the kind of chaos he thrives on.”

“The contract,” Alicent redirects her. “Your lawyers said it was sound?”

“Yes. But who can only guess at what that means.”

“And…he mentioned Otto. He didn’t say why?”

Rhaenyra frowns. Of course: despite being a massive prick, Otto Hightower is still her friend’s father. Alicent’s face is brittle. “No – he didn’t. Should he have?”

Alicent sighs heavily. “Honestly, Nyra, I don’t know. I would tell you if I knew what he referred to – I promise you, I would. But…my father is ambitious. It has left us estranged. He was always heckling me about the boys’ inheritance, always pushing me to talk to Viserys about his will…but for gods’ sake, there is wealth enough for all of us, and I know your father will not leave us beggared should he…you know. Seven forbid.”

“Do you think…?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. I hardly trust your uncle’s word, but without some deeper plot, none of this makes sense. Perhaps, Rhaenyra, you’re the only one playing the game this time,” Alicent ponders.

Rhaenyra drinks deeply. Chews on her bottom lip. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

Alicent shuffles closer and says in a low voice, “I can’t believe you ditched him on the other side of the world. Complete Daemon move, by the way.”

They are still giggling when Viserys enters the room. He beams at the sight of his wife and daughter getting along. Old softy, Rhaenyra thinks fondly.

“You two look very cosy,” he says. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what mischief you’re up to.”

“No mischief, husband,” says Alicent, the very paragon of innocence.

“I don’t believe that for a moment, wife,” he replies. He turns to his daughter and his eyes brim with paternal pride. “You’ve done wonderful work, my girl. I’ve left you some notes – but darling, I am so proud of you.”

Rhaenyra does her best to hide the depth of her pleasure at his words. “Thank you, father.”

“Board be damned – Rhaenyra, I will support this. I will support you. Of course, we – you¸ this is your work – will put it before them, but it is only a matter of formality.” He claps his hands together, delighted. “My brilliant girl.” Viserys pauses, and glances around the room as though someone could be hiding there. “My brother – why has he not accompanied you this time? I had thought he’d come to gloat, at the very least. He has done you a good and generous deed, but I know his nature.”

“He’s hardly lurking behind the drapes, father. Uncle Daemon, I’m sure, is preoccupied with his own pursuits,” Rhaenyra replies, deadpan. “You know his way.”

Viserys frowns. “Have you had a row?”

“No, not at all. But Daemon gifted me this thing so that I could make it mine – I hardly need him for this part,” she assures him. Displeased as she is with her uncle, she doesn’t wish to stoke conflict. Peacetime is so rarely enjoyed in her family.

“Well,” Viserys says with some uncertainty. “If that’s all it is…”

The hour is late when Rhaenyra retires to her childhood bedroom: she decides not to risk a drive back to the city. She’s exhausted, and planning to work from home tomorrow, regardless, for the Averilla Yard Annual Gala is set for the following evening. She will work a half day and spend the afternoon readying herself. She settles down to read (Florence Given – of course, who else, in a time like this), feeling, if not content, less turbulent than she has all week.

There is a soft knock on her door. “Enter,” Rhaenyra calls.

Alicent pokes her head into the room and Rhaenyra snaps her book shut.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Alicent whispers. Rhaenyra shakes her head and beckons her friend in.

“Not disturbing. What is it?”

“I think you should ask Daemon about what my father had to do with the Aracce affair,” Alicent tells her. Rhaenyra is stunned into silence. “Really. Do it. Rhaenyra, if there is a greater truth to it, you must discover it, for your own peace if nothing else. You have an excellent poker face, but I can see how this is wearing on you. Ask him. Why have you not asked already?”

Rhaenyra fiddles with her hair. “I don’t know. Well I do, I just…I haven’t been ready to hear the truth. Or the lie.”

Alicent sits on the edge of her bed. “Well, enough of that. It’s not like you to shy from a fight, Nyra. You’re the bravest person I know.” She quirks her brow. “I don’t always think your bravery makes you clever, mind, but you’ve never suffered fools.”

Rhaenyra folds Alicent in her arms: for a moment, they are toothy ten-year-olds, scabs on their knees, and thick as thieves again.

“You’re a good friend.”

“You are, too.”

“It’s still gross that you fuck my dad.”

“Rhaenyra.”

“I’m just saying.”

Chapter Text

She takes Syrax out the next morning. Both horse and girl are steaming in the cold when they return from their ride. Rhaenyra kisses Syrax’s velveteen nose and passes her off to Harwin. She is on her way back to the house when she hears a high whinny from the paddock. She sees Caraxes, great brute that he is, trotting toward her, arching his tail and shaking his massive head.

“Hello, you terrible thing,” Rhaenyra calls. She clambers up the fence to reach him. He lips her arm and rumbles. The huge red stallion has always liked her: she would never try to mount him, for he has never taken any rider but Daemon, but she trusts him not to bite.

She untangles a burr from his forelock and scratches his twitching ears. Daemon rescued the horse a decade ago: had brought Caraxes to the Keep, scarred and wild as a storm, ignorant to his brother’s protestations that it wasn’t safe to keep such a beast so close to where his children played. The great horse is an ugly thing. Enormous, with a mean, blocky head, hard mouth, and huge, hulking shoulders. Daemon loves his horrible horse beyond sense, she thinks. The bond between them had become such that it wasn’t unusual to find Daemon (often drunk) in the stables sleeping soundly between Caraxes’ hooves, big as dinner plates. 

She’d been riding on him only once: Daemon, in a ploy to enrage his brother and perhaps startle his impetuous niece, had swung her up behind him and taken her careening around the paddock in tandem one summer afternoon. If she’d felt fear at the time, she doesn’t remember it now: only recalls the exhilaration of riding atop an avalanche, the stinging of wind, the steadiness of her uncle’s hard body when she wrapped her arms around him. Her own mad, ringing delight. Viserys had yelled: Rhaenyra hadn’t cared. Daemon had gifted her Syrax, her very own golden girl, that same year.

And had, shortly thereafter, disappeared again.

Sod it, she thinks. There’s nothing for it. She’d given him her untameable heart so long ago. She hardly knows how to take it back. She hardly wishes to. She has loved him, as a child and now as a woman, despite his nature or perhaps because of it. Kindness and cruelty both. The scales have always balanced given time.

Rhaenyra lets Caraxes smear his grassy saliva across her sweater as he searches for a treat: laughs at the beast who, without Daemon’s kindness, would suffered far worse a fate than a green paddock beside a vineyard. Fine, she relents. Fine. Enough of this, then.

She digs her phone out of her pocket and snaps a selfie: Caraxes’ huge head, bowed with pleasure under her scratching fingers, and her own wind-swept smile. Sends it to him.

Today 7.36am

Rhaenyra: Caraxes sends his love.

Rhaenyra: Let’s talk?

He replies before she makes it back to the house.

Daemon🔥: There you are. Yes.  

Rhaenyra: Before this evening, if possible.

Daemon🔥: I’ll be here.

Daemon🔥: Don’t smooch over Caraxes too much.

Daemon🔥: You’ll turn him soft.  

*

Rhaenyra decides to bunk off work for the day – even heiresses get tardy passes sometimes. She stops by the Camden flat to prepare herself. One must look one’s best when negotiating a truce, after all.

She dresses simply: a striped Totême knit, waxed black jeans, her favourite Burberry cardigan. Slides warmly-socked feet into the well-worn Docs that she doesn’t donned since college. She combs her still-damp hair into a ponytail; leaves her face bare of make-up. Her designer dresses glimmer like breast-plates in her wardrobe, but she ignores them: she is dressing for peace time.

It feels peculiar driving to her uncle’s penthouse and she is struck with nostalgia as she cruises through traffic. The last time she was here, she’d played sous chef while he cooked for her. They’d drunk good gin and watched some hideous Korean horror film – she’d complained about her upcoming finals, he’d had told her some lurid anecdote in an attempt to make her blush.

She leaves the car with the valet and nods to the concierge – no need to ask for Daemon. Her Valyrian features tell the young man behind the desk all he needs to know. By the time she ascends to the penthouse, he is waiting for her. He steps forward and kisses her cheek as the lift doors open.

“Princess,” he murmurs.

“Hello, Daemon. Is that a fucking tie?”

He is in his shirtsleeves and he is indeed wearing a tie – or at least, he appears to have been in the middle of tying one when she arrived. He looks mildly embarrassed, as though caught in the act of doing something faintly disgusting.

“Trying something new,” he mutters. “I thought I’d try to look respectable for the Gala this evening.”

“Not sure that’s quite doing the trick, uncle.”

She breathes in the familiar scent of the penthouse: the lingering vetiver of his cologne, morning coffee, fresh toast. While the Mayfair place belongs to the family, it has always been Daemon who resides there: it is most to his taste, after all. He has kept the interior styled in the trend of restrained modern brutalism: raw stone, warm metal and industrial fixtures, sparse yet luxurious furnishings. Pragmatic and primal as he is.  

Rhaenyra feels suddenly unsure of how to proceed. Daemon notices her hesitation and takes pity.

“I’ve just turned the fire on,” he jests, gesturing to the gas fireplace at the far end of the open floor living-kitchen. “Why don’t you sit?”

“A dragon doesn’t feel the cold,” she reminds him, but bites off her soft leather gloves and sits close to warm her hands just the same.

Daemon, she notices, seems just as unsure of how to proceed as she feels. This realisation both amuses and unsettles her. He perches stiffly on the couch opposite her. “I suppose you intended to give me a taste of my own medicine. Leaving your silly old uncle behind. I did feel quite foolish, I hope you know. Ordered far too much Thai food for one person.”

Rhaenyra chuckles bitterly. “Poor Daemon.”

“Are you going to tell me why you left?”

She steels herself. “Are you going to tell me the truth about the Arecce affair?”

He only tilts his head. “What truth is this, zaldrīzitsos?”

“I asked you for the whole of it once, and you denied me,” she reminds him. “Will you tell it to me now?”

“Perhaps.”

Rhaenyra feels the prickle of annoyance. “You insist on no games, uncle, yet you continue to toy with me. Fine, then – if you’re going to dance about the thing, I’ll narrow the fucking question. Did you leak the deal to the Triarchy, or was it Hightower?”

His eyes glitter. “Is this the reason you left?”

“I left, you smarmy prick, because I needed some space to sort my head out. Funnily enough, the very suddenly sincere and well-meaning Uncle Daemon didn’t quite seem believable,” she snaps. Oh gods, he’s opened the floodgates now. It pours out of her like poison. “You left me. For three whole years, I waited for word of you. Half wondered if you’d turn up dead this time, reckless as you are. And here you are, poncing about with your fucking winery and your nice fucking house and all the nice fucking things in it, and you expect me to trail after you, your lost little lamb, like I have always done. Well, unhappily for you, I’ve grown teeth in your absence. A fucking spine. I’m not your little plaything any more: zaldrîzes dohaeriros iksos doar.” A dragon is not a slave.  “I want the truth. Was it you, or Hightower?”

Daemon’s face twists. “I have never considered you a lamb, Rhaenyra. We are dragons, you and I. We were born with teeth.” His Valyrian is harsh, angry. “You’ve dealt your share of cruelty: discarded friends, discarded lovers. You have had your share of insouciance. As you should. You are young. You are spirited. You are privileged enough that you have the means to take what you want and discard it at will. Why do you begrudge me, when we are one and the same?”

“I prefer to leave tragic waste to Shakespeare, Uncle.”

“Stop it,” he snarls. “Stop being clever.”

“Says you,” she spits, perfectly aware of how childish she sounds. “Stop avoiding my fucking question.”

“Hightower has nothing to do with this. This is about you. About me,” he insists. “You are angry at me for leaving – yet you have never once called me home. You are angry at me for playing games – games that you have always willingly played with me. You’re no lamb. Perhaps I am the one to set the board, but you are the one to strike the pieces down.” He stands and prowls closer, insistent. “You and I are the same. I have always seen you for what you are, Rhaenyra: reckless. Fierce. Divine.” This last in a voice so rough that she squeezes her thighs together. Seven hells, not now. “You say my sincerity is unbelievable: I have always been sincere with you. I have never lied to you, never hidden myself from you. How is it that I find myself in the shadow of your doubt?”

