Archive of Our Own

It is a Targaryen tradition for the women, for the omegas, for every first heat.

A retreat to a secluded, undisclosed safekeep. It is discretion that keeps Syrax tended to back at home, in Rhaenyra’s absence. A dragon is too conspicuous by any standard, but especially now. As she is just coming of age, Rhaenyra’s first heat is a matter of gossip and anticipated by a great number of Houses, a signal for all those seeking to align themselves with Visery’s declared heir, a stone’s throw away from a seat near the Iron Throne, close enough to grasp within one outstretched arm. All the more reason for secrecy.

Hayford Castle isn’t considered a great beauty. Small and deary. Serviceable, but fortified. It rests only a day’s ride from King’s Landing. The walls are decorated with the family’s ugly crest, a green fretty over gold, a pale green wave cascading down. The Hayfords are only all too eager to host a Targaryen, and even if they’re of the lesser families, her father entrusts her safety now even in the absence of the Lord at the Keep. The castellan is an elderly man, perhaps seen seven or eight decades pass, but he is known for his prudence.

So, of course, despite all the discretion, despite all the secrecy, despite all the confidences of the Great House of Targaryen, Rhaenyra is only dimly surprised when two days into her retreat, still days away from her first expected heat, Hayford’s bannermen announce that battle has broken out along the nearby riverfront between two unknown warring factions, the only evidence the remnants of a burnt pile of bones piled six feet high like a mound of blooming conquests.

An unexpected development, and Rhaenyra does not believe in coincidences.

“It’ll come slowly, the first time. So gradually you may not know the heat is upon you until you’re stricken by it.”

She’s been told many things, afforded many lectures on preparation. The dresses given to her to wear – without a drip of self-awareness or irony – are all varying shades of white silky material or soft satins, more of slips, really. It is said to help soothe the skin, sensitive as it will become in her heat. She’s been made aware of the upcoming feverish symptoms, the expected frustration, the – obvious arousal. She runs through her selections and decides in the meantime to wear a coat style favored by the men.

She is fashioning her belt closed when the door opens, her guards at the ready to dispatch any uninvited visitors. But it is only the castellan, along with two of his men. The castellan is so old now, he’s shrunk almost two inches since the last time Rhaenyra had visited Hayford Castle several years ago.

“Princess,” he greets, only briefly alarmed by her guard’s ready hand at the hilts of their swords.

“At ease,” she instructs her overeager men, repressing a sigh.

As the men fall back, she bemoans the absence of Ser Cole; not since she was a ten and four years old has she had such inexperienced soldiers surrounding her, but the circumstances require betas. All annoyingly untested in any battle. But Cole’s Alpha presence had been immediately expelled when Rhaenyra first started exhibiting the signs of pre-heat.

“Forgive the interruption,” the castellan beseeches, bowing his head.

“No need for apology,” Rhaenyra replies, graciously. “The only thing you’ve interrupted is my unerring boredom.”

“We must insist that you retreat further into the Keep, behind the most fortified walls. You will not be afforded as much space, nor sunlight. But it is a better place to defend.”

Rhaenyra pauses. She’s already started nesting, but it’s been a fruitless endeavor anyway. Not the right material, absent the correct smell, completely void of any sense of pride. It doesn’t matter much, anyway. She’ll be on her own during her heat.

“Have you identified the threat?” she asks.

A heavy stretch of silence. “There’s been sightings. A dragon, Princess.”

Another unexpected development, but now there’s a pattern unfolding. “What did the dragon look like?”

The castellan frowns. “It looked as all dragons do, Your Highness.”

Before she can clarify, one of his men beside him steps up. “Huge but lean.”

The man is young, green, and dripping with eagerness. Smelling rampantly of a noxious Alpha pheromone even from half a room away. Rhaenyra tries not to wrinkle her nose.

“The color?” she prompts.

“It was – I believe it had some red, Princess.”

Caraxes, she realizes.

Daemon’s dragon.

“We need to move you immediately,” one of the young men speaks.

A pause.

“Yes,” Rhaenyra permits. “Of course.”

She has not seen her uncle in a little over three years.

She has heard plenty of his exploits, however. Everyone has. There is not a corner in any of the Seven Kingdoms that has not heard of the headstrong and cocksure younger brother of the King, a man equal parts charming and dangerous. Half the rumors about him are as outrageous as they are gruesome, but Rhaenyra tends to believe the gruesome ones more. She remembers her uncle’s calloused hands well, his arms coiled with sinewy muscles, his body strife with wounds of war. Most of all, she remembers her uncle’s teachings – more often ending with a tale of bloodshed more than anything of valor.

It’s this reason, of course, that even rumors of sightings of her family’s seal, even the brother of the King himself, garners raised alarms. A sensible man would not seek out unnecessary conflict so close to King’s Landing, but her uncle has always been capricious and too daring for his own good. Even after years in an exile that is half his own stubbornness, Daemon should know better than to come so close to her father’s reach without express invitation.

Yet, despite all that – despite the fact that the last time she saw her uncle was his retreating form through a battalion of his men, her hands clasped around her dead brother’s egg – she finds herself conflicted. Had this occurred years ago, she would have qualified the feeling as only the soft flutterings of youthful hope, but a few years has taught Rhaenyra a great many things. She should be weary of her uncle, perhaps more than she should be weary of any other man save her little brother. But Aegon is merely two years of age, hardly a threat. Fewer men have as much to gain from her head on a spike as her uncle. And she knows more about the world, about politics, than she did when she’d been crowned the heir. She should fear her uncle.

And somehow, despite all that, she does not.

She has missed Daemon.

The only true feeling she feels at the thought of a reunion is a spark of joy, and something else – something she has no inkling of yet, untested as she is as an omega. But it is there, resting just astride her beating heart, a call for something out there yet unanswered.

So, when her uncle finally makes his re-entry into her life, it is with all the pomp and circumstance expected; all signs point to her heat beginning within two nights, three at the most, and her security detail has strict orders not to let anyone through. But it is midday when she hears his dragon roar over the castle, and she remembers Caraxes as a lean animal, far trimmer than her own beloved Syrax. The ferocity of Caraxes is unmistakable, however. He has always been an aggressive animal, twice as hungry as any other dragon Rhaenyra has ever known. His roar is shriller than Syrax’s, despite how slim he is.

Her room is rather small, sparsely decorated. She’s already taken to lining her bed with a handful of furs and a few sheets of velvet and silks. It is soft and warm, but she cannot stand the isolation. Feels herself start to fidget, uncharacteristically, even surrounded by her favorite books of theory. It’s the stale air, she thinks, a musky unpleasant odor. The thick walls trap it in because the safest place in the Keep has no windows, and only one door.

But it is not thick enough, apparently, to keep out the sounds of a scuffle in the single hallway leading to her room.

