Daemon Targaryen, The Rogue Prince, is now married to his niece, Rhaenyra. He finds himself gaining a close bond with her daughter, Visenya. "All characters are over the age of 18."

Chapter 2: The Dream

The dream was not a dream.

It was a memory, polished by desire into something sharper, more potent. He was back in the cavern, but the air was thicker, the glow of the water a pulsing, bloody orange. Visenya wasn't dipping her feet. She was standing in the shallows, the water clinging to her shift, rendering the linen sheer. It plastered itself to the curve of her waist, the dip of her navel, the dark shadow between her thighs. Her sea-green eyes held his, not with uncertainty, but with a challenge as old as the volcano beneath them.

In the dream-memory, he didn't sit beside her. He walked into the water, boots and all. The heat was unbearable, scalding. It didn't matter. Her skin, when he touched her, was hotter. He grasped the neckline of her shift and tore it. The sound was obscenely loud, a crack that echoed like breaking bone. She didn't flinch. She arched into the rent fabric, her small, perfect breasts pale in the ghastly light, tips tight and pebbled.

"You see me," she said, but her voice was his own, twisted and deep.

"I see you," he growled back.

He pushed her against the smooth, wet rock of the cavern wall. The water lapped at their hips. He didn't kiss her mouth. He kissed her throat, biting the tendon there, licking the salt from her skin. His hands were rough on her breasts, pinching and pulling until she gasped. One hand slid down her flat stomach, through the coarse, wet curl of hair, and found her cunt.

She was soaked. Not from the spring. A different, slick heat welcomed his fingers. He pushed one inside her, then another. She was tight, impossibly so, a clenching, velvety fist around his knuckles. He fucked her with his hand, his thumb grinding against the hard little nub at her apex. Her breath came in short, sharp pants against his ear, each one a whispered fuck, stepfather, please.

"Tell me what you want," he commanded, his voice ragged.

"You. In me. Now."

He freed himself from his breeches. His cock was brutal in the gloom, thick and jutting, the head flushed dark. He didn't guide it. He slammed it into her, one brutal stroke that buried him to the hilt. She cried out, a sound of shock and vicious pleasure. The wall held her up as he began to pound into her, each thrust a savage punctuation to the roar of the geysers. Water splashed around them. His balls slapped against her ass. He could feel every clench of her inner muscles, a rhythmic milking that drove him toward the edge.

"Look at me," he snarled.

Her eyes flew open, glazed but holding his. In them, he saw the dragons circling, the fire of their breath, the utter ruin of every rule that kept them apart.

"Daemon," she moaned, not "stepfather." His name. A claim.

He woke up.

The climax ripped through him like a detonation, silent and devastating. His back arched off the mattress, a strangled groan trapped in his throat. His hand was fisted in the sheets, knuckles white. His cock, trapped in the confines of his sleep trousers, pulsed violently, spilling hot seed that immediately soaked through the linen, a stark, wet stain in the dark. Wave after wave of electric pleasure coursed through him, leaving his muscles taut and trembling.

For a long moment, he existed only in that sensory aftermath: the hammering of his heart, the slowing pant of his breath, the cooling, sticky mess on his stomach. The phantom feel of her, tight and wet around him, lingered in his flesh.

He turned his head, slowly, on the damp pillow.

Rhaenyra lay beside him, asleep. The pale curtain of her silver-gold hair was spread out, one arm curled near her face. The rhythm of her breathing was deep, even. Unbroken. She had not stirred.

A vicious, unworthy flood of relief washed through him, followed instantly by a clench of self-loathing so sharp it felt like a knife between his ribs. He stared at the ceiling, at the black damask canopy that swallowed the faint pre-dawn light seeping around the edges of the heavy curtains. The smell of their room—sandalwood from his armor polish, the faint, metallic hint of blood from a dagger he’d cleaned the night before, the leftover dregs of last night’s wine—suddenly seemed cloying, suffocating.

Fuck.