Rhaenyra finds herself on her feet. She wants to smack the living daylights out of him. Instead, she winds her hands in his stupid little tie and pulls it tight so that he is forced to stillness. His eyes smoke with wrath.

“I was a child,” she hisses. “You knew perfectly well how your leaving hurt me. How I always feared the next time you would go. I all but begged you to stay that last time. You barely deigned to speak to me before you left. Now – Was. It. You. Or. Fucking. Hightower.”  

They are both breathing heavily. She becomes aware of the heat of him as the silence settles between them. He gazes at her, lips parted, panted. Then –

“Hightower.”

Rhaenyra feels her rage disintegrate. She huffs a single laugh. Releases him. Covers her face with her hands and laughs again, harder. “I know that.”

“Rhaenyra, that you ever thought I could –”

“Of course I didn’t,” she murmurs, although her enduring faith in him is news to her, too. “And so, Stepstones…”

“A way back to you,” he said simply. “I knew Hightower would sabotage whatever I did for you. Perhaps even your own efforts, when you became old enough to join the Board in truth. I played the expected part of playboy prince until his attention had moved on, and only then did I dedicate myself to acquiring something better. For you.”

Rhaenyra looks up at him and realises just how close he is. She sucks on her lower lip: he watches her do it. His eyes darken.

Seven hells, she thinks helplessly, how the fuck am I already wet?

“I’m still very angry at you,” she tells him.

“Ah.”

“Furious, in fact,” Rhaenyra says. “I ought to banish you myself.”

He dips his head so that there is almost no space between them. “Would you have me beg for clemency?”

“That could be amusing,” she whispers. Winds her fingers around his tie. “But no. I think, Daemon, that instead I’ll have you wear this wanky little tie to the Gala, after all.”

“You’d have me be your jester.”

“Perhaps a funny hat, too.”

“Bells?”

“Yes, please.”

When he moves to kiss her, she releases him and steps back. He growls in frustration.

“Come here, you little minx. I want to show you something that you’ll like.”

Rhaenyra takes another step back. “I’ve not forgiven you yet,” she reminds him.

“Nasty, spiteful girl.”

“I’m going to leave now,” she breathes. “I want to see you wearing that lovely smart tie this evening. Do this for me, and I might consider letting the rest go.”

Daemon laughs softly. There is menace in the sound: the muscles behind her navel clench. “If I’d known all it would take was a tie, I would have come crawling back to the Red Keep years ago.”

“Oh no,” Rhaenyra chides. “I’m keeping the rest, too. Don’t you know? I’m a greedy woman.”

“Your words, not mine,” he replies. Pins her down with that stormy gaze. “I just bet you are, though.”

Rhaenyra gives him a final little smirk and turns on her heel. “Always a pleasure, uncle,” she calls over her shoulder. “Ta-ta, now. See you and your tie later on.”

His wicked chuckle follows her home.

Chapter Text

The evening begins with the pop of a bottle. Laenor messily pours champagne into four flutes, ignoring Laena’s cry of distaste when he spills Dom Périgon over the marbled surface of Rhaenyra’s kitchen island.

“You’re wasting it, you daft git!”

Rhaenyra snatches a glass and drinks half the champagne in one long gulp, relishing the crisp, vanillary snap of it on her tongue.

“Gods, Nyra, if you’re going to neck it, you should have opened the Chandon instead,” Laena huffs. “I’m surrounded by animals.” Resplendent in her matching Henne sweats, she sips primly on her own champagne.

Restless and unwilling to spend the afternoon alone in her flat, Rhaenyra had called her cousins and suggested that they begin the Gala at her place. “Some family time, before we’re drowning in all the corporate bullshit,” she’d pleaded. Laenor had needed little prompting: he and Joffrey had begun drinking an hour prior and hardly needed the added incentive of free booze. Laena, only an hour away from meeting her personal stylist, was more reluctant.

“Hot pants emergency?” Rhaenyra offered.

“Say no more. I’ve already cancelled my appointment.”

Watching the three of them bicker good-naturedly, Rhaenyra grins and pours herself another glass. “You know family brings out my very best manners,” she reminds Laena.

“Seven hells, are you eating off the floor when we’re not around, then?”

Laenor puts a conciliatory arm around his sister’s shoulders. “No, Laena. She’s been a busy girl eating dear uncle Daemon’s –”

“All right! Enough!” Rhaenyra holds up her hands in a gesture of surrender. She takes Laena’s hand and tugs her toward the stairs to her suite. “I’m sure you boys can take care of yourselves. More Dom in the fridge, spirits are in the sideboard. I’ve got to get ready with my most favourite cousin.”

Laenor’s objections follow them to the bedroom. Laena shoots her a sly sideways glance.

“Can we expect to see Uncle Daemon this evening, then? I’d thought he’d have been your date,” she teases.

“Father forbade it. He wanted me to take Jason Lannister,” Rhaenyra gags. “Of all the egotistical pricks…”

“Well,” says Laena happily, “I’m glad that you’re my date. I promise not to talk about my great big Scottish castle or my many fine horses.”

“Thank the old gods for you.”

“But – Daemon?”

“You won’t be diverted, will you? Yes. He’ll be there.”

Laena wraps her arms around her cousin and squeezes her, giggling. “Oh good. Are we avoiding him or will I give you over to his charms?”

Rhaenyra’s lips curl into a vicious smile. “Oh, I’m sure a little avoiding won’t hurt him.”

“What fun.”

Rhaenyra feels herself uncoil as she settles into the routine of pre-night-out primping: no one disarms her quite like her younger cousin. Laena is spirited, as are all children of the dragon, but she is fun, uncomplicated, frank. Their friendship is close and simple. Sipping champagne, the women stand in their lingerie and debate the merits of various outfits, trade complaints about work, lovers, family. Right now, it’s distraction she craves: for the news of Hightower, Daemon’s redemption, and the enormity of her want for him seem all like a tidal swell tempestuous enough to drown her. Rhaenyra turns up the volume on Tinashe and dances absently along as she digs through her closet.  

“Thoughts, babe?” Laena asks, fidgeting with a gauzy, beaded gown – floor-length and elegant, a high choker neck crusted in pearls. Her pale braids reach almost to her waist; Prada in her ears, rings on each delicate finger. Rhaenyra whistles and fans herself and Laena swats at her, laughing.

“You look like a badass Cinderella.”

“Thanks, babe. And you, Prince Charming? I think you’ve gone through half the closet already.”

Rhaenyra stands in a pile of discarded gowns, like so many (exorbitantly expensive) silk and chiffon petals. Her indecision has nothing to do with anyone in particular, she thinks fiercely, and warns Laena of this fact with flashing eyes. Laena mimes zipping her mouth shut and tossing the key over her shoulder.

“Right, not saying a word. Come here, let’s sort you out.”

Her cousin rifles through Balenciaga, Alice McCall, Aje, humming thoughtfully. She drags out the simple Versace gown that Rhaenyra had worn to a charity ball the year prior.

“This is the one, surely.”

The gown is both sheer and modest: fine black tulle layered with black drops of gauze redolent of dragons’ scales. Wearing it last year, she’d felt like one of the conquering queens of Old Valyria. Precisely the thing, she thinks, to steel her resolve for this evening. The gown teases glimpses of her skin and exposes the delicate line of her collarbones; exaggerates her otherworldly paleness. She examines the effect in the mirror and is pleased: fucking indestructible, she thinks.

“Yes. This one.”

She weaves her hair into a tight, intricate braid and coils it into a chignon at her nape. She keeps her make-up minimal: luminous primer, shimmering highlighter, dewy and pared back. She lines her eyes just enough to draw attention to the alien violet brightness of her irises. Applies his perfume to her wrists, her throat, her décolletage. Imagines his mouth there.

No, stop that, she scolds herself. Too far down that path and you’re lost.

Her phone buzzes as she is threading gold drops through her ears.

Daemon 🔥: I hope you appreciate how long it took me to get this thing looking right.

He has snapped her a photograph of himself below the chin: she laughs when she sees his perfectly knotted tie.

Rhaenyra: I thought you were rumoured to be good with your fingers

Daemon 🔥: Who taught you to be this insufferable?

Daemon 🔥: On second thought, don’t answer that

By the time she and Laena are ready to leave, Joffrey and Laenor have worked their way through another bottle of Dom and are intertwined on her velvet couch. They’ve managed, at the very least, to make themselves presentable: Rhaenyra fawns over Joffrey’s Tom Ford tux, Laenor’s gorgeous Dolce and Gabbana blazer. She fingers the crimson lapels.

“Were you aiming for sexy Matador, or is this vibe a happy coincidence?”

“Completely intentional, darling.”

“It’s my newest kink,” Joffrey winks.

Laenor blasts Doja Cat in the limousine and Rhaenyra enjoys the easy, playful dynamic between the four of them. She has never taken well to people outside of her family: her college friends she has long discarded, and she sees little need to make new connections. Why would she, she thinks, as Joffrey hollers along to Woman, when she has them?

Laenor offers her a nondescript pill, which she declines. Truce or no, Rhaenyra intends to keep her wits about her tonight. Between Hightower, Daemon, and her father…Besides, she is high enough on their silly energy: she feels like bright champagne bubbles, fizzy and effervescent. She likes the feeling, clings to it. The rest can wait.

The Gala is in full swing when they arrive. If there is one thing her father really knows how to do, Rhaenyra thinks, it’s throw a party. This year the Gala is held in a crumbling neo-Gothic Victorian mansion on the outskirts of London: the dark swathe of the Thames flows serenely past its rolling lawns. There are glittering lights in the frosted hedges. Inside, lo-fi house thumps over the chatter of the trans-Atlantic elite: the Moët is flowing freely, the open bar crowded with people in suits and silks. Diamonds glitter on hands, at throats. She plucks a champagne flute from a passing waiter and scans the room.

Her heart thumps as she sees moon-white hair in her peripheral vision, but it is only her father, walking heavily on his cane.

“Hello, darling,” he says, kissing her cheeks. “You look beautiful.”

“Hello, father. You look well,” she says truthfully, for he does: his face appears less lined, healthier, than it has since his last bout of illness. Something inside her squeezes tight with love: withers only slightly when he scolds her.

“I recall asking you to bring a date.”

“You said I couldn’t bring Daemon. There was no veto on family,” she says cheekily.

Laena reappears at her side and kisses Viserys. “Hello, uncle. Don’t despair – I’ll take much better care of Rhaenyra than some snotty viscount’s son.”

Viserys throws up his hands in (mostly) mock exasperation. “Best behaviour, both of you,” he warns, and the implied accusation is a fair one – last year he’d had to scoop them both, drunk, soaked, and fully clothed, out of one of the mansion’s many claw-footed bath tubs. “Right – sorry, my girls, I’ve spotted Beesbury and his wife. I should say hello.” Gives them another stern look. “Best behaviour. Pass that on to your uncle, when you see him, won’t you?”

They watch him go, and then Laena grips her shoulders. “Have you seen him yet?”

“Who – Daemon? No, I don’t think he’s arrived.”

“Over there. See? The lonely fellow at the bar.” Laena gives her a meaningful look. “No date, Rhaenyra. Doesn’t take Sherlock to put this puzzle together.”

Daemon is, indeed, lounging against the bar and nursing a tumbler of Scotch. A nervous gaggle of young women linger nearby, shooting him glances and laughing with too many teeth, but he is not diverted – she sees him glance towards the entrance and smirks.

“There’s plenty of time to say hello later. Let’s get wasted,” she says mildly, and Laena beams beatifically.

Arm in arm, they play their expected parts as flirtatious heiresses: weaving in and out of conversations with business partner’s sons, kissing the cheeks of the daughters and mothers, philandering with the aging partners themselves. Rhaenyra ducks away from Jason Lannister when she sees him cut through the crowd toward her; winds her arms around Joffrey’s neck when she runs into him and Laenor in the midst of the roiling crowd. Three glasses of champagne and she is in the mood to adore almost anyone. She loses Laena at some stage.