“Relax, men,” she hears his voice, clear and true, a hint of a threat buried beneath humor. “Don’t you recognize your prince?”

There are at least two guards set outside her room, saying nothing of the other four that Daemon needed to overmatch to arrive this far. Rhaenyra is more entertained than resigned when she presses open the large handle to her door. She expects her uncle’s familiar smirk on the other end of the door, greeting the inhospitable welcome with his customary pride, and she’s half at the ready to send out a diverted reprimand against him.

But when he strides through the doorway as if he has every right to entry, the first thing that assaults her is the sense of an earthy and resinous summer day, the height of extreme luxurious heat.

It’s a spicy Alpha scent that nearly brings Rhaenyra to her knees.

It’s – shocking, how overwhelming it feels in a mere instance. Even if she hadn’t been achingly familiar with Daemon’s scent, she has been surrounded by Alphas all her life, from her father to his small counsel to the guards that protect her to the Lords that all snipe behind her back. It has never, ever been like this. The only thing she can do is brace herself, knees locked underneath her, trying not to breathe through her nose.

But even so, she does not miss the moment Daemon catches her scent either, a sharp pause in his footsteps, his nostrils flaring in delight, just like he gets before battle or a particularly stimulating joust.

“Hello, little one,” he greets, idly. “I had to teach your guards a few lessons in manners.”

Behind Daemon, her men are slow to get to their feet. They’re alive, which is something, but one sports a smashed nose and a face covered in blood, and the other may very well have a dislocated shoulder by the way it hangs awkwardly at his side. She does not bother with more than a glance before turning her gaze back to her uncle.

His hair has grown a little longer since they last saw each other. There’s a wayward lock falling over his forehead, and Rhaenyra is overcome with the instinct to brush it back. “They recognize you well enough, Uncle,” Rhaenyra remarks, after a stint of recovery. “They’ve been ordered to fend off any and all from coming within sixty paces of me.”

“Why?” her uncle has the audacity to muse, as if he does not know. A reproduction of something similar to a smile graces his lips, but Rhaenyra can read something else unspoken; a tension, a stiffness, beneath the amusement. “Should I fear you have something contagious?”

A glance to her guards, a decisive nod meant to dismiss them.

They hesitate, and then immediately protest. “Princess, we cannot leave you—”

Pride rankles like a fresh wound. “I am still well within my full faculties and my full rights. You’ll obey me as your sovereignty.”

Beside her, Daemon does not attempt to hide his smirk as her guards exchange confused looks, unsure about the weight of her command or perhaps the likelihood of overcoming her uncle should they choose to ignore it. Eventually, dullard beta guards that they are, they collect their fallen shields on the floor and stand at attention in the hallway. Daemon closes the door on them with a resounding thud.

He's covered in a layer of ash and a splatter of blood. Only some of it, Rhaenyra thinks, is his own.

“Who were you fighting?”

“Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. My men were attacked at the river front by a group of nomads. I doled out the reprisals. Now the Hayfords owe me a favor for clearing the rabble off their lands.”

“Did you kill for your men or to secure a favor from the Hayfords?”

He lifts an eyebrow. “A killing can serve two purposes.”

She has no response to that.

“Did you miss me?” he asks, and she’d think it somewhat teasing, but underneath all that humor is a hidden softness he has only ever used with her.

No point in lying. “You know I did.”

“Not half as much as I did you, little one.”

If it were any other man, she’d think it flattery. But her uncle is not prone to lying. One might call him habitually brutally honest, even.

“Excellent,” he muses, spotting her abandoned dinner at the side. Meat and potatoes, hearty meals with triple her usual portions because of the upcoming heat. “They’ve already brought dinner.”

Instead of immediately sitting, he moves to the side, behind the table, taking off his coat, flinging it across the back of his chair so absentmindedly that it kicks up a puff of dust and ash. The next moment, he’s rolling his sleeves up to his elbows, showing off impressive forearms and a small wound to his right wrist, the edges of something that looks like a dagger’s cut; his veins stand out in prominence against the fair pallor of his skin. He finally sits down at the small table, and she has little choice but to join him.

She finds herself surveying his face and relieved to find it more or less unchanged since the last time she saw him. It’s been years of hard, brutal war. Her uncle’s exploits have been renowned for their violence, but you could not see the toll of it written on his face, even beneath all that blood, ash, and dirt.

“You look well,” he remarks, eyes casting towards her face, before falling briefly to her body.

“Skoros issi ao doing kesīr, Uncle?”

“Caraxes jorrāelatan iā pryjagon,” he comments, idly, cutting into her steak. “Bisa iksin va.”

She almost snorts. Claiming that the reason he was here was because his dragon needed rest after days of riding was as fictitious as a bedtime story. Rhaenyra would hardly call the Hayfords friendly to someone like Daemon. The Targaryen crown itself, yes. But Daemon has been flirting closer and closer to treason and mutiny with each passing month.

But she becomes momentarily distracted, catching another wayward sniff. Beyond the profile of his Alpha scent, she now realizes he also reeks of someone else, scents of blood and other men’s bodily fluid comingled with his. Subtle hints, but it’s – unpleasant.

“Ao yknagon,” she comments, before she can stop herself.

He pauses, his knife cut clean through a tender juicy bit of bloody steak. “Gaomagon nyke? Se skorkydoso gaomagon nyke yknagon?”

The question hangs fraught in the air, their eyes locked. She cannot believe she just acknowledged his scent to him, what inhibition propelled her to do so, but his heated response, the demand that she tell him how he smelled – Rhaenyra is the first to look away.

“Like bodily fluids,” she retorts, and hopes the blush crawling across her cheeks is not as obvious as she thinks. She switches back to the Common Language because she’s always felt more exposed, more intimate, while speaking Old Valyrian with her uncle. “You need a bath.”

The only true luxury of the room, aside of the large bed nestled with her furs and silks, is the large mason tub in the opposite corner, carved out of stone and granite. It is already filled with heated water, connected by a lever and a row of large round river boulders set into a roaring fire. The fire-roasted stones are arranged into a cordoned section of the tub, where it ensures Rhaenyra will have a constant source of heat and water. Targaryans like to be as warm as a dragon’s egg when in heat, or so she’s been told. She has half a mind to waste the first tub of clean water on Daemon, just to wash the filth off him.

His eyes drift towards the tub, reading her mind. “Perhaps later,” he comments, teasing.

But again, it feels like his words are loaded with so much more than just a simple tease.

“What are you doing here, Uncle?” she asks, again.

This time, he turns serious. Studying her under the dim illumination of the fireplace, their profiles cast in sharp contrast against the light, flinging the relief of their shadows against the opposite stone wall. He is still handsome, despite all the filth.

“I wanted to see you,” he tells her, and it’s perhaps truth enough, but not the whole truth.

“It’s been years.” The timing is suspect.

