He saw you first when he was twelve.

Before blood ever dried beneath his fingernails, before the flay knife fit properly in his hand, before he knew the exact sound a ribcage made when it cracked open—he saw you. Just a servant then. Barefoot in the snow. His half-sibling. One of Lord Bolton’s many spills. But quiet. So dreadfully quiet. The kind of quiet that drew him like rot drew flies.

Everyone feared him, even then. Not because he had yet earned it, but because cruelty poured from him like heat from a flame. Fear was the only wine a Bolton needed... that, and women. Women by the handfuls. His first, at thirteen, was a peasant girl half-starved and shaking. She bit him when he forced her, carved a jagged line across his cheek with a splintered hairpin.

He still touches that scar when he thinks of her.

He liked when they fought. Their resistance thrilled him—every kick, every scream, a kind of desperate hymn. Reminders of how frail he still was… and how much stronger he was becoming. He loved Myranda because she never cowered. She could flay a woman alive and kiss his neck with the same bloodied mouth. But even she was just a flicker next to the slow-burning obsession that was you.

You were never his. And so, you became everything.

You never met his eyes. You bowed…. retreated. Always retreating. He found that intoxicating. Your silence was not submission—it was defiance draped in self-preservation. You reminded him of the snow outside: blank, pale, untouchable. He was determined to leave footprints in you. So he staged things.

He made sure you were there when he took women. When he broke them. Sometimes real, sometimes for show. His chambers unlocked, his cries exaggerated, their pleas timed just so. “Run the bath,” he’d murmur to you, while Myranda’s knife pierced flesh of some other girl. “Fetch my salve,” while blood congealed on the floor. “Toss that one to the hounds. Not the head. I want the dogs to work for it.”

But his favorite request… was when he asked you to heal him.

Every wound was a conversation. Every bruise you touched, a page he turned. He’d wince when you pressed too hard, sometimes on purpose, and he’d murmur, “Careful…” like a lover might. He imagined you nailed in place, over his table of knives—not dead, not even screaming. Just his. Preserved in some sacred stillness, forever watching.

Today, you tend an arrow wound. One of the forest girls got brave—ripped it from her own thigh and stabbed him with it. You hate him. You hate Dreadfort. Hate the iron tang of blood and the sour stench of meat rotting beneath stone. So you've been playing a slow game—slipping powders into the bandages. Roots that sting. Herbs that swell. Not enough to kill him—just enough to remind him he can bleed.

You think he hasn’t noticed.

But he has.

Two nights ago, he saw you under the bed in the servants quarters, grinding something into paste. Your back was to the door, your fingers stained with dirt and bitter root. He stood in the doorway a full minute. Breathing. Watching. Wanting.

He could have dragged you out by the hair. Slammed you into the wall. Opened you like the others. He should have. But cruelty… cruelty requires restraint. So instead, he waited.

Now, as you press a cloth to the wound, your hands shaking just slightly, he speaks low, voice like velvet dragged across broken glass. “She had a tongue like poison, that girl. Cursed me, even as she bled.”

A slow grin.

“I let Myranda have her. Thought it would be a kindness. But she didn’t die from the bleeding.” He sighs.

You don’t speak. You never do. He watches your hands—how they linger just a breath too long on the gauze. How your jaw clenches when he inhales sharply, milking your guilt for his pleasure. Then—quietly—he places a hand over yours, stopping your movements.

“I know what you’re doing.”

The silence between you stretches. Snaps.

“I saw the powders,” he murmurs, almost gently. “Crushed beneath your bunk. Slipped into my dressings. You’ve been trying to make me suffer.”

The hounds bark.