No matter where she is in the room, she is acutely aware of him: drawn back like the needle of a compass to true north. The knowledge of him is excruciatingly pleasurable – she feels the inevitability of this evenings’ end. Her resolve weakens as her buzz deepens and she darts a glance in his direction. He is, as she’d suspected, watching her. His mouth is quirked with amusement; she thinks that she sees him wink.

Rhaenyra huffs and turns back to Criston Cole, who is saying something fairly banal about his finance degree. He stands a little too close to her – hoping, she suspects, for a repeat of the Averilla Yard Christmas Party two years prior, when she’d let him fuck her in the white leather seat of his Mercedes. He’d texted her at least fifteen times in the week that had followed, bless him – but she knows a soft-boi when she sees one. Rhaenyra begins looking for an escape route when he tries to steer the conversation towards cryptocurrency. Gods, what a twit.

Criston is cut off mid-sentence by a cool voice beside her ear.

“You aren’t needed any longer.” Daemon slides his hand against the flat of her back and flicks his fingers dismissively at Criston, who looks disgruntled and opens his mouth to respond before Daemon spins her to cut him off entirely. Criston looks for a moment as though he intends to interrupt: thinks better of it and shoulders through the crowd.

“That was unkind,” Rhaenyra admonishes him.

“So was teasing that poor boy. He wanted to do terrible things to you, I could just tell.”

Rhaenyra quirks her brow. “Well, thank goodness you’ve arrived. My virtue is hardly at risk now.”

Daemon reaches up to drag his thumb across her lips. “Hmm.”

Fuck, she thinks, he looks good enough to eat. His silver-blonde hair is parted and slicked back Wall Street style; his signet rings glitter on his cruel hands. His suit is cut perfectly along the broad lines of his body – Armani, well, the old boy has taste. And the tie – he looks dangerously suave. He has paired it with a silver chain and really, by all rights, he should look a right wanker: instead, she resists the urge to reach for his belt buckle.

“You didn’t bring a date,” she does her best to hide the nervous flutter in her voice. One touch and her body feels like a livewire – gods, Rhaenyra, you are in such trouble, she thinks.

“Neither did you.”

“She did, thank you very much,” Laena appears as if from thin air and wraps her arms around her cousin, giving her a firm kiss on the jaw. “Hello, Uncle Daemon. Look at you: loving the dark and dashing prince thing you’ve got going on.”

“Hello, Laena,” Daemon smiles. “Always a delight.”

Rhaenyra feels steadier with Laena at her side. She snakes an arm around her cousin and tugs her closer for fortitude.

“Where were you? This terrible man won’t leave me alone,” she says, holding Daemon’s eyes with her own. His gaze sears the flesh from her bones. He is going to chew me up and spit me out, she thinks, and shivers. What a delightful prospect.

Laena gives her a little shake. “Stop eye-fucking, please,” she says to the both of them. “I was over the other side of the room with Ali and your father. Uncle Daemon, I know subtlety is not your strength, but I could see the very sexy energy you were throwing at your niece here. Which is fine, honestly, because I could also see the very sexy energy she was giving you, and quite frankly I’ve shipped the pair of you for years. Here’s the thing, though – Uncle Viserys may be quite deep in his cups, but he is not blind.”

“Seven hells.”

“Yes. He made several very interesting remarks about ‘sending you away again’, uncle.”

Rhaenyra frowns. “Again?”

All traces of flirtation drain from Daemon’s face. She sees the fan of his jaw muscles as he clenches his teeth.

“It’s not important, Rhaenyra–”

“Sending you away? What does that mean, Daemon?”

Daemon glances behind her, presumably in the direction of his brother, and back to his adoptive nieces. He shakes his head and says nothing. Rhaenyra feels rage – possibly amplified by half a bottle of champagne – rear its fiery head in her gut. Enough of this. Enough.

“Right, of course,” she spits. “Treat me like an adult until it suits you better to treat me like a child. Great, let’s play the Rhaenyra-doesn’t-need-the-full-story card again.”

“Rhaenyra–”

“No, sorry, please fuck off, my date and I have an appointment at the bar.”

She latches onto Laena’s hand and elbows her way through the crowd, all attempts at decorum forgotten in the heat of her anger. At the bar, she pushes her way to the front of the queue – Targ privileges, she thinks – and orders two shots of tequila.

“Well, you showed him,” Laena’s voice is wry, “That wasn’t childish at all.”

“Oh, shut up and drink your shot,” Rhaenyra orders.

“Also, I’m sure it’s semantics, but you told him to fuck off and then you fucked off. Completely undermined yourself.”

“Drink your shot.”

“Look – if Daemon’s not telling you some minor detail, I would think it’s more about protecting you than anything else.”

“Yes,” Rhaenyra growls. “It is. I’m sick of it – him and father hovering about me like I’m a fragile little girl. I’m not. This whole stupid subterfuge thing…what, father is trying to protect me from Daemon, and Daemon is trying to protect me from…I don’t know, himself? Tell me the threat and let me fight my own battles for a change.”

Laena makes a consoling noise. “Okay, I see your point, but Rhaenyra…perhaps a sensible, level conversation with both of them would be a better first step than another tequila-fuelled tantrum.”

“Tantrum?”

“Tantrum.”

Rhaenyra scowls, and then puts her face in her hands. Laughs. “See, now why can’t they both just speak to me like you do?”

“I know you’re a nasty piece of work: I think they’re still learning.”

“Best teach the both of them that lesson, then,” Rhaenyra grins viciously, and slams back her shot. “Come on. Let’s find Joffrey and Laenor. I want to dance.”

Chapter Text

Rhaenyra finds them both engaged in licking a recreational substance of the countertop in the mens’ powder room. Laenor’s pupils are on high beam: he grins enormously when he sees her.

“You’re not allowed in here, naughty!”

“Gendered bathrooms are a redundant concept, it’s 2022, Laenor,” she says snootily. “Stop breaking the law and come dance with us, won’t you? It’s very boring to hide out in the toilets.”

Outside, the lights are turned low, and lo-fi house turns gives way to the thud of dance music. The dance floor is a living entity: the denizens of the upper-class elite have come for a party, and they intend to have it at its fullest. Rhaenyra loses the last traces of her anger in the thump of bass. She laughs with the flashing of teeth. Laenor wraps his arms around her and pastes sloppy, open-mouthed kisses against her grinning mouth until Joffrey eases him off. She entwines herself with Laena, rocking against her in time to the thud of the beat. She is perfectly aware of how they appear – sirens both, teasing distant sailors, at once mythic and perfectly attainable. Laena kisses her playfully and spins into the arms of someone else: a Martell? One of the Tyrell boys? It hardly matters: Rhaenyra is swept up in the joy of dancing, in the writhe of bodies around her. Time turns syrupy in the haze of tequila and champagne. She is incandescent. She is waiting for him to take her bait. 

She feels a hard body catch her in motion, follow the sway of her hips, and turns – seven hells, she thinks, ducking her chin to avoid Cole’s searching mouth. Not this again.

The crowd is packed too tightly for easy escape. She does her best to edge out of his grasp when a rough hand grasps the nape of her neck and an arm, clad in Armani, snakes around her waist. She smells smoke and vetiver. Her mouth waters.

“So,” Daemon murmurs against her cheek. “You weren’t teasing before. You’ve already let this boy do filthy things to you. He wants to do them again. Tell me, was it in this same dress?”

Daemon’s grip on her waist is bruising. The feel of him matching the rocking of her hips makes her gasp.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she chokes out.

“Who’s not telling the whole story now?” he retorts. His fingers curl around her throat.

Cole, never one to take a hint, dances uncertainly nearby. Rhaenyra tries to turn away from him, to spin against Daemon’s chest, but he holds her fast. He traces his fingers from her neck to her chin and holds her tightly, fixes her gaze forward.

“No,” he chides. The heat in his voice is blistering. “I want you to look at him while you dance with me. I want you to meet his eyes and show him that you belong to me. You’ve been a rude little tease, and now you’re going to listen when I tell you to behave.”

Rhaenyra feels her knees turn weak with want for him. She gasps when he takes her earlobe in his teeth, but she obeys his command: can’t help but laugh when she sees the nonplussed expression on Cole’s face. He makes to reach for her and draws back again. She snakes her arms up and back, drags her fingernails down Daemon’s chest as she winds her body low, feels rather than hears his pleased groan. She holds Cole’s eyes, exposes, for the first time, her desire for the man anyone with any knowledge of her family thinks to be her adoptive uncle. Possessed, desired, complicit in the game. Cole mouths something – what the fuck – before he turns and cuts away through the pulsing crowd.

“Did that please you, Daemon?” she laughs. He spins her to face him. pulls her close so that she can feel the hard length of him.

“You tell me.” The words are rough and breathless. She twines her arms around his neck and draws him down so that she can speak against his mouth.

“Aren’t you worried that my father will see?”

“Fuck him, fuck your sad little love affairs, fuck all of it,” he grinds out. His hands slide down her exposed back to her ass and squeeze. The way he moves against her makes her shudder. “Enough of the games, Rhaenyra.”

They are so close that she can feel his hot breath against her lips. The music quickens, and they instinctively move with it: the rapid, heady thump of the beat, the slide and catch of their bodies. She feels his hands roam over her. She sings against his lips, curls her fingers in his hair.

Psychos forever in diamonds and leather

We’ll never get better – it’s why I’ve got these sick thoughts

He rolls her through the crowd – of course, she thinks, he would be a good fucking dancer – and she can only imagine how they must look. He is near frantic, hands roving, grabbing. Their bodies lurch in a parody of lovemaking. She is flushed, he is dishevelled. They are devouring one another with their eyes. The inevitability of him, the years of yearning that have led to this moment, swell in her throat like salt water. Choking. Drowning. She does her best to claw her way to the surface, to get back on top of this somehow, but he is kissing her neck, her throat, he is saying things hotly in her ear. The very core of her is rendered to a single point of white-hot need. Gods, she thinks, I am undone. I am undone. She wants to beg him to make her whole. She wants him to pick her to pieces and scatter her to the wind. 

When they break free of the crowd, and he releases her, catches her by the hand. 

“Drink?” she asks weakly. Daemon huffs a laugh.

“I don’t think so.”

He tips his chin toward the bar and her stomach rolls: there is Viserys, a wine glass clutched in his white-knuckled hands. She has never seen him look so incensed. He looks ready to set the world afire if only to see the both of them burn. Alicent has a soothing hand on her husband’s shoulder, another over her belly. She catches Rhaenyra’s eyes.

Go, she mouths, widening her eyes.

Gods, they’ve done it now. She can’t find the energy to care too much at all: to hell with it, she thinks. I will take what’s mine. I will seize it with both hands.

“Rhaenyra?”

Daemon’s voice is questioning. Even now, he seeks to protect her. He is asking permission. She turns to him, lets him see the want on her face.

“Daemon.”

He cups her cheek. “I have to be alone with you. Ñuha raqiarzy.” My beloved.

Rhaenyra says, “So take me home.”

He takes her by the hand without another word and draws her out into the dark. 

Chapter Text

Out in the freezing gloom, Daemon shrugs off his suit jacket and slides it around her shoulders. She senses his urgency, feels it thrumming along her own bones, and kicks off her heels to keep pace with him. The bite of the cold stones in the narrow line way beside the crumbling manse helps slow her spinning head.

 “Can you drive?” she asks him. “Shall we call for a car?”

“I’ve only had the one whisky. Come on.”

He leads her to a sleek black Maserati. She can’t help but laugh. “It really was in the shop, then.”

“I couldn’t very well bring the Porsche,” he jokes as he opens the door and helps her into the passenger seat. “Heaven forbid I try to seduce you in the kind of car that only menopausal women drive.”

Rhaenyra turns his words around in her head as he climbs in beside her.

“This is a premeditated seduction, then?”

Daemon turns the car into the drive and reaches over to run his hand along her thigh.