“The long years have given me all the more reason for my nostalgia. Am I not allowed to miss the favorite among my family?”

This time, she does snort. “I am no one’s favorite.”

But he locks eyes with her. “You are mine.”

There is a stilted breath held in, where Rhaenyra wants nothing more than to probe the vercity of that statement to its full extent. There’s a brief expression that flitters across his face, but she cannot describe it. The way he sits across from her, it’s as if his gaze is coolly challenging her to probe away.

Seven hells, this is ridiculous.

But then he continues, breaking eye-contact, idly chomping away at her steak. “You are moments away from being usurped by a two-year old child,” he comments, and she flinches. “At least when it happened to me, I had the security of knowing you would make a good Queen. But you know how your father thinks. We both do. A painful idiot at times, especially when it came to you.”

Rhaenyra doesn’t say anything. The Lords have been scheming for far too long, ever since her best friend had been planted in her father’s marital bed. The efforts to supplant Rhaenyra with a male toddler are well under way, and she doesn’t need her uncle to point out the obvious. It still stings. Abrades like an open wound. She has never once demonstrated anything less than exceptional diplomacy and strategy; talents, even, that Otto Hightower has been forced to acknowledge from time to time. And still, the kingdoms favor a male heir who can only slobber over his own fists.

She stares at Daemon. Years have gone by. More than three since his army had ridden out of King’s Landing, into forbidden territory and annexed such lands within two weeks of battle, starting several long rebellious wars. Impulsive and rash as he is, he’s plunged the land into small fits of anarchy with his great ambitions. Years gone by, and he comes to her now on the eve of her own ruin. As soon as her heat is passed, her father will likely trade her away to one House or another, of age now and ripe for the picking. For the trading, to be sold off like chattel to the highest bidder.

And what did it really matter? The writing is clear. She is already playing house among ruins. Aegon will reign. He will be named as the true heir, and she will be cast aside as a pretty older sister. Bedded and bred.

“It’s not right,” Daemon only offers, into the stinging silence.

“Have you come here only to tender pointless sympathies?” she asks, tartly. “I hardly have to tell you this isn’t an appropriate time for me to be entertaining visitors and obvious gossip.”

He adopts his faux innocence around a mouthful of bloody meat. “It isn’t?”

She narrows her eyes. “You know fully well why I’m sequestered here, locked under guard and key.”

“Ah, yes.” He wipes his mouth on a scratch of a napkin, tossing it back onto the table with a flourish of displeasure. “The old tradition of hiding away any maiden during her first heat. A barbaric tradition. As if there is anything ashamed in an omega’s first fucking.”

The words color her cheeks. “I ask a third and final time, Uncle. What are you doing here?”

Daemon holds her gaze, steady and true, for a familiarly long beat. “You know why I’m here, Rhaenyra.”

She tries to push down the jolt of emotions, a feeling too much like anxiety, panic, eagerness, and anger all packed into a storm. Her head swirls with the obvious possibility and it is too dangerous. Her uncle has never been the type of man to mince words or hesitate in the pursuit of what he wants; it’s just the first time he’s ever overtly acknowledged that Rhaenyra is what or who he wants. Whether or not they are uncle and niece, whether there are conflicted lines of succession or not, whether his Alpha scent sings to her like no other, this is an incredibly reckless thing to propose. Because that’s what this would be, in effect. A proposal. She is not yet locked enough in the spiral of her heat to overlook the significance of that.

“This is –” she pauses, unable to tender a word strong enough. “Foolish.”

“Is it? I rather thought it inspired.”

“It must be tiring to constantly plot against your own brother. I am not your ticket to the Iron Throne.”

“Is that why you think I’m here?” He reaches across, covers her hand with his own larger palm. She cannot control the shiver across her exposed skin, under the warmth of his fingers as he brushes the digits lightly across. Barely there contact, almost like a phantom touch. She hates to admit it, but it’s effective in rendering her mute. “If so, send me away. Say a single word commanding me to leave, and I’ll go.”

Her throat is closed off, tongue heavy in her mouth.

She has, since she was perhaps too young to understand such things, wanted this. Wanted him. The old Targaryen traditions, the precedent for sisters, brothers, uncles, and aunts marrying and having children in their closely-bred royal line, it has always been permissible. But Rhaenyra has always been cautious by nature, too aware that her blood, her heat, her mating – it holds more significance than others.

“You want the throne,” she accuses.

He lifts an eyebrow. “A union can serve two purposes.” Words, echoing earlier wisdom about killings. At least he doesn’t deny his ambitions. “It should not come as a great shock to you that I want you.”

She has never been a naïve girl. She’s noticed the pattern, the coincidences in timing whenever her uncle would visit, always primed best to spend the most time with Rhaenyra. Touches that linger, charged looks exchanged between niece and uncle, the urge to connect crawling up her spine to take permanent residence underneath her skin, craving his comforting presence beside her. They’ve always been close, but since she last saw him at ten and five years, she cannot deny she has missed their kismet relationship, a relation she has not ever been able to properly name or fully describe.

Her skin still tingles with awareness whenever he is around, though whatever joy dwelled within her stifled a bit when he renounced her father’s decision to name her as the heir.

She understands Daemon’s frustration, of course. She can now keenly empathize with the shame of being overlooked in favor of a younger heir.

All this, in short, forces her to square up to meet his gaze, straighten her spine, even as her cheeks stay heated and blushed. “Convenient that my heat,” she tells him, “can get you both the girl you want and the throne. Is that your plan? Bed me during my heat? Claim me? As you are frequently reminded, you’re already married, Uncle.”

A slam of his fist against the tabletop, rocking the legs. “To a bronze bitch not of my choosing. I have never bitten anyone, never taken a mate in the old Targaryen customs. You are who I choose.”

In her experience, she’s learned to be wary of men promising things too good to be true. “My father will see through this ploy.”

“Your father is a fool. You’re old enough to have seen it for yourself. Wavering when he should strike, cautious where he should advance. You are wiser than him by magnitudes. And this—” he knocks the table aside between them, yanking her closer to him, propelling her to stand while he rises himself, to his full height, looming over her. “You cannot deny this. I smell, do I? Tell me, my dear niece, what do I smell like to you?”

A rising swell of his scent as he invades her space, his breath fanning across her cheeks.

Power. Obsession. Lust.

Alpha.

“Shall I tell you what you smell like to me?” he taunts, leaning forward, into the orbit of her world, eclipsing all else. “I can smell your slick from here. Still days away from your heat, and yet you still smell like I would find only the sweetest nectars of the Seven Kingdoms just between your parted thighs.”

To her everlasting horror, underneath all that embellishment, he is only pointing out the loud shameful truth. She can feel the gathering slickness between her thighs, pooling because of his diminishing proximity. He shifts inches closer, tugging her head back by her thick white braid – and she lets him. Exposing the long line of her throat and her mating gland. Resting slightly swollen now, the gland ready to bloom under her impending heat. Too close, but not yet ripe.

