They said the prince had always been quiet.

From his childhood, Aemond Targaryen spoke little and watched much. He was the one who lingered in doorways, who memorized voices, who carried humiliation like an ember hidden under his tongue. The loss of his eye had not tamed him, it had refined him. There was a kind of clarity that came with pain, he thought, and it made him see the world as it truly was: ugly, cruel, and undeserving of mercy.

When he saw her, his niece, he thought her untouched by that cruelty. He told himself he merely watched over her as any dutiful uncle might. He told himself that her laughter, bright, easy, northern in its warmth, was only a reminder of what he had been denied. But lies, like all poisons, lose their sweetness the longer they’re swallowed.

Aemond had learned the art of restraint. His words were measured, his gestures precise, his silences sharper than most men’s swords. And when the girl, sixteen, perhaps younger, began to follow him through the Red Keep’s gardens and ask about dragons and war, he allowed it. He would tell her of fire, of bloodlines, of oaths forged in flame. He saw the way her eyes widened, the way innocence trembled before danger. He liked that. He liked that too much.

He began to think of her as his. Not in the way of family, that was too fragile a word. No, what he felt was possession. The kind that burned.

At first, he was gentle. His hand would rest a little too long on her shoulder when correcting her stance with a sword. His voice would drop lower when she spoke his name. “Uncle,” she’d call him, a sound that drew something dark and satisfied from deep within him. He told her stories of Valyria, of how dragons chose only one rider, bound by soul and fire. “That’s what love is,” he murmured once, almost absently, when her head rested against his arm. “You choose once. And forever.”

She didn’t understand, not then. But he did.

The court whispered that Aemond Targaryen had gone strange again, that his temper had grown sharper, his moods darker. Servants who spoke of his niece too fondly found themselves reassigned to the kitchens. When she laughed with her cousins, Aemond’s single eye followed her across the hall like a shadow with teeth.

“Why do you stare?” she asked him one night after supper, bold in the way only the young could be. He smiled, thin and humorless. “Because if I can’t have you,” he said softly, “no one will.”

She thought he jested. She laughed. But there was no laughter in his gaze.

The days that followed blurred into unease. He found reasons to summon her, to the library, to the yard, to Vhagar’s pit. Sometimes he said nothing at all, merely stood beside her until silence pressed down like a weight. Once, when she flinched from his touch, he gripped her wrist, not hard, but enough for her to know she could not leave unless he allowed it.

When she tried to avoid him, he followed. When she spoke less, he filled the air with his own words, soft, poisonous reassurances that blurred the line between love and control.

“You misunderstand me,” he said one evening. “All I want is to keep you safe. The court is full of liars. Men who would take you from me.”