“Mutually so, I suspect,” he replies. “This is a particularly enticing dress. Did you mean for me to spend the night thinking about taking it off?”

Rhaenyra shivers. “I’ve told you before – I would never seek to torment you.”

“Liar.”

His hand has been slowly working her dress higher. It bunches in her lap as he pulls it over her knee; he slides his rough palm along the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. Rhaenyra instinctively lets her knees fall apart and he chuckles darkly.

“Perhaps…” he muses, and glances sidelong at her. Draws his hand higher until she can feel the tip of his smallest finger pressed against the centre of her. She hisses and tips her head back against the seat. “Hmm.”

“What is it, uncle?” she gasps. “I can’t decipher your cryptic murmurings while you’re doing that. It’s…distracting.”

“I am only wondering how you might like it if I were to torment you.” His finger presses more firmly against her. She can feel the slickness between her thighs; knows he must, too. “Ah. That certainly seems to be doing the trick.”

Rhaenyra hears herself whine. Fuck, she thinks desperately, hold it together. But when she feels him hook his finger through her underwear to rub against her in earnest, she thinks she might dissolve on the spot. His broad knuckle finds her clit; strokes it gently.

“Zaldrīzitsos, do you promise to be very good?” he asks. She glances at him: his eyes never leave the road, but his other hand is white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

“I would never promise a thing like that,” she manages to say, and makes an indignant sound when he withdraws his hand. “Hey!”

Daemon brings the offending hand to his mouth and sucks her desire from his finger. “Well, in that case…”

Oh gods, she thinks. He is going to kill me. I’ll have a brain aneurysm if he doesn’t touch me again.

“Okay, no, I take it back. I can be…good,” she agrees. The words feel strange in her mouth, and she is not completely sure that she likes them. Rhaenyra is used to controlling from the bottom, at the very least. Submission rankles her – until he reaches over and runs his fingertips over her wetness again. “Fuck. Yes. Okay, good. The best. The nicest.”

“Liar,” he says again, but he adjusts his posture and slides his finger inside of her.

Gods, he is good at this, she thinks blearily. Digs her fingers into the seat as he curls his finger in just the right way, works her gently apart. He never once looks over at her: calmly watches the road even as she begins to writhe in her seat. He presses his palm flat against her so that she can grind against it. The heat of his hand, the pulse of his finger: Rhaenyra feels pleasure glittering along her nerves, setting sparks along her teeth, crackling below her navel. She can hear herself crying out, a broken, frantic jumble of High Valyrian and English. Pressure builds in the centre of her, delicious, obscene, she is chasing the peak of it, she is going to explode into a thousand sparking pieces, she is –

He stops. Smirks at her outraged cry.

“Oh! You–”

“Rhaenyra,” (fuck, even the way he says her name has her curling her toes), “You talk of games, of turns. Well – it’s my turn to torment you. Your turn to practice patience.”

“I absolutely hate that idea,” she snaps. She is suddenly very aware of the tangle of her dress, her mussed hair, the sticky mess of her underwear. “Seven fucking hells. I hope to the Mother that I’ve ruined your leather seat.”

He laughs. “You’re going to ruin a good deal more before I’m done with you.”

“Gods.”

The bittersweet friction between her thighs won’t dissipate. She wriggles in her seat, eyeing him with distaste.

Smug fucking bastard, she thinks, watching his self-satisfied smirk. His posture is only that of a man taking a leisurely drive home: his hold on the wheel is relaxed again and he watches the road as though she were not here.

Right. Enough of that.

Rhaenyra twists in her seat so that she is close to facing him. She wriggles her skirt up over her hips so that he may see the sheer lace of her underwear.

“Rhaenyra, sitting like that makes your seatbelt completely ineffectual.”

“You’d best keep your attention on the road then, Daemon,” she replies, and runs her index and middle finger between her lips. When he glances at her, she lets him see her suck on her fingers. She traces a slow, teasing line between her breasts, down her torso, between her legs. He watches her from the corner of her eye. She sees the muscles feather in his jaw as she pulls her thong to the side and draws circles around her clit.

“Rhaenyra. Stop that at once.”

“Someone’s got to finish the job,” she gasps, finding the right rhythm and biting her lip. “Fuck. That’s it. Daemon.” She says his name and his knuckles go white.

“Stop.”

“Don’t stop. Fuck, Daemon, don’t.”

“I can’t…concentrate while you’re doing that.”

“Shh. Don’t distract me. I’m having a very specific fantasy about a very dark wine cellar and your face between my–”

Rhaenyra squeaks when she feels him hit the brake. He pulls over abruptly and glares at her while she disentangles herself from the seatbelt and her own dress.

“Hey!”

Daemon reaches over and unbuckles her seatbelt. His mouth crashes into hers with a force that is almost painful. She gasps against his lips, sighs when he slides her tongue into her mouth. He kisses her so thoroughly that she is dizzy by the time he pulls back. His hair is a wild, moon-bright tangle. His lips are swollen, skin flushed. He has never been more beautiful to her.

Or so she thinks, until he tugs her dress down, swivels her back into her seat, and clips her seatbelt into place. He grabs her hands and forces them into a single, tight fist.

“Right,” he splutters. If she weren’t so annoyed at him, she would be charmed by how flustered he is. “You will sit there like this until we arrive home, or I’ll leave you out on the street like the insolent little urchin that you are.”

“Urchin. Uncle, how Dickensian.”

“You’re only proving my point.”

“Please, sir, may I have some more?”

“If you keep asking nicely,” he mutters, and the heat in his voice makes her shiver. “You might just.”

Chapter Text

“Princess.”

In the subterranean garage at the Mayfair penthouse, Daemon opens the passenger door of the Maserati and bows mockingly, holding her gaze with his own. Rhaenyra huffs to cover the nervous fluttering in her stomach.

“I am not going to refer to you as prince, though you are welcome to assign me all the titles you wish,” she retorts. She leaves her shoes in the footwell and does her best to look dignified in her dishevelled dress and bare feet. She surreptitiously swipes her chin with the back of her hand to wipe her smeared lipstick; runs palms over her braid to smooth it down. Gods, she wishes she had a breath mint. Is her mascara running?

Fuck, she thinks, I am so abysmally unprepared for this.

When he offers his arm, she takes it with as much self-possession as she can muster. She hopes to the gods, both old and new, that he can’t feel her shaking.

This is suddenly very, very real, she realises. Only a short ride in the lift stands between her and his bed. Rhaenyra feels suddenly, shockingly, young – and yet her mouth waters at the thought of tasting him. She thinks, I want to eat him alive.

The lift pings quietly as the doors slide open. Daemon glances down at her as they step inside, almost as though he is confirming that she is really there. She hears him clear his throat, sees him swallow. He notices her watching him and his face settles his face into its characteristic untroubled expression.

Interesting. Either he’s fucking with her, or he’s nervous, too.

“Would you prefer to call me by a higher title? King, perhaps? I must admit, I quite like the idea of being called Your Grace while I’m fucking you,” Daemon says lightly.

Rhaenyra attempts a brash laugh, covering for the effect his words have on her. Fucking you. “Oh puke, uncle.”

Daemon pushes her back against the mirrored wall. Any traces of his apprehension are gone. He stares down at her as though to set her afire with his eyes.

“Do you think it perverse that I enjoy the sound of that word in your mouth?”

Gods help her. Rhaenyra tilts her chin and gives him her best obstinate stare. “Which word? Puke?”

Daemon dips his head to blow gently in her ear, laughing when she jerks away. He chases her, lightly drags his mouth down her throat. “You know which word. I want you to say it again.”

“Puke.”

“Not that.”

The lift doors hum open. Rhaenyra ducks out of his grip and grins viciously. “You might have to give me more specific instructions.”

She wanders through the dark penthouse, sensing the enormous bulk of him prowling close behind. She lingers just out of his reach – reluctant, still, to succumb to him. Slides out of his suit jacket, lets it trail along the ground behind her. Treading water while she can. The polished concrete floors are cool on her feet as she leads him, teasing, tempting, to his own bedroom. The dark bed is striped with the acid glow of streetlamps.

“If I give you clearer instructions,” Daemon’s voice makes her jump – he is closer than she’d thought, “Will you follow them this time?”

Rhaenyra whirls to face him: in the darkness, he is a vague outline, pale and gleaming, only paces away. Understands, truly, just how alone they are. The thing she is about to do, this thing she both fears and craves. Her breath stutters in her chest.

“No clever little quip?” Daemon asks. He takes a step closer, near enough that she can feel the warmth of his skin. Reaches to run his fingers, featherlight, down her left arm. He takes her hand and holds it in his rough palm. “You’re trembling.”

“I’m doing no such thing.”

“You are,” he insists, coming closer still so that he looms over her in the titian dark. His face drawn taught with shadows. “Like a leaf. Am I making you nervous, little dragon?”

“Boo for clichéd similes, Daemon.”

Daemon traces a line along her collarbone, strokes the hollow of her throat. Releases her hand only to cup her face. The gentleness in his expression threatens to unravel her completely. He leans down to kiss her narrow-boned shoulder, and there is tenderness in the way he bites the skin there.

“Little dragon, here is my first instruction,” he murmurs. He pauses in his kissing, stroking, and she leans instinctively into him, desperate for him to start again. “I am going to ask that you refrain from being snide while I’m seducing you. Do you think you can handle that?”

Rhaenyra presses more firmly into him, insisting. He laughs softly and draws away from her.

“Don’t make me ask you again.”

“Pox on you,” she retorts. “Fine, no snide remarks.”

Rhaenyra has to bite back on her gasp when he softly curls his fingers around her throat.

“I’m also going to need you to be a little politer.”

 “I’m always very polite.”

Daemon presses against her windpipe with his thumb and her arms break out in gooseflesh. His breath is hot in her ear when he whispers, “You’re a rude little tart. You need someone to remind you how to use your pleases and thank yous.”

Rhaenyra laughs breathlessly. “You can try.”

She reaches to touch him, and he lets her go. “No. Stand still, or I won’t touch you again.”

“As you wish.”

He spins her around and she feels him expertly pluck apart the delicate buttons on the back of her dress. He eases it over her waist, and as he strips it off her, he kisses the flesh over her spine, her shoulder blades, the swell of her hip. She steps out of her dress as he kisses the skin behind her knee. When he reaches up to hook off her thong, he flicks his tongue over the dimples above her ass. Rhaenyra feels every nerve of her body crackle like a livewire.

“Good,” he says. “Very good. Go lie on the bed, mēre jorrāeliarza.”

Rhaenyra crawls to the head of the bed and settles herself against the headboard so that she can watch him. Half of his face saturated hectic orange by the sodium brightness of streetlights, the other masked in darkness. His eyes never leave her face as he unbuttons his shirt. The clink of his belt buckle is loud in the airless room. The broad bulk of his torso, the taught, snowy musculature of his chest. The gleam of pale hair below his navel. Clad only in his underwear, Daemon catches her foot and drags her down to him; hooks her knees over his arms and drags her to his mouth. She sees his lips part softly as he gazes down at her. His gaze flicks to her face and he smirks.

“Don’t try to be quiet, Princess,” is all he says before he dips his head and unleashes himself upon her.

 Rhaenyra barely knows herself in those minutes: she only knows the simmering waves of heat that draw ever-tightening circles below her navel until she is drawn to a single, sun-bright pinprick of exquisite pleasure. She is vaguely aware of gasping a string of curses; of his hair gripped tightly in her fists and the buck of her hips against his face as she is shattered to pieces. She tries to wriggle away when it becomes too much, but he pins her down with his hand and feasts on her until she is shuddering, half-sobbing and begging him to stop.

He draws back only when she begs, “Please.”

“There’s a good girl.”

Daemon kisses the inside of her thigh, stands to kiss her mouth. She tastes salt, something heady and wild. Feels strangely bereft when he moves away. She slides back against the headboard again, and he crouches on the bed before her. Her saturnine satyr. She sees something warring in his face.

“Rhaenyra,” he says softly, “I have a last instruction. I need you to tell me that you understand something.”

