Chapter Text
Aemond sneers at his niece, who has come begging to Borros Baratheon with empty hands.
The Lord of Storm’s End is no fool. He has no sons to betroth her to, so he brushes Lucera off, telling her to go back to her mother and remind Rhaenyra that he cannot be called to heel like a dog.
But the thought of strategic marriage sprouts like a weed in Aemond’s mind, twisting its roots deep around the seething, vengeful core of him. As Lucera turns to go, he steps forward and speaks for all to hear.
“Lord Borros. I have a message for my niece to convey to her mother as well, but it is for her ears alone.”
The Lord of Storm’s End narrows his eyes. The enmity between Rhaenyra’s children and Alicent Hightower’s is no secret, and the contested throne after Viserys’s death has only made it more apparent. There is no sign of it thus far tonight, however. Neither Aemond or Lucerya have tried to awaken old grudges.
Aemond unsheaths his sword and removes the dagger tucked into his belt with a raised brow. He sets them on the stone in front of him as a gesture of goodwill.
Borros wonders which would be more dangerous: denying a prince or trusting him with an enemy? He needs well-positioned husbands for his daughters, and an alliance with the king’s family is temptingly advantageous.
“Through there,” he finally agrees, gesturing to one of the arched doorways encircling the massive central tower of the Baratheon fortress. Aemond inclines his head in acknowledgement and spins on a heel, opening an oaken door. He sweeps his arm outward in invitation, stares at Lucera, and waits.
After a moment of hesitation, Lucera hands her own blade to one of Borros’s guards and follows. It has been years since she’s spoken to her uncle alone. They had been almost friends in childhood, before…
Aemond unsettles her now. The boy she knew has become a deadly swordsman, and though he’s beautiful as morning in spite of the scar, she knows she should be wary of his dangerous edge. She cannot guess what he wants to convey to her mother, but she feels duty-bound as emissary to find out.
Aemond closes the door firmly behind her, and - after a quick glance around - Lucera makes sure to keep him in her sight.
The room is just an antechamber with one large, square wooden table flanked by two chairs. The storm is building outside the single window, and two wall-mounted torches hold back the dark.
“What is your message, Uncle? Speak it, and I’ll be on my way.”
But instead of talking, he closes in on her – so fast she can barely see him move. It’s the same quickness he uses in the yard to dodge Ser Criston Cole’s morningstar or to deliver a killing blow.
Aemond slams into Lucera, lifting her off her feet and ramming the backs of her thighs against the heavy edge of the oak table. Despite his speed and violence, the movement is nearly silent and so controlled it is almost graceful. Lucera braces herself with her palms behind her on the tabletop and freezes when she feels the cold edge of a small blade at her throat. It must have been tucked into a hidden sheath somewhere under Aemond’s cloak. The tip protrudes from the end of his curled fist, wickedly sharp, as he balls his fist under her chin.
“Don’t make a sound,” her uncle whispers.
Lucera is cursing herself for trusting him. Does he mean to scar her like she did him? The thought of the blade slipping into her eye is a cold band around her heart, but she will not show fear. She mustn’t.
“Lord Borros will not be pleased if you shed the blood of a messenger in his hall,” she warns.
Aemond Targaryen does not give a shit what Lord Borros thinks. He’s got a score to settle. “You owe a debt,” he tells her.
Lucera knows what debt. She can see it plainly on his face: the curved scar that goes from cheek to brow. The lost left eye is patched where her blade scored and ruined it. Aemond reaches up and pulls off the leather; in the empty socket is an unpolished faceted sapphire that glows deep blue in the flash of lightning that illuminates the room.
Lucera has no answer for him. She took his eye, though it had not been her aim. She was protecting her little brother Joffrey in the scuffle after Aemond claimed Vhagar. Things had gotten ugly quickly, and she was still green with a blade. She had swiped at him, that much is true – a small cut, perhaps, had been all she’d intended, but she was overzealous. It was years ago now; clearly, his resentment has not healed along with the wound.
What recompense does he seek?
