Chapter Text
“You have to follow where your blood takes you.”
– Federico García Lorca (tr. John Edmunds), Blood Wedding
“And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.”
– Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
Rhaenyra presses her mouth to back of her hand. It smears some of the color off, leaving her lips a little less bold, the skin of her knuckles gleaming like a boxer’s torn flesh. But she still looks like a young girl who’s played with the palettes her mother has left out.
Not a good train of thought. She looks at the ceiling and thumbs her knuckles in hurried circles, willing the glaze in her eyes to subside and the color to go off easy. She breathes out. With a last self-conscious tug at her hair, disciplined into waves with a flatiron and endless TikTok tutorials, she steals out of her room and tiptoes down the stairs.
“Going somewhere?”
Rhaenyra freezes, teetering in her high heels.
Her uncle watches her over the rim of a glass tumbler, two fingers of whiskey gleaming like amber within. He’s certainly made himself comfortable, a black blazer thrown lazily over the armrest and crisp white shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. He pushes back stray locks of his hair—so much like her own, a blond so pale it’s nearly silver. This and their common language the shared inheritance of the Valyrian diaspora, or what remains of it.
In the dark, the green of his eyes looks almost like slate.
“I didn’t know you were in town,” Rhaenyra says. She only ever speaks Valyrian when she’s with him. The intonation comes to her like a familiar friend.
“Just arrived.” He taps his finger on the tumbler. “Sneaking out, I take it?”
She purses her lips. “Please don’t tell my father.”
“Our secret, darling.” He looks her over as he takes a sip of whiskey. She almost feels the burn of it down her own throat. “You’re not wearing any of the necklaces I’ve given you.”
She scoffs even as she shivers beneath the scant lace of her bralette. “None of them go with my outfit.”
“That so? Come here then, and turn around.”
She does, her hips swaying with each step. It unnerves and thrills her both to look down at him, sprawled like a lazy panther on her father’s favorite Eames. Obediently she turns away. The air behind her shifts as he stands, his tumbler hitting the side table with a strange finality. And then his hands are heavy on her shoulders, his breath hot against the back of her neck.
She gasps at the first press of his lips.
He kisses his way across the base of her neck before spinning her like a marionette. She breathes him in, Macallan and musk, when he meanders along her clavicle, and fights the urge to sink her fingers in his slicked-back hair.
“Beautiful,” he says, and retakes his seat. “Hurry along, now, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Thank you, Uncle, she means to say, but the words catch in her throat. Rhaenyra makes her way to the elevator and does not look back.
“Here, eat this,” Alicent says in the car, and Rhaenyra is so lost in the haze of her thoughts she bites into the chocolate wordlessly.
The foulness of it drags her back into reality.
“Jesus,” she says, forcing herself to swallow. “That was vile.”
Alicent scrunches her nose. “Shrooms always are. Just didn’t want you to be behind everyone else.”
“Thanks. Sorry I missed the pregame.”
“You’re good, babe. I think Laenor’s too fucked up to care anyway.”
“What’s he on?”
“He’s candy-flipping.”
“Messy.”
“It’s his birthday.” Alicent hums, sinking into the plush leather seats. “He can do what he wants.”
“Are you tripping already?”
“Mm-hmm.” She reaches over to clasp Rhaenyra’s hands. “You look like a movie star, ‘Nyra.”
Rhaenyra rolls her eyes. “You think everyone looks like a movie star when you’re high.”
Alicent winks. “Just you.”
Rhaenyra feels like her uncle has left a brand for all to see, molten heat glowing from her collarbone to the top of her spine. But no one says a word when she and Alicent file into the club. Laenor kisses her on the mouth in greeting, and Laena snakes an arm around her waist. A round of shots before they merge with the ebb and flow of gyrating bodies. Lights flash in technicolor overhead. She tries not to think about her phone, burning a hole in her purse, three taps away from an immediate line to her uncle. What was there to ask him? What was there to explain?
Nothing.
