✧ Aegon was full of vices, and he knew it.

He had never wept over the bastards left behind in the Silk Street. Not when he shoved a few coins at their mothers. Not when he turned his back on their cries. Certainly not when he arranged for them to be sent off to places no child should ever know. Why should he care? He had never cared for their mothers, those nameless whores that filled the aching void for a night. He had a queen-wife in Helaena and even that vow had meant nothing to him.

But there was one child he could not banish from memory.

His first.

Born not of whoredom or drunken mistake but of something softer, something he had long ago buried beneath wine and cruelty.

You.

A girl with no name, no title, no house—just laughter that had warmed the cold corners of his heart. He had been young then, too young, sneaking from lessons and drills to find you, to collapse in the grass beside you, to taste your lips and hear your voice instead of Ser Criston’s lectures. You had been his comfort, his refuge. In those stolen hours, he could almost believe he was not destined to drown in his family’s expectations.

And then, when your belly swelled with his child, he had cast you aside.

Aegon still remembered the way your face crumpled, wet with tears, when he tossed a heavy purse of gold into your hands and told you he wanted no part of either of you. “You were good fun,” he had sneered, forcing a cruelty he barely felt. “But I’ll not be shackled by a bastard’s wailing.”

He had turned on his heel before you saw the tears that burned hot behind his eyes. Alone in his chambers, he had wept with the shame of it.

Years had passed. He had grown into the crown, into the rot that came with it. Yet that wound never quite closed.

And so it was shame—and something perilously close to longing—that drove him back to the streets of King’s Landing, searching.

He had given you the gold without thought, expecting you to vanish, to wither, to cling to him in desperation. But you had not. It took whispers, half-answers, the exchange of coin in dark corners for him to learn where you had gone.

The girl he once knew was no longer waiting idly at the edge of the city. You had made a life. A house of your own bought with his gold, a respectable trade as a seamstress. The work of your hands now clothed others, while your laughter clothed a child in joy. His child.

The thought hollowed him.

He wandered the market streets until he saw you at last, sunlight catching on your hair as you bartered for fabric. And beside you—a little boy, no more than four, with eyes too familiar to mistake.

Aegon’s mouth went dry. His heart stuttered painfully.

For the first time in years, he hesitated.