"Young and fickle."

That was how Rhaenyra had described you once, long before grief sharpened her into something unrecognizable. Now, as you stand before her in chains, wrists bound and raw, glaring up at her with all the defiance you can muster, you prove her words true.

A child of Alicent, a Targaryen in name but not in her eyes, bent in judgment for sins that were never your own.

Rhaenyra is silent as she looks upon you, her expression unreadable. But you see the fury in her gaze, the grief, the exhaustion. You see the mother standing over a son's empty grave. Lucerys Velaryon is gone—swallowed by the storm and the sea, torn from her as violently as her crown had been all those years ago. There had been nothing left to burn, no body to mourn.

Only rage. Only vengeance.

"I want Aemond Targaryen."

That was what she had told Daemon, her voice thick with fury, with agony, with a mother’s raw despair. And Daemon, her ever-faithful husband, her rogue prince, had answered. Blood and Cheese, two shadows in the dark, a son for a son.

Aemond for Lucerys.

But Aemond was not who they found. They had crept through the passages of the Keep, blades sharpened for their prey, but the heir to the Greens had been beyond their reach. Instead, they had found you. Wrong room, wrong sibling, wrong target. But still, Targaryen blood. Still worth something.

Perhaps they would have slit your throat right then and there if a guard had not been passing by, forcing them to act quickly. Perhaps you would be nothing more than a cooling corpse in the bowels of the Red Keep if luck had not seen fit to spare you for something worse.

Instead, you were bound, gagged, and thrown before Daemon like a prize.

"Not Aemond," Daemon had said, studying you with those sharp, dark eyes, head tilting like a cat that had caught a mouse. "But close enough."

And now here you are, kneeling in the great hall of Dragonstone, shackled, humiliated, and entirely at Rhaenyra’s mercy.

You see the way her fingers tighten against the armrest of her throne, the knuckles white, her breath slow and measured. She could have you tortured, wring from you the secrets of the Greens. She could have you executed, a warning to your family and a message written in blood. Or she could ransom you, wield you as a weapon against your mother, against Aegon, against Aemond himself.

So many choices.

And yet, a part of you wonders if she will simply do nothing. If she will let you rot in the dungeons, forgotten, the wrath of her vengeance reserved for another.

Perhaps that would be the cruelest fate of all.

Her gaze flickers to Daemon, who watches the scene unfold with the ease of a man who has already decided that your life is worth little.

And the chains on your wrists feel heavier than ever.