The state she’s in, the haze of post-orgasm benevolence, she will grant him anything. She nods for him to continue.

“If we do this, I need you to understand that there is no turning back. I wish to have you in your entirety: this is not one night, it is not casual, it is not temporary. I have no wish to own you, for you cannot be owned: I ask only bind myself to you in perpetuity. If this is not what you desire, now is the time to tell me.”

The words stick in her throat. How to tell him that this is all she has ever desired? How to tell him that she both believes his words and listens for the lie in them? Gods, she thinks, how to communicate the immensity of it. How to tell him that she wants not just this, but all of him, flesh and soul both. To consume him, destroy him, become him.

Instead, she says only, “Kepa, shifang.” I understand, uncle.

“Ivestragon issa bona ao sytilībagon naejot issa,” he murmurs, crawling to loom over her, trailing his mouth along her skin. Tell me that you belong to me.

“Nyke sytilībagon naejot ao,” she agrees. He makes a desperate sound, takes her waist in a punishing grip. 

“Rhaenyra,” he whispers, “Ivestragon issa bona ao jaelagon bis. Tell me again, my dear one, my beloved.” Tell me that you want this. His High Valyrian curls like smoke, makes the words catch in her throat. His hard body is only inches from her own: every inch of her skin aches for contact. Her pulse thrums wildly.

Fuck it, she thinks, I don’t care if he’s gone tomorrow. I want this. I have always wanted this.

“Daemon,” she chokes, “Please. Please. Nyke aôhon. Stop playing. Take me. Nyke aôhon.” I am yours, I am yours, she thinks, the words a hymn in her clamoring brain.

His mouth crashes into hers. The kiss is artless, desperate: she feels the knock of his teeth, gasps past the rough push of his tongue. He takes her face in both hands and kisses her as though to bind them into one being. His knee works her legs apart and presses up so that she can grind against him, groaning at the sweet agony of it. She scrabbles inexpertly with the waistband of his underwear, and he huffs a laugh into her mouth when she growls in frustration.

“Just take them off, will you?”

“Impatient creature.”

“I’ve been patient,” she gasps when he kisses a line down her neck, takes her nipple between his teeth. “For years. I want you now.”

Daemon groans and rocks back to strip off his pants: Rhaenyra gazes at him, wholly naked, with frank curiosity and hunger. To see him this way, bared to her, glowing in the gloom, feels sacred. She crawls to kneel before him, lays a reverent hand against the firm muscles of his stomach. Presses a kiss to his muscular shoulder, runs her hand over his broad chest. They pull away to stare at one another: as she explores him with her eyes, he drinks in the sight of her with his lips parted.

“You are beautiful,” he murmurs. “My Rhaenyra. Come here.”

He leans back onto his heels and takes her hips to guide her astride his lap. She feels the blunt, hot end of him bump against her. His laugh is excited, bewildered.

“You’re soaked,” he whispers in a way that makes her shiver. “Fuck, Rhaenyra, the number of times I’ve imagined this, I’ve thought of you this way…”

Rhaenyra snakes her arms around his neck and kisses him slowly. “Enough chatter, Daemon,” she commands. “I want you to focus on fucking me, now.”

She eases herself onto him, gasping a little as she adjusts. She watches his face: his eyes squeezed shut, brows furrowed, mouth open with the ecstasy of her. She feels him roll his hips gently, testing her depth, and she rocks hers in response, feeling jolts of pleasure rocket up her spine.

Daemon butts his forehead into hers, catches her mouth with his own, bites down on her lip until she cries out. And just like that, they are thrown into frenzy: he bucks wildly, matches her own wild writhing. His tongue flicks over her nipples; she digs her nails into his scalp. His hands, his mouth, are everywhere, he is saying her name and spilling erotic nonsense in Valyrian and English both. She hears her own animal sounds, hears his name from her lips.

“Rhaenyra,” he gasps, gripping her chin in his rough hand, the other flat against her back, urging her faster. “Rhaenyra, gods, you feel…this is…”

This: Rhaenyra feels the edges of her being blur and merge with his, holds him as tightly as she can, desiring only to sink into the heat of his flesh, to dissolve in the blaze of her love for him. This can’t last, she thinks desperately, she is going to burn to ash, she is incandescent, she is herself a flame. She will be wrought to embers in the inevitable absence to come. She kisses her name desperately into his tongue so that it may be the only word he ever speaks again. As their pace quickens, a great tide swells from the center of her: their joining is the epicenter of a quake of pleasure that sends shockwaves through her prickling flesh. Her orgasm is sudden and intense: she hears herself cry out, cannot even begin to discern the words.

Daemon lasts moments before he follows her, pressing his damp face into the crook of her shoulder, gripping her so tightly that she knows she will be bruised tomorrow.

He holds her against him, breathing heavily. She tightens her hold on him, running tender fingers over his back.

“That was…”

“I know.”

Rhaenyra feels a laugh bubble up in her chest: her amusement makes him pull back, but he is smiling wryly.

“What amuses you, little dragon?”

“We should have started doing this years ago.”

Daemon grins against her neck and tilts his head to kiss her cheek, her nose, her forehead. “I certainly started thinking about this years ago.”

“As did I.”

Rhaenyra eases herself off him, lies back on the bed and smiles at the ceiling. She hears him groan as he straightens and flexes his legs.

“Old man,” she teases. “We’ll have to watch those knees of yours in future.”

Daemon crawls to lie beside her, curling his muscled arms around her. “You’re always so thoughtful, dear niece.”

“Someone’s got to look after you.” As she speaks, she becomes aware of the stickiness between her thighs, the cooling sweat on her skin. “Ah. I think I need to take care of this mess.”

He smiles. “Come. Let’s get cleaned up.”

In the bathroom, Rhaenyra runs the shower until the water is steaming and steps into the heat with a grateful sigh. Her champagne-and-tequila buzz has long worn off: instead, her body feels heavy with exhaustion, syrupy with post-pleasure. She works her long hair out of its intricate braid and stands with her eyes closed under the harsh stream.

“You have better water pressure than I do,” Rhaenyra calls. “I’d forgotten.”

She starts when she feels his naked form press against her. He kisses her deeply, holds her against him as though she is a breakable object. “Plenty of water for the both of us, then,” he says. “Come here. Let me take care of you.”

Rhaenyra is too tired to argue. She lets him run soapy hands over her body, lets him wind his fingers through her hair to unweave the tangled strands. He is gentle and attentive: she hums when he presses his thumb into a knot in her shoulder.

“You’re tense,” he tells her.

“No – relaxed, now. I’ll admit to feeling some tension before this evening.”

“Hm.”

“We have more to talk about,” she reminds him. “Don’t think you’ve pleasured me so thoroughly that I’ve forgotten the rest.”

“To think such a thing would be a folly – you’re far too implacable to fuck the anger out of,” he assures her. “I only wished to temper you some.”

“Ha ha.” She rolls her eyes, turns to look up at him. Watches beads of water run down his cruel, lovely face. “Clever Daemon.”

“We can talk in the morning, little dragon. I promise you.”

Rhaenyra rests her hands on his hips, gazes into his face. Searches for dishonesty: finds only quiet adoration. “I half expect to wake up and find you gone in the morning.”

Daemon ducks to kiss her. “You couldn’t banish me if you tried.”

When they dry off and slide between the cool sheets of his bed, Daemon curls around her like a firedrake around its glittering hoard. She falls asleep to the rhythm of his breath, the thrum of his heartbeat against her spine.

Chapter Text

Dawn. Rhaenyra’s internal clock strikes her awake in the instant that the sky begins to lighten. She is momentarily disconcerted – swathed in unfamiliar sheets, her usual view replaced by an elevated aspect of a quiet, leafy streetscape – but she smells him on her skin, flame and smoke, and remembers. She turns over carefully, determined not to wake him, and sees that he is still sleeping deeply. She must have rolled away from him in the night, for he still faces her, his arm is outstretched as though seeking her warmth. Asleep, Daemon is only a man: his harsh, handsome face softened by slumber, rendered vulnerable in his dreaming. His moon-bright hair is tousled against the dark silk pillowcase. She sees, with fond amusement, a few silvering strands at his temples. She will tease him about these later, she thinks, pleased to have found new ammunition.

Her dry mouth, sour with last nights’ champagne, spurs her to movement. She eases herself out of bed and pads into his cavernous bathroom. She finds a spare toothbrush in the vanity, helps herself to his Hermes body cleanser in the shower, delights in the heated flooring as she combs snarls out of her long hair. She picks her way through his toiletries like a curious child: sniffs his Le Labo moisturiser and, finding its bergamot scent to her liking, dabs it onto her face. She smirks at his Sisleyüm anti-age cream (more ammunition, how delightful), resolves to steal his under-eye masques, makes an impressed hum in her throat at his tasteful collection of colognes. She feels like she is peeking beneath the surface of him: the unacknowledged diffidence of an aging man, the modest and beguilingly human ways he is taking care of himself. Rhaenyra’s own insecurities are partly borne of being over a decade his inferior – she has never thought that her youth might equally disconcert him.

In the wide mirror, she contemplates her own naked form. She can see small, flowering blue bruises on the surface of her flesh. His fingerprints, blossoming. The way he’d tried to drown himself in her last night…she tries to see the woman he’d sought to worship. She sees only the same body that carried her through her childhood, that he, too, would recognise from youthful summers when she’d run naked in the sun, swum naked in the sea. The small scar on her chin that he had stitched himself after she’d split it open falling from Syrax at ten-and-one. The bony knees on which he has placed plasters and iodine; the narrow, flat chest that he has smeared with eucalypt oil to soothe her infantile coughs.

Does he not see her slim hips, the ladder of her ribcage, and compare her to the lush bodies of those before? Those models and daughters of oil tycoons, socialites and influencers. Rhaenyra runs her fingers over the bruises on her hips and smiles. Fuck that thinking right off, she scolds herself, his want is painted all over you. The thought wakens a hunger in her belly.

In the bedroom, she finds him soundly asleep, his arms thrown around his head. She tugs gently at the sheets to reveal his rippling torso, runs an experimental finger below his navel. He stirs and resettles himself when she pauses.

In the mood to be wicked, she carefully settles herself to straddle his legs and pulls the sheets back further. He is hard in his sleep: the sight makes her mouth water. Watching him closely, she leans forward and flicks her tongue experimentally over the tip of him. Hears the sharp intake of his breath: spurred on, she takes him in her mouth, wraps her small hand around the base of him. This time, when she glances upward at him, his eyes are open, startled, smouldering.

“Good morning to you, too,” he says. Cocky bastard. Best remind him of who he’s dealing with.

Rhaenyra holds his eyes and takes more of him in her mouth: delights when he jerks at the contact.

“Fuck.”

His hands fist in the sheets, white-knuckled, as she slides her tongue over him, drags her teeth gently on her way back up. His groans set a fire in her blood.

She feels a turgid tightening in him, surging under her hand, when abruptly he sits up and drags her off. One moment he is beneath her, and in the next he is behind her, pressing a palm to the flat of her back, fisting his hand in her hair, forcing an exclamation from her as he pushes himself inside of her. He runs a calloused fingertip over the bundle of nerves at her centre and in moments (damn him), she is a shaking mess, her face pressed into the bed, hands balled in the sheets. His laugh is breathless: he leans over her, biting the flesh of her waist, chasing his own peak. She says his name and he gasps, shattering against her, thrusting his hips in the throes of his pleasure and setting her vision to glimmering atoms.

They collapse against one another in a sweating, panting tangle. Rhaenyra raises her palm to his face, traces his pale features. Gods, she never wants this to end: is it possible to suspend time in these moments, the aching intimacy of it?

“Good morning, uncle,” she murmurs, and smiles against his kiss.

“That word again,” he replies. “I’m going to have to teach you to say it while we’re fucking.”

“You’re the dirtiest old man to ever live,” she scolds.

“Hm. You’d not deny this old man his pleasures, would you?”

“Not if you’re…very…good,” she teases, tapping her finger against the tip of his nose. He laughs, loud and open-mouthed, with such sincere delight that her toes curl.