Rhaenyra lets the music pull her under. Soon the lights seem to burst in startling prisms. The crowd is not so much a crowd but a beating heart, and she a part of it, the bass line thrumming through her teeth. Another shot, another cocktail. A drag queen, glorious, ascends the stage and lip-syncs to a Beyoncé track. Laenor screams along between sloppy kisses with his beau of the minute. Alicent’s hand ghosts under Rhaenyra’s skirt. More shots. House music, eerie and percussive. The room spinning from the bathroom line. Ungraceful clamber onto the porcelain throne. Her pupils are blown in the mirror, the blue-gray of her eyes Neptune eclipsed. A pink smear of lipstick on her jaw. Outside, Laena blows a plume of smoke into her mouth, and she breathes it in, marijuana laced with nicotine. The stars spin in sweet circles. She presses her phone to her cheek, whispers,
“Take me home.”
Some finance bro in a pastel button-down and boat shoes gawks at the car. “Bro, do you see that? Is that a fucking Lambo?”
Rhaenyra rolls her eyes as she walks past him, though her uncle’s car does look horribly misplaced on this grungy Bushwick block. The passenger door unfurls before her like a cardinal’s wing, and she slides in as coolly as she can. “You drove?” she says, wincing at the slur of her words.
“You know that I prefer to,” Daemon says. He’s changed into a sweater, the knit of it dancing like a serpent. Her hands twitch with the impulse to touch. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“You’re being mean.”
“I’m being perfectly serious.” He catches her by the chin, searching her eyes. “What are you on?”
“Don’t worry. I’m already coming down.”
“Hm.” He pulls away to start the car, and immediately she misses the rough warmth of his fingers.
The glare of street and traffic light is too much. Rhaenyra leans into the seat facing him and lets her eyes drift shut. Sparks flare in the darkness behind her eyelids. Everything smells like him. “Did you have to drive this car?”
“Let an old man have his fun.”
She snorts. “OK, boomer.”
“Not pulling any punches, this one.”
She opens her eyes to glance at him. God, she loves the lines on his forehead. The silver chain furrowing beneath his sweater. His big, stupid ears. “No, really, what are you, Uncle? An elder millennial?”
“I suppose that’s the scientific term.”
She runs her fingers down her sternum, willing him to look her way. But he’s turned his head over his shoulder, switching into the next lane. “There’s an Evian in the cupholder, Rhaenyra,” he says, almost as if he can sense her attention. “Drink.”
“Later.”
“Rhaenyra,” he says. “Drink.”
She concedes with a groan. It’s only when she drinks that she realizes how thirsty she’s been, and she gulps down greedily. “Thanks,” she mumbles.
“Good girl.” He rewards her with a look. Her heart stutters. “Looks like you had fun.”
“What do you mean?”
He taps his jaw. “Over here.”
“Oh.” She mirrors the motion. Her fingers come back stained pink. “Right. I don’t even remember.”
“No?” He frowns. “You should be more careful.”
“Not like that. It was probably just Ali or Laena or something.”
“Do you normally snog your friends?”
“Do you normally snog your nieces?”
She wishes she could take it back as soon as she’s said it. If they don’t talk about it, maybe it never happened. If they don’t talk about it, maybe it could happen again.
“Deflection doesn’t become you, darling,” he says, unmoved.
It is a dumb deflection besides, she concedes (if only to herself). He doesn’t have any other nieces, and her only barely.
“Well, then, sure, I guess. I kiss my friends whenever I feel like it. It’s nothing serious.”
“And when it is serious?”
She shrugs. “I’ll let you know when it happens. For now, it’s all play.” She looks at him. “Right?”
“Right,” he says, but his eyes are on the road.
Rhaenyra licks her lips. “How long are you staying?”
“I’m here for another week at least.”
“Make time for me, OK?”