With his other palm flat on her chest, Aemond pushes with steady, irresistible pressure, forcing Lucera down on her back on the table as he stands between her bent knees. One of his hands slides up her covered thigh. She tenses, stomach muscles bunching as she tries to sit upright again.
“Be still,” Aemond demands, his melodic voice like silk bonds.
When she dresses to ride Arrax, Lucera wears leather breeches under a skirt that’s knee-length in the front and ankle-length at the back, but cold fear surges through her veins when Aemond bunches it around her waist.
“Uncle…” she objects, and he gives her a warning look that’s full of unmistakable hatred. A bad sign.
He moves fast again, his hands a blur, and Lucera hears the bite of metal on leather. The blade returns to her throat as Aemond tears at the juncture between her thighs, jerking her whole body with the force necessary to rip her breeches open with one hand. Then his fingers are loosing the laces on his own.
It’s clear what he wants now. What his message will be.
“St–” Lucera begins, but the blade threatens along with her uncle’s single blue eye. She tries to slam her knees closed but is stopped against his hips.
“Open your legs,” Aemond commands, his gaze burning into hers.
This is his revenge, then – after all these years. When they are no longer children, and he can take from her what only a man can. Lucera knows little about this act, but she knows of it. How patient he’s been. Now, it’s more than just her body and her pride; a marriageable daughter is Rhaenyra’s leverage, and Aemond means to ruin Lucera and deprive the queen of that, too.
She spits in his face.
His answering smile is chilling.
Slowly, methodically, he wipes her saliva off his cheek with his free hand and uses it to wet his shaft. He’s already impossibly hard: her fury, her shock, and especially the glint of fear in her wide brown eyes are a heady aphrodisiac. He's waited so long to see intimidation in that defiant but delicate face with its bare dusting of freckles across the bridge of a nose that is fine and sharp like Rhaenyra’s, to ball Lucera's traitorous chestnut hair in his fist, to feel her taut little body writhing under his hands. Her beauty enrages him. Aemond drags her hips to the end of the table and slides his fingers along her cleft.
Lucera stiffens; her huge eyes widen still more and she parts her lips in surprise, but her expression looks so much like desire that he can almost pretend she welcomes it when he pushes the head of his cock inside her.
“Aemond, please,” she whispers, hoping his name will restrain him. Too late, she realizes it sounds wanton.
He bares his teeth. Time is disjointed; everything is a blur but infinitely slow: Aemond leans over her, presses his free palm over her mouth, and slams into her with merciless force. It’s like being run through on a field of battle: a huge, searing agony. Lucera wails into his hand. She should grab for the knife, scratch out his remaining eye, kick and scream until one of Borros’s guards break down the door, but the pain so enormous it consumes her. She has taken every kind of blow in the training yard, but nothing prepared her for this kind of pain and the wave of humiliation that magnifies it.
She blinks and hot tears course down into her hair.
Aemond is unmoved.
Lucera swings a fist at his hateful, defiantly handsome face, but he catches it in midair.
With his frightening efficiency, he returns the small blade he’s been holding at her neck to its sheath at the back of his belt and pins Lucera’s wrists to the table beside her head with both hands. That thick, searingly hard part of him is still impaling her, so deep it throbs with a sickening ache. Every time he moves, she feels it shift, a subtle torment.
She might retch.
Lucera swallows hard.
Aemond is rolling his hips now so he slides out just a little before slamming back in. Every thrust is a lightning strike as he rams against some internal barrier, dragging over her torn maidenhead and stretching her open around him. It burns. Outside, the storm rages, drowning out the mewls of protest that seep between her lips unbidden. His assault is not the consummation of withheld lust but the relentless advance of a siege. Strategic. Dispassionate.
Lucera is not going to give him the satisfaction of breaking her.
She does not sob or beg and she does not scream for help.
She does not look away or let her consciousness drift free of her body.
She grits her teeth, fixes her uncle with an unblinking glare, and fights, even if she has to feel everything. Her outrage temporarily overwhelms every other emotion.