“Cruel, spiteful thing.”

They shower and Rhaenyra rifles through his closet for something to wear. Her own soiled dress is in a heap of tulle and lace in the corner. She chooses a well-worn button-down shirt, softened with years of wear, one she remembers from her childhood. She leaves her hair loose and pulls on a pair of his warmest socks on to her feet.

Rhaenyra pauses in the bedroom, listening to the susurrus of his movement around the penthouse. The simple domesticity of clinking cups, his shuffling footsteps. The comfort of him only rooms away from her. Part of her hesitates to push against it: perhaps she needs no further explanation of the rest. Perhaps she can find contentment in the present and discard the past.

She shakes her head at her own foolishness. If only, she thinks, I was that fucking naïve.

She finds Daemon fussing with a fresh filter for his sleek black Moccamaster in the kitchen. He smiles at the sight of her in his clothes.

“You wear that far better than I,” he says.

“Flattery will get you everywhere, Daemon, and coffee will get you even further than that,” she informs him. “Do you need a hand?”

“I’ve got it.”

Rhaenyra nudges him out of the way: fits the filter, weighs beans into the grinder. She had taken a casual barista job in her late teens while at college: she’d wanted, she reminisces wryly, to slum it a little, get a taste of the life her peers were living, working low-wage shifts to make rent. She’d found the work methodical, precise, and enjoyable – she still delights in being able to make herself a good coffee.

“Here, I’ve got this,” she says. “Why don’t you be a good boy and dash down to that lovely little patisserie on the corner? I fancy a croissant.”

He kisses her crown. “Mark that off on the list of ‘things I have done to be very good today’, please, there’s a girl.”

When he arrives back in the apartment, flushed from the cold, she is waiting with a steaming pot of fresh coffee, curled by the fireplace. Coiled with nerves. He shrugs out of his coat and settles himself beside her, slinging his arm across the couch and offering her a pastry box with a flourish.

“Sweetling.”

Rhaenyra is struck by the novelty of this: the simple pleasure of having his arm around her, the dropping of all pretence. How easy, she thinks, it would be to have this all the time. If that is at all possible.

Well, she thinks, no use putting this off any longer.

Daemon, picking croissant flakes off his t-shirt, senses the shift in her mood. “No more playing house?” he asks.

“Is that what we’re doing?”

“I am most decidedly not playing, no. How do I prove that to you, little dragon?”

Rhaenyra pours herself another cup of coffee and settles back against the arm of the couch where she can watch his face. “Tell me everything,” she demands. “I have asked you for the whole of it twice now. Will you give it to me?”

Daemon purses his lips and runs his hands through his hair. A snowy, sleep-wild halo. “If I tell you, do you promise to believe me?”

Rhaenyra laughs. “No. But I promise to listen.”

Daemon’s mouth curls. “My clever girl. All right, you’ll have all of it.” He puts his own mug aside. Rhaenyra feels her heart quiver in a staccato beat. “I meant it, Rhaenyra, when I pledged myself to win the deal for you. I saw your dream and poured my faith into it. I wanted to prove to your father – to you – that I could take something seriously. I was growing tired of being sent away. I wanted to do this thing for you.”

His eyes flicker to her face, gauging her response, and away again.

“Yes – this business about being sent away. Tell me what you mean.”

“I will come to that. Do you mind if I circle back?”

“All right. Go on.”

“The Board – as you well know – were resistant to the acquisition. They felt that there was no need to take such a risk – Hightower, especially, felt that tradition was the cornerstone of success, not innovation. He resisted at every opportunity. Your father is good-hearted but this makes him weak, Rhaenyra, and indecisive, and while he refused to hear criticism of either you or I – me, the profligate and you, the spoiled child – he was wavering on the entire matter for months. I strove, despite his vague protestations, to acquire the land. I was close...I had planned to bring you to Italy for your birthday that year, surprise you. But the deal was leaked to the Triarchy, and they snatched it up before I could counteroffer.”

Rhaenyra’s heart is in her mouth. She has never heard more than a word or two of the events surrounding the Aracce affair: Viserys, reluctant to discuss it, had deftly avoided her questions. No one else was willing to discuss the matter with her, not even Corlys, newly retired and, she suspected, expressly forbidden from giving her any further information.

“I didn’t leak the deal.” Daemon holds her gaze. She sees the muscles of his jaw clench. “Of course I fucking didn’t, Rhaenyra, why would I? I know how you see me – your capricious, punishing uncle – and I won’t tell you that you’re incorrect. I am not a good man, but neither am I entirely a bad one. You alone seem to draw out the best of me.”

Rhaenyra grips the edges of her chair. “Yes. Hightower. I know this part.”

Daemon sighs heavily. “Hightower. I could never prove it – believe me, I tried, but he covered his tracks. A damnable old bastard, but a clever one.”

“Why didn’t you tell father?”

Daemon stands abruptly. He paces, a creature caged. “I tried. I tried. But Viserys wanted an excuse to send me away again.”

“This again. The ‘sending away’. It makes no sense.” Rhaenyra frowns. “You cleave him in two when you leave. He loves you, Daemon, even if he’s absolutely shocking at showing it. You, of all people, know his nature, as he knows yours.”

“You really believe that I am the one who chose to be absent from my family so frequently?” he retorts. He sees the withering look she gives him and deflates. “I suppose you would. I did a wonderful job of painting the image of a rogue playboy prince. I enjoyed playing the part.”

“Speak plainly, uncle,” she demands. “Stop talking around the thing. Say it.”

Daemon braces his hands on the couch across from her. “It’s true – I caused conflict on the Board. I pushed against the other members. I was bored. I enjoyed the discord, and it was easier, at first, for your father to send me elsewhere. To entertain business partners, to survey land he never really wished to purchase. That, first, was the cause of my absences. But I have always longed to be near my family – more so, when Aemma died. When we lost her, I did not want to be parted from you. I have seen your loneliness all these years.” His voice is gentle. “And then – seven hells, and as you became a woman grown, I only wished to be near you.”

She can’t bring herself to look at him. Her thoughts roil, turning over this new information.

“Your father – he is a fool about some things, but not fool enough to look past our closeness. He talks of us as kindred spirits, but the connotations of that make him...uncomfortable. He began to encourage me away from you. He wished to see you spend time with boys, with friends, your own age. I reminded him that you take slowly to those outside of our family. I reminded him that I knew you as no one else could – saw you, as no one else would. He didn’t want to hear it.”

“I don’t understand.”

Daemon gives her a slow smile. “You do,” he mutters. “You simply refuse to see the truth of it. I was all but asking for permission to court you, Rhaenyra, and he denied me that. I ignored his wishes.”

“But you never...we never—”

“No, of course not,” he replies. “You were so young – I was content to wait until you came around to the realisation yourself. That our connection to one another knows no banners, no titles – that we belong to one another and no one else. I vowed to be at your side as your protector, confidante, until you consented to have me as your lover.”

Lover. The word sends warm bubbles of pleasure through her. She pops them all with the barbs of her sudden rage. Such pretty, pretty talk from someone who abandoned her without a word. “You never told me. You let me believe that you had betrayed me. You left me for three years.”

Daemon’s face is stone. “Yes.”

“You have nothing else to say?”

“Remember, Rhaenyra, that Hightower would have found some way to prevent me from returning to you. To assist your rise with Averilla Yard. I had to hide in plain sight until his attention passed over me. And…” he pauses, scrubs his hands through his hair again. “And there was wisdom in Viserys’ demands, Rhaenyra. I wished to give you space to grow. To become wholly yourself, without my influence. Yes, you and I are one and the same, but I wasn’t ignorant to the sway I held on you: I encouraged your wildness, your single-mindedness. I wanted to have you all the time, but I knew it meant I was stealing the moments you should have been spending with college friends. With your cousins. And…you have grown up seeing me as your uncle.”

“I haven’t thought of you as my uncle since I was about seven years old,” she retorts. “You have never taken advantage, Daemon. I was a woman grown before we began spending so much time in one another’s company.”

“You were so young. You are still so young. You will look back and understand, one day, why I made the choice to leave you. But you never lost me. I thought you understood. Nyke jāhor va moriot find issa ñuhoso arlī naejot ao.” I will always find my way back to you.

Rhaenyra feels her lips draw back over her teeth. “You could have given me the choice.”

“It was no real choice, Rhaenyra. You would never have let me go. Have you not found your own way, these years, without me?”

A sob crawls its way past her lips. Gods, not now, she thinks, I will not cry. “You tore me apart, when you left,” she admits angrily. “I have found my way, yes, but only to fill the missing parts of myself. To crush our likeness down. To stifle myself, kill the parts of you that live in me. I never once stopped missing you. I hated you for leaving. I thought…”

“You thought I didn’t care for you,” Daemon finished for her. “Perhaps you knew, deep down, that I hadn’t betrayed you, but you thought I’d cast you aside nonetheless. Gone in search of some new diversion.”

“Something like that,” she admits. She looks down to where her hands twist in her lap. “I didn’t think myself enough to hold your attention. You had always…wandered…before.”

Daemon moves to sit by her, and gently works her hands apart so that he may bring her knuckles to his mouth. He kisses each finger one-by-one, until she lifts her head and meets his eyes.

“I do not intend to wander again,” he murmurs. “I meant it, last night. I was not merely spinning pretty words to seduce you. I intend to bind myself to you for as long as you will have me.”

Rhaenyra feels a wet laugh bubble up in her chest. It is like something from one of the silly, romantic films she sometimes watches with Laena: the cunning villain, the cruel prince, humbled by love. What a laughable prospect – and yet, she sees he is sincere. The ache in her chest unravels when he smiles at her.

“Do you laugh at my confession?” he asks.

“Only at this – look at us, uncle,” she giggles. “Confessions. The drama of it. Over croissants and coffee, of all the fucking things.”

Daemon chuckles, once, and only when he runs his thumbs under her eyes does she realise that she is crying. He leans in and catches a tear on his tongue, kisses another away as it falls.

“Rhaenyra,” he whispers. “Ao issi issa mērī mēre.” You are my only one.

“I don’t know if I believe you, yet,” she admits, “though you paint a pretty dream.”

“I understand,” he replies. “I did not expect your immediate acceptance – a chance to prove my commitment is all I hoped.”

“Is Stepstones not the proof you had intended to sway me?”

“Only a gift to lay at your feet, in the hopes to be heard.”

“My, my. Am I to expect my own private island next?”

“If you wish it.”

“No,” she smiles. “I have something even better in mind.”

“What’s that, little dragon? Shall I conquer whole nations for you? Do you desire to walk the rings of Saturn?” he teases.

“Better, you silver-tongued old rogue.” She gives him a devilish grin. “Finish your breakfast. We’re going to visit my father.”  

Chapter Text

The cauldron-dark sky hangs low and portentous over the Keep when Rhaenyra turns her BMW onto the drive. Daemon glances her way from the passenger side where he has, she thinks smugly, tried his best to hide his mild sulk during the drive out. Devotion or no, ceding control of the driver’s seat has rankled him somewhat.

“Are you quite certain that this is better than all of my wonderful suggestions?” he asks. “I feel rather like we’re about to endure a great deal of shouting.”

 “I thought that conflict amused you, Daemon,” Rhaenyra smiled, putting the car into park.

“Hm.”

“Never fear,” she soothes, leaning over to kiss his chin. “I’ll protect you.”

“That’s quite enough of that.” He winds her hair in his fist, tugs. Rhaenyra digs her fingers into his thigh, and he hums happily in his throat. “You’re insatiable.”

She has already given herself to him again this morning, a punishing, furious coupling against the wide mirror in her entryway when they’d stopped by the Camden flat. He’d held her gaze as he’d fucked her into the glass. Whispered disgusting things in her ear until she’d clenched around him. Seven hells, she thinks, she’d let him take her again, right here by the front door of the Keep. He need only ask.

“Pot, kettle,” she snips back. “Unhand me, you bloody cretin. Play later.”

He takes her lower lip in his teeth, sucks away the sting. “As you command.”