He carefully, silently, shifted onto his side, away from his wife. The stain on his trousers was cold now, clinging unpleasantly to his skin. The dream’s imagery refused to dissipate. The torn shift. The feel of her against the rock. The defiant, hungry look in those sea-green eyes. It wasn’t just the raw physicality of it. It was the rightness. The terrifying, primal rightness of her saying his name as he took her.

He had bedded countless women. Whores in silk houses, noble ladies seeking a taste of danger, his first wife in a political duty, Rhaenyra in fire and alliance. It was fucking. A release. A transaction. Sometimes, with Rhaenyra, it was a battle, a clash of wills and bodies that left them both exhilarated and bruised.

This was none of that. This felt like recognition. Like finding a piece of yourself you didn't know was missing in another person’s face. It was an unbearable intimacy, and he had just fucking dream-jizzed in his sheets over it like a green boy.

He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. The stone floor was icy under his feet. He raked a hand through his hair, his gaze falling on the decanter of wine on the table beside his dragonbone dagger. He considered it, then dismissed it. Wine would not scour this from his mind.

He stood, peeled off the soiled trousers, and tossed them into the shadowed corner. He used a clean corner of the bedsheet to wipe himself off, movements brusque and angry. Naked, he walked to the window, pushing the heavy velvet drapes aside just enough to look out.

Dragonstone was a monochrome sketch in the grey dawn. The sea was a restless slab of iron. He could make out the winding path down to the black-sand beach where she had watched him. Where he had felt her eyes like a touch.

They mistake your quiet for emptiness. That is their failing.

He had said those words to her. A truth. Now they echoed back at him, mocking. He had seen her quiet, her strength. He had not seen this coming. This raw, inconvenient, fucking devastating hunger. It wasn't just protectiveness anymore. It wasn't kinship. It was a need to possess, to mark, to be inside that quiet until she screamed.

A soft sound from the bed made his shoulders tense.

“Daemon?” Rhaenyra’s voice was sleep-roughened. “Come back to bed. It’s cold.”

He didn’t turn. “Go back to sleep.”

He heard the rustle of sheets, the shift of her weight. He could feel her eyes on his bare back, taking in his tense posture. “You’re brooding. What is it? The petition from the Gulltown Arryns?”

He almost laughed. The pettiness of it. The vast, screaming disconnect between the politics that ruled their waking hours and the secret storm raging inside him. “It’s nothing,” he said, his voice flat. “A dream.”

“A bad one?”

The best and worst one I’ve ever had. “A vivid one.”

She was silent for a moment. Then, with a sigh that held the weight of a thousand councils, she settled back down. “Your mind is always at war, even in sleep. Come, husband. The war can wait until the sun is up.”

Husband. The word was a shackle. He let the curtain fall back, plunging the room into near-darkness again. He did not return to the bed. He found a clean pair of breeches and pulled them on, then sat in the high-backed chair near the cold hearth, the dragonbone dagger in his hand. He turned it over, feeling the familiar ridges of the carving, the sharp edge of the blade.

He sat there as the room lightened from black to grey, waiting for the dawn, the ghost of Visenya’s heat still wrapped around him, tighter than any vow.

Sleep eventually dragged him back under, a thin and fitful thing. When he woke again, proper light was cutting around the drapes. The dream’s specifics had blurred, but its essence remained—a visceral, clawing need lodged deep in his gut. Rhaenyra was already moving beside him, sitting up with a soft groan, the sheet pooling at her waist.

“You’re still here,” she murmured, her voice thick. “I thought you’d be in the yard by now.”

He didn’t answer. He looked at her. The morning light caught the silver in her hair, the familiar lines of her face. She was beautiful. She was his queen. And in that moment, she was a utterly wrong shape, a wrong color, a wrong sound. The frustration of it, the sheer, fucking impossibility of his desire, coalesced into a single, brutal impulse.

He moved.

It wasn’t a seduction. It was an ambush. He rolled, his body covering hers, pushing her back into the mattress with the full, unyielding weight of him. She let out a startled “Oof,” more surprise than protest. Her violet eyes, still clouded with sleep, widened.