If he responds, she doesn’t hear. One moment she closes her eyes; the next they’re back on Park Avenue. She must have dozed off. Now that they’re here, a part of her is reluctant to let the night end, to let this newfound something between her and Daemon slip between her fingers. But he opens the doors and steps out, handing his keys off to the valet. She follows suit, wincing when she puts weight on her feet. She can feel the blistering from her frivolous shoes now that her psychedelic invincibility has started to fade into the night.
“Silly thing.”
He is threading her arms through the sweater she’d so admired. It’s softer than she expected. He pops her head through the collar, ruining the careful work she’d made of her hair, and gathers her in his arms. She leans her head against his chest and buries her face into his neck, crooking her fingers into the worn-soft cotton of his t-shirt.
When the elevator door closes, she decides it’s quid pro quo. Scrabbling for purchase on his shoulders, she kisses her way down the strong line of his neck. But for the tightening of his grip, an intake of breath, sharp, he seems to neither notice nor protest her machinations. Good, she thinks, bearing her teeth down just hard enough to tease. She is starting to squirm in his arms, pressing her thighs together, carried enough away by the smell and warmth of him to want to leave a mark—
The elevator rings open.
He sets her down right outside it. There’s a smile on his face, slight and condescending, when he ruffles her hair. “Good night, Rhaenyra.”
After he turns the corner to the guest rooms, she shucks off her shoes to take the stairs two at a time. She spends the rest of the night tangled in her sheets, her fingers working against her cunt. It’s not enough. She falls asleep aching, the silk of her nightgown clinging to the slick between her thighs.
She pauses at his bedroom door. He looks freshly showered, his hair dampened to a ruddy grey-gold. His belongings are strewn about the bed, haphazardly made, his suitcase cracked open and perched perilously on the luggage rack.
He spares her a glance. “What’s with that pout? Is my darling niece hungover?”
“Don’t condescend,” she grouses, and she is hungover. “You’re not even really my uncle.”
“Good morning to you, too, kitten. Looks like your claws are out.”
“Is that why you’re leaving so soon? Because you’re so annoying?”
Daemon looks up from his packing to throw her a grin. “Not quite.”
She makes herself comfortable on the corner of his bed. She’s thrown his sweater over her nightgown, and she stretches out the chunky hem of it for his perusal. “Did you want to toss this in?”
“Keep it.”
She supposes he doesn’t need it. Daemon looks cozy enough in his black hoodie and sweatpants.
“You said you were going to stay the week,” she says.
“You know how it is. Something came up with the Stepstones deal. Viserys wants me back for a board meeting tomorrow morning UK time.”
“That’s like sending a knife into a gunfight.”
He swats her with one of his ties. It lands painlessly on her cheek. “You’re only feisty because you’ll miss me.”
“As if,” she says, passing him his toiletry bag.
“You could always follow in my footsteps and come back to the superior side of the pond.”
“I got into Princeton ED. I’m not going to Cambridge, god forbid.”
“Very good.” He zips his suitcase shut. “Oxford, then, like your dear father. Surely you’re too posh for New Jersey.”
“I like New York,” she says. At least here she can forget about his girlfriend, a French-Japanese model so fit Rhaenyra half-desires her herself.
“No? Were you in England, we could drive back out to Dragonstone when you’re on holiday, give Caraxes and Syrax some proper exercise.”
Her heart twinges at the thought of their horses, probably gone fat by their lonesome in Oxfordshire. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
Is this what we’re doing now? she wants to ask. Acting like nothing’s happened?
“As you like.” He stands and dusts his trousers off. “I’ll certainly miss you.”
She looks away. “I’ll call down for your car.”
The bed sinks as he sits down next to her, slinging an arm over her shoulders. “Are you cross with me, Rhaenyra?”
She eases against him despite herself. “Why should I be? You’ll be back soon enough.”
Daemon pauses. “Perhaps.”
Brow furrowed, Rhaenyra shifts to look him in the eye. “Is everything all right?”
“Right as rain, darling.” He taps her shoulder absently before getting to his feet. “Right as rain.”