She has always found it comforting how tall he is, how easily he crowds her, but now she finds it unbalancing her delicate equilibrium.

And Daemon, too, is not unaffected. He takes a deep inhale in, groaning at the scent that must flood his mouth. Upsetting his natural steadiness as he upends hers, putting them both off-kilter like he’s tugging at her strings and she’s just a dancing puppet. Despite herself, she suppresses a shiver and finds her head tilting up, towards him, exposing herself even more.

But she is a pure-blood Targaryen born Princess.

Unprecedented, the first of her kind, a female omega cited as the heir to the Throne. She’s spent her entire life refusing to bow to any Alpha, to expose her neck, to fling herself at their feet.

She yanks herself free. “You are too obvious, Uncle, in your scheming.”

A clear reprimand creeping across his features. “Have you ever considered that you are too cautious in your desires?” he snipes back. “You want this. Go on, deny it.”

She cannot.

He sucks in a breath, and she can see it, the mounting anger – building in his shoulders, his deceptively strong body, lean muscles clenching. “I smelled it on you years ago,” he tells her. “When you first presented as an omega. You remember? The rest of the House was in an uproar. A female Targaryen, an omega, presenting at the ripe age of thirteen with her first blood.”

She remembers. The shame, the whispers already stirring in the air among her father’s men and counsel. Even her mother had looked worried. Rhaenyra’s chances of being named heir had been slim at best at the time, but she had felt it slice in half when she had first presented as an omega. The memory of it still causes her stomach to curdle with humiliation and anger.

Even Alicent had presented as an Alpha only two months prior.

“You tucked yourself behind my legs, you remember?” Daemon continues, softer now, as he reminisces. “Even then, I recognized the way your smell changed in my presence. Seeking me out as protection. A room full of Alphas, and it was my shadow you became. Surely you must have smelled the way I changed in your presence, too?”

She had. It had taken her years to realize it, the significance. That she would be attuned to Daemon’s scent to such a fine acuity, so fine, in fact, that she could select him out of a dozen competing fragrances. He’d always smelled like the air after a fresh blaze, fire personified, like home. It’s changed now, or maybe she is the one that’s changed? Matured. She cannot say, but Daemon’s scent is just as captivating as it’s always been, just more… intense.

Daemon has always been intense. It has made him reckless and daring, equal parts feared and revered. She cannot let her emotions and desires rule her, not when her gender and station as an omega already presume her weak for such innate alleged deficiencies. No one wants a fragile little girl on the Throne, led about by a bite to her mating gland.

“No,” she tells him, though she stumbles as she says it.

He tilts his head like he cannot fathom her answer. “No?”

“I’m not one of your whores, Uncle. I am your future Queen.”

‘So let me serve you as your future King.”

She almost laughs. “You would serve me?”

“Valar dohaeris,” he insists. She stares at him, speechless, and he presses forward, gentler this time, more cautious. “Have me take you as my last lover,” he says, almost soft, almost – pleading, if she didn’t know the man well enough to know he never pleads. “As your mate, I swear to you I will deliver you your every desire and wish. I bow to no one, not even the King, but I would be on my knees every day and night for you. Only for you, Rhaenyra.”

Desire and caution war inside her.

But his breath stirs the air, tipping the balance. Goosebumps ripple across her skin. The look of him is ruinous, eyes flickering down to her lips, all-consuming want evident in the darkening of his gaze. She gives into it, for just a second. A second is all he needs, because as soon as she stops fighting his call, stops fighting whatever this is, it’s like he senses it and pounces, his mouth descending on her like a predator. His palm slides up the back of her neck and keeps her pressed against him, holding her still as his lips crowd against her mouth, demanding entry – and she yields. The slip of his tongue inside her mouth leaves her moaning, arching against him, breathing faster, exhilarated by his answering wounded groan.

He roughly maneuvers her so that she slots against him better, in a way that feels like a rebirth, as if she’s never felt quite whole without him. She’s been kissed before, yes, but none like this. It’s terrifying, electrifying. Dangerous. Heat spikes through her, an instinctual need to press closer. Devastation in a single embrace, damning her. His hands can’t seem to decide where they want to settle, stroking her everywhere – her hips, her arms, skimming over the curves of her clothing like he wants to map out her body.

He’s prying apart every single reason for rejection in a matter of seconds, minutes – an assault against her senses.

They break apart as she gasps for air, thinks she hears him whisper her name, but the gravity of the situation takes root in her, anchoring her back to reality.

She pulls back, lips kiss-bruised and distraught. “We can’t.”

“I think we just did, Rhaenyra.”

But she’s shaking her head, trying to figure out how to undo what just occurred and take it back. Let herself forgot exactly how it feels to be kissed by him, embraced by him, wanted by him.

A breath held in, but he seems to read her hesitation before she can articulate it herself. “Fine,” he hisses, agitated. “I find no pleasure in bedding a woman who lies to herself about what she wants.”

That isn’t even her protest, because she wants, she wants more than she can say, and she surprises herself by almost stopping him.

Almost.

He’s displeased, and it shows in his movements. For a man as expressive as him, she can always read every single emotion ghosting across his face like a well-read book. He tenders only a half-distracted nod of understanding, as he walks across the room, gathers a forgotten goblet of wine resting on her bedside table, tossing back the drink, Rhaenyra pretending not to watch the way his throat bobs as he swallows it down. The drink runs empty, only rivulets of red wine sloppily running down his chin. He wipes away the wetness, glances at the bed and her nesting with a too-keen awareness, a too-hard expression, and then turns back to face her fully.

“I’ll be here for the next three nights, if you change your mind. If I can smell it on you like this, I suspect your heat will begin within two nights. Most likely one.”

He disappears without further exchange, but he leaves his coat behind.

Bloodstained, torn at the edges, but the prevalent smell is all him.

Despite all her consternations and promises, the coat is given a prestigious position in the center of her nest. She lays atop it, nose pressed into the inner fur lining, where the spice of him is dominant over the other odors of blood, ash, and dragon.

He still smells like home.

What he’d promised is not, perhaps, as purely self-serving as she had first called it. With him by her side, she could admit that her hold over her future rule would be more secure. The realm would quiet as it often did when assured of a male influence over the Throne; the Houses respect Daemon, even if most do it out of fear. She could, she knows well enough, control his more impulsive tendencies. She’s demonstrated enough in the past, a restraining hand to his reckless endeavors. Perhaps that is why he seeks her as his omega. They are well-balanced.

With Daemon at her side, she would have a great alliance.

But the thought of securing a hold over her own right of inheritance through a mating bite stings. Rhaenyra has spent her life fighting to secure the respect of the Houses, more importantly the respect of her father. Even still, even after naming her as heir, she can tell Visery’s faith is fickle, bending to the ears of those who would prize her baby brother instead.