The morning is cold and miserable after the luxurious warmth of the car. Rhaenyra shivers and draws her jacket more tightly around her. In spite of her bravado, she feels the thrum of nerves singing in her chest. She is used to bickering with her father, but it has been many a year since she has truly incurred the impetus of his wrath. She steels herself against it now: holds her chin high, squares her shoulders. Queenly. She will not be cowed by an old, sickly patriarch.

At the great wooden door, she takes Daemon’s hand in hers. His teasing manner has fallen away: play later, indeed. To battle.

It is little Aemond who answers her knock. His white-blonde head peers nervously around the door.

“Hello, Nyra. Hello, Uncle Daemon. Father is very angry this morning.”

“Oh, how wonderful,” Daemon murmurs, ruffling his nephew’s hair. “No need to escort us in, little man. Best avoid your father when he is cranky.”

“Mother is unwell,” Aemond tells them worriedly, leaping from thought-to-thought as small children are wont to do. “Our sister is making her sick. Clare is helping me and Aegon to make tea for her.”

“A noble endeavour,” Rhaenyra smiles. “Off with you, then. Your uncle and I will speak to Father.”

“He’s in the family room. Luck,” Aemond informs them before he scurries off in the direction of the kitchen.

Rhaenyra takes a deep breath and releases Daemon’s hand. “Perhaps I’d best go this alone,” she tells him. “He’ll be insensible if he sees you. Let me speak with him first.”

Daemon nods his assent. “Sagon nedēnka, zaldrīzitsos.”

“Keep your courage. He’ll be even angrier with you.” She accepts his kiss: Gods, the taste of him, the strangeness of his mouth against hers in the hall of her home. She will have him in every room, she thinks wildly. Every surface. Fuck, to pin him beneath her in her childhood bed – the thought of such a wanton desecration makes her dizzy.  But first – Viserys. She swallows her desire and goes to find him.

Her father is swaddled in furs by the flickering fireside. He looks, she worries, reduced – for the first time, she doubts that she should have come. His mottled flesh, his greying hair: she hasn’t put thought to the physical toll her father might suffer in his apoplexy. He is barely recovered from his last bought of wasting sickness. Perhaps this is poor timing, after all.

Or, she thinks, as she studies him, perhaps rage is the cure. Fire cleanses, renews, after all. Indeed, his face is a lively convolution of rage. The firelight sets his ashen skin ablaze, catches the shine of his eyes. He looks more awake and aware than she has seen him in some time.

Rhaenyra approaches him warily and perches on the edge of the leather couch.  “Father.”

“Daughter. Why, precisely, are you here?”

“You know why. We have much to discuss. I grow tired of our tradition of avoidance. Fire and Blood: are those not our house words? It seems we ought to change them. It has been long since we have fought any of our battles head-on.”

“I feel fire well enough, daughter, and there may well be blood spilled in this house today.”

“Whose? Daemon’s?” she scoffs. “What will you do, Father, have security pin him down for you? Let’s not debase ourselves with melodrama.”

“Where is the blasted wretch? Sent you in his place, did he? How toothless he has become.”

“He is here. I told him to wait. I wish to speak with you alone.”

Viserys’ jaw works furiously: biting back the words he would spit at her, to wound, to lacerate the thin skin of her calm. Rhaenyra’s fingers clench in her lap, anticipating his malice: but he only puts his face in his hands. Rubs his palms on his forehead.

“Your uncle. He is your senior of ten-and-four years. I can’t even look at you, Rhaenyra,” Viserys mutters.

“You need only turn your head,” she bristles. You bloody old fool, look. See me as I am.

“I suggest,” her father snarls, “that you keep that impertinent tongue of yours in hand.”

“There’s a sight.”

“Enough!” Viserys barks, and he meets her eyes at last. His own foam with rage. “What do you hope to gain by coming here, daughter?”

“We have much to discuss,” she repeats.

“Oh? And what is it, exactly, that you wish to discuss? Your own ruin at the hands of your uncle? The shame you have brought down on this house?”

“The shame!” Rhaenyra laughs bitterly. “For Sevens’ sakes, Father, if you’re concerned about my chastity, you should have started paying attention years ago. I didn’t realise you’ve intended to sell my virginity to the highest bidder. What was the plan – procure a septa to check whether or not I was intact?”

“Now, you listen to me–”

“No, no, it’s your turn to listen, Father,” she snaps. “I am not here to beg your approval. I am here to do the asking, not the answering. I am your heir apparent. I will not be treated like a child any longer. I refuse to be bent to your will, to find a husband of your choosing, to bow to those simpering fools on the Board, to play the part of your sweet, ignorant princess – and old gods help me, I will have answers.” She feels her lips curl back over her bared teeth. “Did you know it was Hightower?”

“I know not of what you speak.”

“The Aracce Deal. Did you know that Hightower was responsible for the leak? Did you banish your brother at Otto’s whim – or your own?”

“Otto Hightower has served loyally for longer than you’ve been alive, young lady, and you will pay him the respect he is due.”

“You know me not, Father, if you believe I will give respect simply because it is demanded of me,” she snaps. “Hightower is a misogynistic sycophant at best, a conniving leech at worst. He has sought to undermine me at every turn these years. I know, too, that he has hounded Alicent about the will: he seeks to supplant me, does he not? Pass over the daughter and hand the company to the sons. How he loves his tradition: and Seven forbid a woman should make a single fucking decision about the future of Averilla Yard.”

“Is this what Daemon has been filling your head with?” Viserys scoffs angrily. “Conspiracies? Plots and schemes? How like him. He is bored, Rhaenyra, and stirring discord entertains him. He will become bored of you, too, in time.”

“Such a cutting assessment of his character: yet I see how it suits you to think so. You did not send him away to protect the family. You sent him away because of his intentions towards me.”

“I banished him for his betrayal.”

“You divided us deliberately. You saw our closeness, and it repulsed you.”

“I saw him manipulating you. Drawing you away from your studies, your friends. He sought a new plaything – I could not tolerate this treatment of you. You are not one of his pretty accessories: you are the daughter of dragons. You were young, impressionable. I desired only your happiness.” At this admission, he withers, becomes only a sad old man, the rage blown out of him. “I have only wanted what was best for you, Rhaenyra. I wished only to see your joy after the sadness of your mother’s passing.”

“Father,” Rhaenyra murmurs, “You have always said that Daemon and I are of the same nature – and yet you have always tried to fit me to the mould of another girl. You expect sweetness, innocence, naivety. I am none of these things. I am fire and blood. I don’t wish to diminish myself in the shadow of tradition – I will forge my own path, and I want Daemon at my side. It broke my heart, when you sent him away. I am whole again with him.”

“Daughter: you cannot offer him your heart again. You cannot. He has betrayed our trust once. He will do it again.”

And with this, she sees now that he has believed, all this time, that Daemon’s betrayal was the truth of it. Perhaps conveniently timed, given his discomfort, his protectiveness, but he has not sought to divide them by ignoring reality. Rhaenyra goes to him, perches on the end of the Eames. When she reaches for him, he clasps her hands in his own.

“My darling,” he whispers. “Please. I would not see you hurt again.”

“It was Hightower, Father. We were wrong. I beg you, heed me – it’s like a bloody Agatha Christie plot. Otto does not advise you faithfully. He seeks only to further his own interests.”

“Rhaenyra–”

“She speaks the truth, Viserys.”

Alicent, pale and wan, leans feebly on the threshold, where she has apparated like a spectre. She cradles the miniscule bump in her belly tenderly. “I asked him outright at the Ball last night,” she continues. “I’m sorry, Viserys, Rhaenyra. I swear to you that I didn’t know, though I began to suspect after Rhaenyra and I spoke of it. He leaked the deal to upset her position with the company. He grasps for more power.”

Viserys sinks back into the Eames with a haggard gasp. Rhaenyra, overcome by tenderness at the way his face greys and sinks upon itself, stands to fuss about his blankets, smooth his hair. He waves her off.

“Enough, Rhaenyra, I am not an invalid yet. Only processing this new perfidy.”

Alicent wavers in the hall, and Rhaenyra encourages her close by extending her hand. She holds her stepmother (gross, weird) and friend (…better) close, breathing her scent: roses, the ammonia of morning sickness.

“Thank you,” she whispers. Alicent squeezes back. Rhaenyra feels a momentary bite of regret for the division that has festered between them in the years since Alicent’s marriage to her father: seven fucking hells, she thinks, all this happy family nonsense is turning me soft. She finds she doesn’t mind all that much.

“It seems I have done my brother a great disservice,” Viserys murmurs. “Though I cannot make allowances for the fact that he has ignored my commands to let you alone.”

“Be at peace, Father,” Rhaenyra smiles, “I know you will enjoy having him close.”

“I’d rather flay him alive at this moment,” Viserys glowers. “You are still my daughter.”

 “We can take leave if you wish. My intention was not a family reunion, but rather to clear the air,” she replies. “I wish to be allies as we determine how best to manage the Hightower matter.”

“I imagined you’d demand his head on a pike.”

Alicent flinches almost imperceptibly.

“No,” Rhaenyra concedes, “He is family of a sort. I don’t wish to make things…awkward for you and Ali. We will come to a solution that pleases us both.”

Viserys smiles wryly then, considers her as though seeing her for the first time. “My girl, you do yourself proud with this clemency.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“Don’t go just yet,” Viserys says after a pause. “Stay. I wish to…for us to…that is to say, let’s at least do our best to begin forging bonds anew. Go get your un–” He coughs. “Fetch Daemon, will you? I believe the boys have already got the kettle on.”

Chapter Text

Rhaenyra sips on her second double-shot latte of the morning and scrubs her fist across her tired eyes. She stands slouched at the Heathrow pick-up lane in her rumpled lounge set and Chanel cashmere coat, huddled against the dreadful cold. It is disconcerting to be this exhausted at 8am: she drifts, barely present, in the surreal liminal space between travel and home. Though she slept most of the way from Doha, the last few weeks have whittled her down until she is held tenuously together by caffeine, adrenalin, and dry shampoo.

The biting winter wind makes her shiver. She has been spoiled for good weather of late: Australia, deep in a halcyon summer, has been hot, dry, and humid. Each morning she’d woken to the whir of cicadas, the strangled warble of magpies, the maniacal mirth of kookaburras. The smell of baked red earth and eucalypt, the smoke of far-off bushfires. Her skin gone brown from the sun. Stepstones has begun to feel more like it belongs to her: while she is still far from making any real headway with the vineyard, she has begun making connections in Wurundjeri country in her weeks abroad. Builders, tradesmen, viticulturists, vintners. Construction will begin after the holiday season; she expects to begin planting in the depths of winter when the vines are dormant and bare-rooted. The thought fills her with excitement and trepidation both.

Rhaenyra had hardly wanted to leave the Yarra. She had seriously considered a Yuletide in solitude: wine from the subterranean cellar, local cheeses, and the joy of her plans for Stepstones unfurling before her.

But Daemon, sequestered in the London offices after Hightower’s forced retirement, had called her home. 

And, she admits reluctantly, she supposes that she has missed him. Only a little. Just a smidge. Enough that when she’d heard the plea in his smoky voice during their nightly phone call (morning, for him), she’d booked a ticket home there and then. In the mood to toy with him, Rhaenyra has given him a false flight number. He doesn’t expect her for another week. She has not yet decided how to announce her presence: she needs to sleep in a real fucking bed, she thinks, before she decides on the most amusing way to surprise him.

Her phone buzzes, alerting her to her incoming Uber. She waves him down, thanks the driver has he helps her load her bags into the trunk. She drinks in London as they wind through the slate-grey streets. It has not yet snowed, but Rhaenyra is hopeful for a white Christmas at the Keep. How her half-brothers love the snow; her own fondest memories of Yuletide are white ones. Snow angels, mulled wine by the fireside. Syrax frolicking in fresh snowfall. Of course, Christmases past meant that Daemon would have returned from his last sojourn: it feels peculiar that this time it is her who has been ordered home. That she joins him as his…partner? Consort? Girlfriend? Seven fucking hells, not that, she thinks, vaguely revolted at the juvenility of the term. They’ve not applied a label, for there is nothing that seems to fit the precise nature of their…whatever it is.