But her strength does not compare to his, and he reads challenge in the way she strains against him, trying to get her heels up on the table or bite at his fists around her wrists like iron bands or wriggle her hips – the way her body squeezes around him like she’s trying to push him out. He merely tightens his grip and slams into her harder and deeper, satisfied only when she gasps and bucks like his cock is the crack of a whip against her skin.
Aemond is not principally interested in sex: that is just a weapon he wields like any other when his enemy presents him with a weakness. But there’s pleasure building alongside his grim satisfaction now. It creeps over his skin like guilt but only makes him angry.
It would have been enough to take Lucera’s innocence like she took his eye: suddenly, violently, painfully. Rip into her and leave her bleeding so she can go home and cry to her mother knowing nothing can undo what’s been done. But perhaps, this way, he can twist the knife. Aemond surrenders to the building wave silently; he can’t raise the suspicions of Borros and his men.
Lucera resists him, and he uses the weight of his body and his carefully honed strength to negate hers and make her nothing.
A sheath for his sword.
She feels him pulse inside her and the spreading warmth that follows, but her wide eyes contain no understanding.
That is a surprise.
The fact that Lucera’s libertine mother seems to have kept her only daughter ignorant of the specifics of matters of the flesh is a cruel irony that Aemond can use to his advantage. He sinks deep and exhales, his perfect control compromised only by the slightest slackness in his lips.
Her uncle stills, and Lucera wonders if it’s finally over. There’s a prominent vein in his forehead and he’s breathing hard, but otherwise he is frighteningly composed. Not even a stray hair is misplaced on his silvery head.
He can unleash savagery with preternatural calm, it seems.
His withdrawal leaves behind a stab of agony that Lucera instinctively curls around. Aemond brings her wrists together and traps them with one hand above her head, pressing his other forearm against her shins so her legs are folded along her torso. He holds her there, his weight making it hard to draw a full breath.
“Release me,” she orders, her voice steady even as her head spins.
“Not yet,” is his coldly calculated reply.
Lucera tries to keep her face as carefully neutral as Aemond’s, but her body aches and shudders are creeping into her trapped muscles. His single eye never leaves her face. Finally, after a seemingly endless, inexplicable delay, he turns away from her, adjusts his clothing, and replaces the patch over his eye. Her fingertips prickle as full circulation resumes.
“Tell Rhaenyra that war is coming,” Aemond growls as he strides out of the room, closing the door behind him without a backward glance. Lucera will carry the marks of his hands on her body and his seed inside her back to Rhaenyra, too. Aemond fully anticipates that the false queen will rage and weep and wash him away with moon tea when she finds out what he did, but if some additional pain and blood and humiliation are involved, it won’t go amiss. It took his eye several moons to heal; his niece deserves no less.
After Aemond is gone, Lucera slides off the tabletop with a sharp gasp and a fist balled against her abdomen. She straightens her skirt and presses her legs together as she takes a shaky step forward, feeling battered.
She doesn’t fully understand what has transpired, but she flushes with shame to recall it. Lucera cannot bear the thought of Borros Baratheon or his men knowing what her uncle had done, so she pats shaking hands on her hair and ignores the myriad hurts that scream in protest as she stands tall and tilts her chin up haughtily.
Lucera retrieves her blade, marches out of the Great Hall of Storm’s End guarding her secret, and mounts Arrax’s back. The dragon lets out a high, mourning cry. Vhagar is already gone.
“Lykirī, Arrax. Sōvēs.”
Girl and dragon turn toward Dragonstone, the torrent washing them clean.
Lucera can already imagine the shock and horror on her mother’s face. Daemon’s rage, always so dangerously hot even though she is not his daughter. But it is the possibility of disgust in Jace’s expression that pushes her over the edge.
Tears blend with rain, and when Lucera and Arrax burst through the cloud cover into the stillness above the storm, she has clarity of purpose.
She will not allow Aemond to use her against her family.
Wincing, she leans forward in her saddle and turns Arrax east.
Lucera Velaryon disappears for over a year.
The war starts anyway.