And if it were perhaps only a political alliance, Rhaenyra would know what do with Daemon’s proposal. It would be easy to decline. The hesitation rests in one key distinction.

It is not just a political alliance. Rhaenyra knows.

As she presses her nose into the fur of his coat, breathing in his heady scent, she knows.

But the next day, before she can act upon her night’s musings, the castle falls under attack.

She is awoken, sticky between her legs, bursting with unfilled need, phantom memories of Daemon’s touch drifting across her body. But the sounds of a dragon roaring overhead bring her out of her dreams and back into a startling reality with a pounding heart. Her sleep had been a bit delirious, skin clammy and vision unfocused. It takes her a moment to register the distant sounds of a skirmish. The walls are thick, there are no windows, the fighting must be some way’s away – but it doesn’t take much to recognize the screams of dying men.

When she goes to the door, her guard’s voice on the other side stops her. “Princess, it is not safe. You must not open this door for anyone or anything. It is the most fortified room in the castle.”

Another guard adds on, “We will keep you safe, Princess. Don’t worry.”

Rhaenyra doesn’t have to conceal the roll of her eyes. There is no one to see it.

The fighting continues for some time. Enough time for night to fall. She can hear Caraxes’ reverberating screech as he flies overhead, and the thought of her uncle is perhaps the only thing that is keeping her calm. As it is, she can feel herself slipping further and further into a delirium that makes her claw at the edges of her dress, tug her collar free of the buttons that close up the material to her throat. She had started off the day getting ready for potential battle, a dark and sturdy dress made of thick leather, a northern style fur padding the lining of her coat, her cloak affixed to her person with a hard chain of slender metal rings. Her hand had been primed on the hilt of her sword for much of the evening.

But as the day progresses, she finds herself shedding almost each and every item. She finds herself seeking out the dresses made of dainty soft satins, the ones she had earlier shunned, feeling both restless and agitated as she disrobes. The wispy material feels pleasant on her skin, and she finds her preferences inexplicably drawn towards the impractical choice. The only exception she allots herself is the filthy, dense leather coat that Daemon had left behind. She must look ridiculous, dwarfed as she is. It’s indecently too large over the wings of her shoulders, the sleeves engulfing her hands passed the tips of her fingers entirely. But it is sturdy, and strong, and smells much of Alpha. It will do.

When there is more movement and noise in the corridor leading to her door, Rhaenyra has sweated through the thin white silk dress she now wears underneath Daemon’s coat. The slick between her thighs has dampened her underclothes into a sodden mess. She can hardly focus on the screaming in the distance.

Daemon finds her like this, half-delirious.

It’s him pounding on the door. Rhaenyra knows. Maybe it’s his scent, maybe not, and distantly she’s aware her guards have been drawn away to fight for many hours now, but there is no hesitation to pull open the door to reveal him dressed in full armor; he’s blood-stained like he’s gone swimming in it. He yanks her to his side immediately, pressing his face into the curve of her neck, breathing her in and then cursing violently.

“My—my guards,” she murmurs, with ill-grace, even while her mind screams Alpha is here, Alpha will protect, Alpha, Alpha, Alpha.

“All dead, useless fuckers, the lot of them,” Daemon growls, swinging her around and marching her out the door. “You ride with me now.”

It is not a suggestion.

As he navigates her through the halls, he leads her to the spiraling flight of stairs and she realizes he’s taking her to the rooftop; his hand is clasped tightly around her forearm, keeping her pressed to his side, but the staircase is narrow and almost too constricted for both of them.

She scrambles for words. “Who are they? Is it more of your nomads?”

His jaw tightens, an angry vein protruding in his neck. “Turns out they weren’t mindless hordes. They’d been sent here by our enemies.”

“For you?”

He shakes his head. “For you, Rhaenyra. They mean to capture you during your heat.”

Her face pales. She’s not yet too far gone to miss the obvious. Her, in the hands of enemy Alphas, during her heat. Her feet stumble as he marches them relentlessly up the narrow steps, but he catches her before she spills onto the steps.

“No one else will touch you,” he declares harshly, his hands in contrast gently sweeping the fallen hair away from her face. “I am here now, Rhaenyra. Nothing will happen to you, I swear it. Trust me.”

She does. She trusts him.

Alpha will protect her.

It is this mantra that allows her to be swept outside, into the chaos of the fight. Immediately there are two men coming for her, dressed in threadbare clothes, displaying a snarl full of cracked and yellow teeth. Daemon dispatches one by gutting him with a sword, and the other with a headbutt and vicious kick that sends the man reeling back over the wall, falling to his death. His dragon is waiting for them, talons dug in over the crumbling shingles of the highest tower. He flies down on Daemon’s command.

Daemon hefts her onto Caraxes’s tough hide like she barely weighs a thing, and she goes without a single word or protest. He is bigger than Syrax, even if he’s more on the slender size. Caraxes has known her since she was a babe, so he does not protest the idea of being mounted by anyone other than Daemon. Besides, her uncle is right behind her, climbing on swiftly, arms encircling her waist, gathering the reins in his sizeable palms. With a grunt and a command, “sōvegon!” his dragon takes flight. Rhaenyra only catches the sight of devastation from overhead, as they fly atop, the castle surrounded by a league of enemies, Hayford’s men dead or dying. The smell of burnt bodies, the screams of distant men, it all recedes as Daemon forces the dragon higher and higher into the air.

The castle disappears entirely from sight.

She cannot think.

He takes her high above the clouds, so their enemies cannot track their movements. Rhaenyra counts her breath, trying and failing to think of anything else besides the press of Daemon behind her back, the heavy toll of her blooming desires. Everything feels outsized; him and her, his muscled thighs bracketing hers. She feels so small in comparison to him, it’s almost obscene. His hands practically dwarf hers, and the trace and coldness of his suited armor leaves an intense imprint along her spine. Her blood thrums in her ears.

His fingers rest against her stomach, holding tight to the reins. Her face burns as the thought occurs to her that it would not take much for his fingers to creep downwards, to press firmly against the source of her gathering slickness. He could provide her with some relief if only he would shift, just a few inches south. He must know. He must smell it on her. Even with the howling wind beating around them, he cannot miss the frenzied nature of her scent, calling to him. It isn’t fair. Why doesn’t he do anything about it? It isn’t fair.

“Almost there,” he tells her, against her neck.

His fingers stay where they are, tauntingly close and not close enough. She whimpers; she cannot help it, the sound weak and abused, pilfered from her throat against her will.

Then, a hand, firm – on the back of her neck, threading around her white braid to tug her head back. She locks eyes with him over her shoulder, face tilted up, neck outstretched. His pupils are blown wide, consumed equally as her with the same want. It’s so vivid and fresh it knocks her breath loose from her chest. She feels his hardness now, something that in her delirium she had somehow missed, but it presses against her backside like a siren’s call.