In truth, these few weeks spent on another continent have given her the space she has needed to turn things over in her mind. She is still somewhat mistrustful of his motives; waits, out of habit, for the trap to spring. If Daemon has been restless, he hasn’t shown it. He has served her dutifully in Hightower’s place, has not started a single argument with the rest of the Board, has not irked her father (well…at least not deliberately). By all accounts, his record of late is impeachable. It simultaneously settles her fears and rouses her suspicions.

Morning traffic makes for a protracted, halting trip home, and Rhaenyra wakes with a start outside the Camden flat without realising that she’s dozed off. She breathes a sigh of relief when she arrives inside: relishes the familiarity of home. She begins to unpack, abandons her efforts halfway though, and instead luxuriates in a long, hot shower. Afterwards, smelling of her favourite coriander seed soap, she slides between her cool sheets, relishing the decadence of being abed mid-morning. The rest can wait – now, sleep.

*

She wakes in the cold murk of evening with a start, at once certain that she is not alone. She disentangles herself from her silken sheets and peers into the gloom, listening hard – she hears not a sound, beyond the susurrus of the bustling street far below. Still…

“Daemon. I know you’re there. Stop lurking about in the dark, you horrid scopophiliac.”

“There’s a good Scrabble word.”

Daemon is a hulking apparition in her doorway. The sight of him leaves her feeling slightly breathless, as it has always done after a long separation. She cannot quite believe that he is there. She flicks on her bedside light so that she can see the curl of his smile. Seven fucking hells, she thinks, just look at him. The firm fit of his dark grey suit, his silk shirt unbuttoned just enough to be indecent for a corporate environment (but, of course, this is how he will have worn it all day, pernicious creature). The gleam of a silver chain at his throat, his pale hair slicked back from his angular face. A face that is, she notes, set in a supremely smug expression. Fucking satyr.

“How did you know I was home?”

He prowls steadily closer. His eyes, faded blue, simmer with a heat that makes her shiver. Gods, she’d almost forgotten the sheer force of his presence, the way his nearness threatens to undo her. She does her best to sound offhand, though she knows he must see how he unravels her.

“I may have bribed the doorman. I thought you might pull something like this, cheeky minx.”

“It’s no fun if you don’t play along.”

“Hm,” he hums, coming to sit on the edge of the bed. “We’ll see. Come here. Let me look at you.”

He reaches to stroke his thumb along the edge of her jaw. Traces her mouth. Trails his fingers along her throat. Her skin prickles with pleasure so acute that it is almost painful. He tugs at her sheets: she has gripped the silk around her like a shield.

“All of you, zaldrīzitsos,” he commands, and the nickname makes her shiver. “You’ve made a beggar of me these last weeks. All I’ve thought about is you.”

Rhaenyra allows him to pull the blankets away and quails against the feeling of defencelessness. His gaze sets her to burning: the way his mouth falls softly open, his eyes flicker along the planes of her body. She grasps desperately for control.

“I’ve barely thought of you at all,” she snips, tilting her chin defiantly. “I’ve been ever so busy.”

“You wound me, dārilaros.”

Daemon sits back, shrugs out of his suit jacket. He undoes another two buttons of his shirt so that she may see the pale musculature of his chest. Fucking hells, can he not, she thinks desperately. He watches her watch him. Laughs under his breath.

 “Poor Daemon.”

“Horrid little tart,” he whispers, looming over her. She smells his cologne, vetiver, flame. “I have some ideas about how I might become more…memorable…to you.”

“Lovely. You’ve got my calendar – let’s book in some time for a pitch. I do hope you’ve added some exciting transitions to your PowerPoint.”

Daemon gives her a filthy look and, without warning, perhaps intent on punishing her impertinence, he bends to take her nipple in his mouth. When she gasps and writhes, he runs a hand up to pin her hips. The other finds her throat. His grip makes her wild: she plunges her hands into his silky moon-pale hair and drags her nails along his scalp. His groan vibrates against her breast. He bites gently, pulls hard, groans again at the sounds she makes in response. When she spreads her legs to twine them around his waist, he slips a long, blunt finger inside of her, gasping when he finds her soaked. Adds another when she keens.

“You fucking liar,” he chokes. “You’ve been thinking about me. Haven’t you? You’ve been thinking about this since the moment you left.”

He begins to fuck her violently with his fingers, slowing each time she comes close to her peak, until she is a senseless, sobbing mess. She claws at him, begging, but he only tightens his hold on her throat, watching her desperation as though bewitched. When she hisses with rage, he draws his fingers away, presses them roughly into her mouth. She resists the urge to sink her teeth into his hand. Flays him with her eyes.

“Behave,” he commands, and Rhaenyra bares her teeth.

“Stop mucking about,” she snaps. “I’m not in the mood to play.”

He releases her throat, pushes her back into the pillows when she tries to rise up on her elbows. He straddles her, sits on her arms to pin her. His weight is suffocating and unbelievably erotic. New kink, her brain chirps unhelpfully, as she watches him reach into his pocket and draw out a length of dark fabric. He shakes it at her, taunting.

“Familiar?”

“You did not bring that stupid fucking tie,” she says in disbelief. But indeed it is – the very same one he wore to the Gala.

Daemon catches her wrists in one hand. She tries to writhe away but he holds her fast, begins to wind the silken fabric in expert knots.

“I did.”

“You pervert.”

“Shh. Don’t be crass.”

He eases his weight off and watches her strain against her bonds. It is no good – she’s held fast. She glowers at him.

“Daemon. Do not.”

But she knows he can see that she wants him to.

“Rhaenyra. Lo ao sagon olvie sȳz, nyke'll tepagon ao skoros ao jaelagon.” He sits back in the mess of her sheets. Unbuckles his belt with agonising slowness. “Relax, little dragon.”

“Oh, fucking bite me, you old rogue.”

He obeys: slides his hand under her ass to cant her hips, sinks his teeth into the meat of her inner thigh until she cries out. Bound as she is, she feels vulnerable, rendered powerless. She hates it. She loves it.

The taste of her seems to undo him: he holds her hips in a punishing grip. Runs an obscene tongue along the seam of her, once, slowly, before he tugs her against his mouth and devours her in shameless earnest. The frantic curl of his tongue sends her wild – she hears sounds from her own mouth that she hasn’t heard before, the delicious, sinful curl of his name, despoiled, wanton things, things that will make her blush, later, when she fantasises about this moment. The vibration of his groans only spurs her on. She grinds against his face so that when he pulls away he is slicked with her, his chin, his mouth. Panting, he takes himself in hand, flips her unceremoniously onto her belly so that she squeaks in indignation and, still fully clothed, he sinks inside her with a single hard thrust.

She quivers around him, gasping into silk, lets loose a volley of the worst curses she knows. He laughs breathlessly.

“Filthy, uncouth little urchin,” he groans, and sets about the task of driving her to the brink of madness. She feels the snap of his belt against her thigh, the stinging grip of his broad hand in her hair. Bound, she is useless as a ragdoll: he manoeuvres her forcefully at his leisure, drives her face into the pillows without mercy, until finally she is driven into ecstasy, falling apart for him with his name in her mouth like a chant. She hears him reply with her own – reverent, adoring – before he sinks into her a last time and shudders violently, burying his forehead in the small of her back.

They collapse and lie in a sweating, winded heap. He drags lazy kisses over her shoulders, gently tugs the tie until the bonds fall away. Rhaenyra rubs her wrists and quirks her brow. Seeks the safe ground of a taunt to steady herself against the tidal swell of her love for him, her desperation for him to belong to her.

“Please tell me,” she says, “that you did not just fuck me with your shoes on.”

“What’s worse – shoes on, or only socks?”

“Seven hells. Socks.”

“Good news for you, then, I’m in my shiniest brogues.”

“Gods, Daemon – are those socks argyle?”

“I missed you,” he smiles, and kisses her tenderly until she melts against him. Don’t leave me, she intones in her mind, don’t leave, please. Please.

“I missed you, too,” she admits. “And I did think about you the entire time.”

“I knew it.”

“Don’t be smug. It’s not comely.”

“Ah.”

“Nor are those socks.”

*

Eventually, they rouse themselves to shower, and he fucks her again under the warm spray, gently, holding her gaze with his own until she comes – once, twice. He whispers her name into her skin. She thinks she feels him mouth the word ‘love’ against the hollow of her throat – knows she is likely fooling herself.  

Later, dried off and cosy in hoodie and tights, Rhaenyra watches him expertly uncork a bottle of wine: a rich, juicy Sangiovese she’d purchased at a cellar door in Victoria. He pours, hands her a glass, hums happily when he sips.

“You have the most exquisite palate,” he tells her. “This is delicious.”

Rhaenyra takes a slow sip: lightness, pop, the taste of summer on her tongue as winter presses on her windowpanes. “Great little number. Very jubey. 2021 was a good year in the Yarra.”

He toasts to her. “To our very own good year in the Yarra, next year.”

Rhaenyra returns the toast, places the glass on the counter. Runs her finger around the lip, contemplative. She fixes her gaze on her fruit bowl, determined to look anywhere but him. Notes that she really should have tossed those lemons before she left for Melbourne. Chides herself for becoming distracted. On with it, she thinks. Fortitude. Forge ahead.  

“So,” she begins shyly. “What now, exactly?”

Hideous question. She wonders how many of his women have asked the same thing – what are we? Where now? When do you disappear?

“I thought we might order in, watch some awful foreign horror film. There’s this new Spanish thing I think you might like.”

Rhaenyra smiles wryly at his charming deflection. “And then?”

“Well – I thought I might stay the night. Take the day off tomorrow. The office has mostly closed down for the season, anyway. Perhaps go see that ridiculous big Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square? You did always love that.”

“Daemon.”

“And after that – well, I’ve yet to get Christmas gifts. I’ve been so terribly wrapped up in all this post-Hightower nonsense that I’ve not organised myself. Perhaps you can help me choose something for Alicent. What does she like? She seems like the sort who’d like a nice new table runner. Or crockery. That sort of nonsense.”

“You know what I mean,” Rhaenyra says.

“Right. Of course. Well – Yuletide is in a week. We’ve not been disinvited to family Christmas, so I assume it’s all right for us to go along together so long as we don’t snog in front of the children. Or at least not too often.”

“Daemon.” Rhaenyra tries to hide her smile – fails, miserably. Daemon’s own lips curl in response.

“Fine, fine. I haven’t New Years plans yet, what do you–”

“I mean, uncle,” she presses, “What now for us?”

“I’m telling you – you’re not listening.”

“Do you know that you’re the biggest pain in the ass? Ever?”

“Page 103 of the Guinness Book, princess. Anyway, as I was saying before you so rudely interrupted – in the New Year, you’re going to need someone to back your proposal to the Board. And after that, you’ll want company in the Yarra, I’m sure. Poisonous reptiles aside, I’ve come to like the place, and I don’t wish to be parted from you for weeks on end. Those fossils on the Board will drive me mad. I’d best come with you else I’m sure to misbehave.”

“You,” Rhaenyra laughs, “Are avoiding my question.”

Daemon puts his wine glass down and comes around the bench to gather her face in his palms. He kisses the corners of her face: her brow, her nose, her chin.

“No, I’m not,” he promises, “I’m answering your question. What now? Whatever we wish. You are mine, and I am yours. What now? Only the future, little dragon. Does this please you?”

Rhaenyra laughs. Finds she believes him – or at least, most of her does. Perhaps that is enough for now. “Yes, Daemon,” she replies. “I suppose it does.”

He rests his forehead against hers, traces a shape on her palm. “Now, the more important question – Rossopomodoro or Il Sugo?”

“You’re insufferable.”

“You,” he declares, “are adored.”

And in the simplicity of their evening in, the easy delight of his company, Rhaenyra finds that at last she can relax her guard, if only by a little. She will endure whatever else is to come – for now, she curls against him, watches in wonder as the first snowflakes of the season gleam under the haze of Camden Town streetlamps.