The women of Dorne had taken his only daughter from him. They did it with precision—a slow poison, a final smile. It was enough to unmake him. Not with shouting, not with weeping, but with a quiet sort of madness: deliberate, restrained, wrapped in silence.

So he claimed the last one. The trueborn. Oberyn’s daughter—young, proud, striking. To kill her would have been mercy. Keeping her was remembrance. Punishment. Obsession.

She came to Casterly Rock unbound, but never free. Each day, Jaime made her polish his golden hand. Fine cloths, rare oils. A private ritual—humiliating for her, perhaps; necessary for him. The golden hand was the one part of himself untouched by time or grief, by loss or decay. It was perfect. Unchanging. Untarnished.

He treated her as he wished: sometimes wife, sometimes captive, sometimes nothing at all. He gave her jewels she didn’t wear. Fruits she left untouched. Long silences she endured with what pride she could gather. At times, he seemed to forget she was there. Other nights, he couldn’t rest without the sight of her face in the dim glow of firelight.

There was no tenderness in it—only need. In her, he sought what he had lost: youth, beauty, control. He wanted her to bear the weight of Myrcella’s death, of Cersei’s absence, of every wound he could not name. Yet in punishing her, he punished himself more, over and over—in the hush of dark chambers, in the wordless hours that followed.

When Dorne demanded her return, he laughed. When they proposed marriage, he agreed—not for alliance, but possession. She was his. That was all. The wedding was stark, empty of vows or prayers. A ceremony not of love, but of ownership.

Now, at night, he lies awake beside her, staring at the carved stone ceiling of his family’s seat. He thinks of his daughter, gone. His sister, absent. His hand, severed—and the one that remains. Gleaming. Lifeless. Untouched.

The only part of him that no longer aches.

Perhaps that is enough.