“Just a bit further, little one,” he declares, but this time it sounds like a promise.

They finally land in the forests, likely Kingswood if she had been in the right mind to guess. But if she had been in the right frame of mind, she may have asked, perhaps, why her uncle had not flown to her father’s castle, easily within a few hours flight on Caraxes. They could enter through the secret tunnels of the Red Keep. But the question wouldn’t have been clever, either.

She knows why her uncle is not taking her back to King’s Landing.

The reality of it thundering through her addled mind, echoing like something in an empty chamber, as they dismount, his hands swift and familiar on her hips. She isn't imagining the way his nostrils flare, but he doesn’t immediately take her in his arms like she hopes.

They are still exposed, she tells herself, Alpha must protect. So, she swallows the cry that almost forces its way out of her mouth when Daemon turns to check his dragon for wounds, seemingly uncaring for any he has taken himself, soothing his giant beast; then he leads Rhaenyra, by the hand, to a small damp cave hidden behind the drop of a waterfall. Caraxes curls up at the mouth, near a bulky pool of fresh water, wings folded around him, resting with his head atop talons. Rhaenyra and Daemon disappear under the splash of the waterfall into the cave. It is small inside, but she can manage.

She pulls herself free, looks to the floor, slides off and deposits Daemon’s dingy coat onto the floor, the beginnings of a paltry nest, but it will have to suffice. She looks back up to him to apologize for the meager showing, but when she does—

—he crosses the space between them in three swift strides, his mouth sealing over hers, a blistering claim, a searing slip of his ruthless tongue inside her mouth. She reels backwards but he follows the line of her body, pressing it against his own like any inch between them is an affront; she yields to the demand, his grip greedy at her hips, possessive at her mouth. It is as if he can no longer hold himself back, cannot abide any space for her to breathe, to swallow air that does not come directly from his lungs. She groans.

He leads her back, until her spine hits the cavern wall with a muted thud. He invades her space where there is none, his muscled thigh sliding between hers. She’s left in her flimsy white dress, slick gathering at her thighs, nipples pointed in the cool air, and he palms her breasts with overeager hands, exploring her curves and lines with all the assurance of a king surveying his own lands. She preens when he groans, an obvious sound filled with desire and delirious longing, a type she has never heard before. She wants more of it, she wants all of it – from him, only him.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he tells her, and there’s something errant, between his devouring kisses, something angry. “You were supposed to be safe, warm, and well-tended to when I fucked you. This is not how your first heat should go.”

“You’re here,” she whispers. “That’s all I need.”

But he’s shaking his head, bothered by something she cares nothing about. Before she can figure out what, he’s slamming a fist against the wall beside her head so hard she flinches; an instinctive recoil, Alpha’s mad at her, but in the next second he seems to realize his blunder because he’s soothing then, voice gentle as he tells her, “No, no. You did nothing wrong. I just—we have no provisions. I need to get a fire going. I have to provide you with food. To hunt—”

She surges forward to kiss him, her mind screeching to halt the blasphemes words. “No, no, don’t,” she whispers, panicking at the idea of being abandoned now, like a forsaken thing, not when he’s right here in her arms where she desperately needs him. “Please, please, I’ll be good. I don’t need anything else. I don’t. I don’t.”

His hands at the back of her neck, pulling her braid loose until white strands spill out of his grasp. “Hush, sweet thing, I’m not leaving you.” He boxes her in, takes over her panic with more sinful suckling kisses down her throat and towards her chest. “But I do need to hunt and gather firewood at some point. But I’ll do something to take the edge off, shall I?”

Her fingers catch on his armor, and she doesn’t quite know what he means.

“You are so soft,” he marvels, like she’s a wonder. “Did they give this to you to wear?” He yanks down one strap of her dress to suck a wet bruise across her collarbone. “This flimsy little thing, for what? So you could squirm in it all by yourself? Trying to find relief with those searching little fingers? What is the point of this pretty fucking dress? When you won’t be seen – wouldn’t be admired.”

She doesn’t want to talk about her fucking dress. So, she does away with it, wrenching it off her own shoulders, dropping it to the floor —she hears a sudden sharp inhale, only vaguely remembering she isn’t wearing anything underneath except for a thin material soaked into a sodden mess between her thighs. Daemon stares at her pert breasts, before sucking a nipple in between his teeth, desire indulged to the point of obscenity.

“You haven’t done this before, have you?” he asks her, mouth around her tits.

His voice is soft, but she hears it – the quiet danger. She shakes her head, because it’s only the truth, and she does not miss the flash of triumph, of Daemon looking too pleased with himself, the self-satisfied victory. One hand finds her breast, the weight of it heavy in his palms, kneading the flesh between grasping fingers, the other hand venturing down the valley of her stomach, towards the apex of her thighs, underneath the obscene patch of her soaked fabric, to her damp curls.

Her breath catches when he bumps against her clit, and he laughs. “Like that, did you?” his hushed voice, smug with satisfaction as he turns her into a panting squirming thing, desperate for his touch, his thumb grazing over her clit, gentle circles, small strokes, barely there touches that have her melting into his chest, whimpering. She needs more, and cries to him about it. “No patience in you, is there? I’ll have to teach you a number of things.”

How can he talk about patience when she feels like her skin is on fire?

This desire in her stirring up something, restless and feral, wild for his touch.

“I’m too—please, please,” she breathes, frantic and aching. “I need—”

He grabs a handful of her hair, wrenching her head back roughly. “I know what you need, little one.”

She lets out a reed-thin whine when he rips the material between her legs into shreds, then slips one finger inside her without preamble, just pushes in one of his lengthy slender fingers and – fuck, she’s so slick, it goes in without struggle. He thrusts in and out of her with corrupting strokes, scorching, burning, pulling moans from her throat she can barely recognize as her own – invading a part of her only she has ever known, only where her own fingers have ever ventured. The intrusion is glorious but aching, and she sniffles out half a sob, overcome, needing more. He pushes a second finger inside, and she cries out forcefully, then, as she stretches and burns.

“Your heat is only just beginning, and look at you.” He sounds awed, enraptured. “You’re so pretty like this, just begging to be fucked.”

“Un—Uncle,” she sobs, and he clucks his tongue disapprovingly.

“Come now, I’m two knuckles deep in your quim. I think you can call me something else.”

She stares at him, dazed, blinking. “Daemon.”

He smiles, more of a feral baring of teeth. Pupils dilated, expression ravenous. “What else, love? What else should you call me?”

