The Red Keep was hushed, but not still. Its walls held whispers, its windows trapped the last fevered embers of the Dance. Victory had come to the Greens, but the air was not victory’s—it was taut, expectant, heavy with the weight of unfinished hungers.

Aemond Targaryen stood at the gallery’s edge, his tall frame poised with the cold elegance of a blade too finely honed to rest. Black tunic fitted like armor, silver hair spilling in perfect order across his shoulder, the sapphire in his ruined eye socket caught the torchlight and made him look carved from myth. Yet it was not war he studied tonight.

It was you.

You walked beneath him in the courtyard, steps quiet against stone, your loose gown whispering as it brushed your ankles. You moved without spectacle, without trying to command attention—and that was what ensnared him. No courtly affectations, no feigned graces, only the blunt geometry of your form, the soft defiance of a woman who carried her dead mother’s scarf like a sigil. You were not dazzling. You were not delicate. You were… other. And Aemond felt it like a splinter lodged under the nail.

She does not try to be seen—and so I cannot look away.

Your height dwarfed nearly every courtier, your olive skin kissed by sea-winds, your pale grey eyes flat as a winter sky. To others, perhaps unsettling. To him? Perfect. Because your unyielding presence gnawed at him like hunger.

He followed the tilt of your head as you glanced at the gardens, at the Keep’s spires, never once sparing him a look though he knew—knew—you must feel him watching. His hands curled behind his back, restraint as natural to him as breath.

Two weeks, he thought, a pulse of dark satisfaction tightening his chest. Two weeks, and you will stand before the Sept as mine. Betrothed, bound, wedded. And yet even now, even before vows or witness, I know—she is already mine. Does she not feel it? The chain coiling invisible around her throat?

He replayed every detail of your arrival—how you dismounted with blunt practicality instead of grace, how you ignored the simpering lords to ask after the stables, how you had brushed aside a hound that leapt near you with clear distaste. He savored the memory as a miser savors coin.

She dislikes dogs. Good. Then she will not shy from the dragon who claims her instead.

Your intelligence fascinated him most. He had listened, unseen, as you corrected a steward’s figures with crisp efficiency, as you spoke of maintenance, administration, vision. He had watched the way you built order from chaos, with no need for swords or fire. And gods, how it burned him.

She commands without trying. She governs without crown. What will she do when she rules me, without ever meaning to?

He inhaled, slow, deliberate, the silk of control wrapping tighter around the storm inside. He would not rush. He would not mar this sacred torment with haste. No—Aemond One-Eye knew patience better than any man alive.

He would haunt your steps. He would breathe your air. He would become a shadow stitched so tightly to your days that when you finally lifted those pale eyes to him, you would not look away. Not out of fear. Not out of duty. But because you could not.

I will make her see. I will make her ache. And when she kneels, not from command, but from hunger, I will know—this is not conquest. This is eternity.

High above, his lips curved faintly, a predator’s almost-smile.

In the courtyard, you paused, head tilting slightly, as though a shiver had passed over you. You frowned, scanning the darkness.

And though you did not see him, Aemond’s heart surged with triumph.

Because your unease was proof of his presence. Proof that already, already—

You belonged to him.