He presses his fingers inside her more forcefully, quickening the tempo, a pitiless push for her to answer him. Her hand finds his jaw, following the sharp edges helplessly, but she finds his eyes drifting closed at her mindless caress, finds him pressing his cheek into her palm, inhaling sharply. She absently runs a thumb across his lower lip, and he – he sucks her thumb into his mouth, rolling his lips around it in a gesture somehow more obscene than how he’s finger-fucking her.

“Alpha,” she whines out.

He lets out a pleased hum, fingers assaulting her sloppy cunt. “Good girl.”

She thinks it’s his praise that sends the rush of warmth through her, making her come like she’s being pitched off a cliffside, falling under a deluge of euphoria, a damning onslaught. Her resulting moan is swallowed entirely by his questing mouth; he devours her, shoving his tongue down her throat, doing his best to crawl inside and take residence in the very heart of her as the orgasm rolls through her.

Rhaenyra whimpers against his lips. She’s so full—full of him, his tongue, his fingers—that she feels small in comparison, overwhelmed as she settles down.

A comfort – in being conquered, dictated to, here, suspended in this push and pull of his fingers as they slow in rhythm, helping bring her down, where all she needs to do is feel; she does not have to think, reduced to something to be fucked. An omega serving her purpose well to her alpha.

It’s a miracle she doesn’t fall into a pile of useless limbs on the floor when he pulls himself free. A fire still burns in the pit of her stomach, but it’s at a low flame now, just for the moment.

He starts shedding off his armor, fingers deftly undoing the braces on his arms, the pauldrons and his bloody gorget. Each piece of armory removed feels like another layer of consecration being exposed. He watches her with a singular commitment the entire time, his agitated movements signaling the rife tension in his body. The air seems to strum between them, shivering, waiting, quivering in anticipation.

When he’s left in his breast plate, her hands join his, finding the buckles inaccessible to him, the ones at his shoulders and sides. Lifting the last bits of his armor off him feels like a victory, and his mouth finds its way back to her lips while he divests himself of the simple linen clothes underneath, until he’s standing naked under her warm wandering hands.

The next kiss is violent, all-out war as if he has decided there is no need for gentle or slow, not anymore, him looming over her, leaning the full weight of his body into her against the wall. The kiss is bottomless and filthy, his hands squeezing the flesh of her backside. She’s crushed between him and the wall, hands flat against his chest, gasping for air and some measure of discipline. He doesn’t let her have either as he lifts her up and guides her legs to wrap around his waist, locking her heels at his back.

He cups her cunt possessively and she jolts, thighs trembling around his hips. He chuckles and presses a hot kiss to her collarbone, licks the sweat away, while his fingers crowd and send white-hot shocks of pleasure through her body.

But then he stills.

“Look at me,” he breathes, suddenly serious, even as he strokes the head of his cock along her wet seam. Her eyes fly to meet his gaze. “There will be a pinch at first while I break you in. The pain will recede, I promise. Just breathe and hold onto me. I’ll do the rest, little one.”

She nods, trembling slightly, both wanting this desperately and yet afraid.

“Do you trust me?” he asks, his voice low in her ear.

She nods, teary-eyed and gasping.

“Answer me,” Daemon growls.

“Yes, yes – I, Alpha, I trust you.”

It’s like her mind is washed clean of thought. Just the feel of his cock as it drags across her slit, gathering her slickness, his fingers at the back of her neck, pushing aside her hair, his mouth at her throat, bruising and possessive. Grip firm, he holds her in place, hands spanning around her waist so easily as he first breaches her, barely pushing in; a lust-addled whimper escapes as her body yields to his – just as it should.

“Fuck, ñuha dāria, you're so fucking tight,” he tells her, gravelly. “Open up for me, sweet thing.”

Her hands scramble for purchase as he invades her with a stretch and a burn, impales her further on his sizeable cock, one hand flying to the slope of his shoulder, the other splaying uselessly against the cavern wall behind her, nails catching hopelessly on grit and unmalleable stone. He pushes in further and pulls back out, a shallow stroke, reminding her to breathe in a low whisper near her ear. She tries – she really does, but it’s hard to catch her breath speared open like this. The air hitches and holds in her lungs as he repeats a single thrust, going deeper, carving out more space inside her where nothing has ever existed before.

But soon, his promise holds true, because the more he repeats those damning little strokes, the more the stretch and burn recedes, instead replaced by a single stubborn entreaty. Desperate for more. She cannot manage much in words, does nothing more than hold onto him, grunting as he takes and gives while his movements gain a new ferocity.

“Qogralbar nyke, ao sagon gevie hae bisa,” he grunts, and she preens. “So good for me, you’re taking me so well – I knew you’d be so good for me. This cunt was fucking made for this, wasn’t it?”

It was, it had to have been for him. It’s the only explanation for how she feels.

The force of his thrusts turns ruthless, bottoming out at an intense depth, his cock sliding into her cunt like she doesn’t deserve to walk afterwards, suffocating her in her desires, stoking the intensity until she feels a mess, spun into a ragged fuckdoll, a shaking dripping thing.

His moves, suddenly — pulling out to flip her around, rearranging her to his liking, controlling her limbs as they plant themselves on the ground, her ass to his groin, eyes facing the wall, and he’s forcing her legs apart to take him back inside in a single quick thrust that sounds obscenely loud, a wet squelch. She unravels, moans and gasps, her fingers splayed wide over the walls, his finding hers, covering her dainty hand with his own considerably larger palm.

Tears leak out, drawing keening cries from some savage place inside herself, and he’s groaning with this unfamiliar desperation— she barely recognizes either of them. She’s begging him. Begging him for more, begging him never to stop, begging for whatever he’ll give her, over and over—

Her second orgasm is wrenched out of her, tasting of salt and desperation and submission.

His thrusts continue to carve her out with an unerring, ruthless precision, not slowing down – perhaps even speeding up. Hip bones bruising with each harsh thrust. She’s mindless, void, barely hanging on. Hardly recognizing the animalistic grunts from behind, the sounds of a predator ripping into his prey; defiled, she’s absolutely defiled, his teeth scraping along her neck where her mating gland throbs. She stifles a sob by biting her fist.

“None of that now, Rhaenyra,” he chides, hoarsely, his voice thrumming low into her ear. “I want to hear you choke out my name. Those pretty little sounds. No need to stifle yourself.”

“I—Daemon, I need, please—”

“Who owns this cunt?” he rasps, hips slamming into hers.

“You—you do,” she gasps.

“Gonna fuck my heir into you, little omega,” he promises, grunting. “Gonna paint your insides with my come. Māzigon, ñuha dāria, māzigon syt nyke, that’s sȳz, sīr sȳz, ñuha dāria, ñuha hope, ñuha gevives.”

She muffles a scream into the musty cavern walls.

“You like that, do you?” he grunts, satisfaction dripping like corrupted honey. “That’s right, love. Gonna fuck you full again and again and again. You’ll swell with my child – our child, a pure Targaryen – and the whole world will understand I put it there. Have all of them know I fucked you raw. My ring on your finger, my babe in your belly.”

Yes, yes, that’s what she wants. A desperate desire she has never allowed herself to entertain before, because it’s a foolish thing. He’s married already, but it matters little. He’ll do what’s necessary, just like he’s always done. The words are almost enough to push her over the cliffside of her pleasure yet again, shove her over the edge – and then he torments, “you’ll look lovely stuffed with my cock, with a crown on your head, leaking come.”

He pushes down on her sensitive bundle of nerves between her thighs, and her breathing catches, pleasure cresting with an obscene cry.

And it’s this, her own pleasure, that blinds her to the first building stretch, as his knot begins to swell. It's a bizarre, blunt pressure, so much bigger even than his cock. She feels pinned, the dual weights of his growing knot and her own delirium, it sends errant spasms of aftershocks, pleasure rippling through her in shudders and gasps. Even as he impossibly expands, greater and greater, affixing himself inside her, lodging himself so deep he can barely move.

“Forgive me, little one,” he grunts, afterwards, almost laughing to himself. “I don’t normally knot on the first release. I guess I’ve thought about this too much.”

She can hardly breathe, but feels like she’ll never want to move from this spot ever again, because it feels right, it feels true.

Daemon’s perfect space inside her where he’s made himself a home.

Time seems to stop and restart in steady, brutal ruts.

He reshapes her to fit him, again and again. Lays her down atop his coat, a paltry nest, and sets a bruising pace. Frenetic. Obsessive. His hips snapping, hair falling into his face, eyes wild as he manhandles her towards whatever position he desires. “Fuck, look what you’ve done to me,” grunted into her skin, teeth grit and groaning, sweat dripping from his hair as he sheathes himself inside of her with sharp thrusts, becoming uncoordinated every time he nears his end with her. She loses count of the orgasms.

He fucks her twice more that night before dawn rises. After the second time, he rolls her over, has his fingers in her cunt, mouthing kisses against her bare shoulder, before he lowers himself between her knees and feasts on the combined mess that he’s made of them both. His lips worry her cunt and her clit with unerring precision, applying galling suction, his fingers curving to beckon harshly inside of her, mercilessly coaxing out a series of orgasms from her.

The sight of his broad shoulders and stark white hair bent over the apex of her thighs, it seals a haze of recklessness over her, becomes a searing permanent image in her mind that she can never forget. By the time he lifts away from her thighs, chin shining with her slickness, she's a puddle of helpless nerves, an obscene mess.

In the morning, she takes his cock again, letting her seat herself on top of him, silvery locks spilling down her spine. Let’s her trembling limbs and body sink down over him, learn a new cadence as she squirms and struggles.

“Do I look pretty?” she asks him. “Sat on your cock like a throne?”

At that, he growls, pinning her hips in place in his open palms and driving himself upwards, fucking up into her in deep, frantic strokes. He captures her mouth again, molding her to him with a hand pressing into the flesh of her backside, making her take his knot again, the resounding answer to her teasing question.

But as much as she denies it, her body needs sustenance more than just his come.

At midday, she’s forced to huddle into a shuddering, blubbering mess, while he goes out to hunt for food and return with firewood. She doesn’t know how long he’s gone, but the entire time it feels wrong, it feels criminal, left alone without her Alpha and the protection of his shelter. By the time he comes back, game slung over his shoulder, she’s frantic to prove her worth to him, to show him how quickly she can learn.

Her lips wrapped around his cock as he trains her to take him to the root. “Yes, sweet girl, just like that. Watch your teeth, you feral thing.” A muffled sound, pleased and sloppy, as she takes him so far back into her throat, she gags. He only laughs, gratified. “So much wisdom left to impart,” he tells her, pleased. “But you’re doing so well.”

He fucks her four times that day, then three again that night.

Finds him more insatiable than her, a triggered rut, so demanding that she wakes one time to find him already inside her, fucking her languidly in her sleep. “Need to make sure it takes,” he tells her, shushing her sobs as he moves her fuck-weary body against him. “I’ll be gentle. Shh, I’m almost done. Go back to sleep, rūs riña.”

The third day, a fire roaring in its pit, she surfaces with a new need. Washes herself clean in the cascading water, feasts on the roasted flesh of the boar Daemon slayed. Scrubs herself clean as much as possible, then returns to his sleeping side, rousing him from slumber, presenting herself to him by climbing onto his hardening cock. Naked, knees splayed out on either side of his body, neck elongated up to showcase her swollen mating gland.

“My Queen,” he murmurs, fuck-drunk and still groggy.

She rakes nails down his sides, presses her fingers into his abdomen while he hisses in pleasurepain.

“It’s time, Uncle,” she tells him. “Claim me.”

A groan of approval. She spends a moment just breathing, as he gathers her hair, brushing it aside, feeling the stretched grip she has around his cock, the scent of her omega pheromones flooding the air, increasing second by second until she knows the fragrance of her heat permeates the entire cave. She knows it floods his system as well, edges him further along in his rut. He catches her mouth in another bruising kiss and forces a few frantic rolls of her hips with his hands.

When he sets his teeth into the flesh of her mating gland, she keens. It’s more than she anticipates, almost too much, a bite that goes down to her bone, sets a wound searing in her flesh that somehow, illogically, also makes her bloom with gratification. The appeal goes through every square inch and depth of her, a fire ignited, claimed, owned. Clearly it’s half of the ritual for them, this determined bid to pull her close, demolish her and reforge her anew in the flames.

She squirms as she comes, panting and writhing on top of him, moaning his name.

Afterwards, the Targaryen customs clear, he gathers aside his own hair to expose his neck, revealing his own mating gland to her for the taking.

An equal exchange, Alpha and Omega. A bite for a bite.

A King for a Queen.

“How long have you been planning this?” she asks him, afterwards, fingertips tracing the angry mark she left on him.

“Years,” he tells her, quietly. “So long I can hardly remember the start.”

“Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“You were too young. You could have hardly comprehended what I wanted from you. It wasn’t the right time yet.”

“I’ve been old enough for several years,” she refutes. “Why wait until my heat?”

“Because a biting claim cannot be denied, cannot be undone. Your father will do everything in his power to separate us. Those who would favor your baby brother will mount their protests, perhaps even start a war. But there is no separating us now, Rhaenyra. You are mine just as I am yours. If we die, we die, but this is forever.”

She cannot say anything to that, at first. Finds herself hushed in the face of his commitment.

But one thing is certain. “War,” she repeats. “This will cause a civil war, won’t it?”

“Perhaps, little one,” he murmurs, though it sounds a certainty; he gentles the contention by pressing a kiss to her lips, an inexplicable devotion in his eyes. “But I will protect you.”

“Kivio?” she asks, softly.

He smirks. “Kivio.”

Fin.