“Daemon, wha—”

He crushed his mouth to hers, swallowing the rest of her question. It wasn’t a kiss of affection. It was a claiming, a desperate attempt to overwrite one taste with another. He pushed her nightgown up, bunching the silk around her waist, his hands rough on her thighs. He was already hard, a painful, throbbing ache against her hip.

“Now,” he grunted against her lips, a command drenched in urgency.

He fumbled with the laces of his breeches. Rhaenyra, waking fully to his fervor, responded to the raw energy of it. This was a language they knew—the sudden, tempestuous clash. A welcome change from the recent, dutiful quiet. She helped him, pushing the fabric down his hips just enough.

“Someone’s eager,” she breathed, a hint of her old fire returning as she hooked a leg around his back.

He positioned himself and shoved inside her in one unceremonious thrust. She was ready, but not wet enough for such haste; there was a brief, sharp resistance before she yielded. She gasped, her nails digging into his shoulders. He didn’t pause. He set a punishing, relentless rhythm immediately, driving into her with a focused, almost angry desperation.

The bed rocked, the heavy frame knocking dully against the stone wall. Each slam of his hips was an exorcism. He fucked her with his eyes squeezed shut, the image of the cavern wall superimposing itself over the black damask canopy above his wife’s head. In his mind, it wasn’t Rhaenyra’s hair fanning beneath him. It was shorter, with a wilder curl. The eyes beneath him weren’t violet. They were a deep, devouring green, watching him with that quiet, all-seeing intensity.

“Fuck,” he snarled, the curse torn from him.

His hands gripped her hips, his fingers pressing hard enough to leave bruises, holding her in place for his assault. The wet, rhythmic sound of their joining filled the room, a vulgar counterpoint to the distant cry of gulls. He could feel his wife’s heels scrambling against the small of his back, her breath coming in hot, quick pants near his ear. She was arching to meet him, lost in the sheer physical fury of it.

“Yes,” Rhaenyra hissed, her head thrashing side to side on the pillow. “Gods, like that. Don’t stop.”

Her pleasure was real. He could feel her tightening around him, her body responding to the brutal pace. But her voice was wrong. It was higher, clearer. He wanted a different sound—a gasp moaned into steaming rock, a whispered plea for him, not for any god.

He opened his eyes. For a second, he saw Visenya’s face, flushed and open-mouthed in ecstasy. The illusion shattered as Rhaenyra’s climax hit her; she cried out, a sharp, familiar sound, her inner muscles fluttering around his cock. The sensation pushed him over the edge.

His orgasm was a violent seizure, a rush of release that felt more like rage than pleasure. He emptied himself into her with a guttural groan, his body rigid, every tendon standing in stark relief. He saw, for a blinding instant, silver hair plastered to a damp forehead by sulfur mist.

He collapsed onto her, his weight driving her deeper into the mattress, his face buried in the crook of her neck. He smelled her skin, her sweat, the familiar scent of their bed. It was wrong. Everything was wrong. The pleasure curdled into a sour, shameful residue in his veins.

He rolled off her, staring once more at the canopy. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped thing.

Rhaenyra lay catching her breath beside him. She turned her head, a satisfied, almost smug smile playing on her lips. She trailed a fingertip through the sweat on his chest.

“Well,” she said, her voice rich and warm. “That was a welcome way to break the fast. I’ve missed that fire. You’ve been… distant.”

She saw the fervor, the animal intensity. She felt desired. She did not see the phantom in the room, the girl whose ghost he had just desperately fucked. The deception was perfect, and it tasted like ash in his mouth.

“The petition from Gulltown will be a nuisance,” he said, his voice hollow as he sat up, turning away from her to pull up his breeches. “I’ll deal with it today.”

She stretched, unconcerned, the mystery of his passion solved to her satisfaction. “See that you do.”

He stood, his back to her and their ruined bed, the memory of the dream now a permanent, burning brand behind his eyes.

The week that followed was an exercise in siege warfare against himself. He threw himself into the mundane violence of training yards, the sharp clash of steel on steel a welcome distraction from the quieter, more insistent conflict within. He oversaw the repairs to the eastern dock with a critical, unforgiving eye, his barking orders keeping men at a distance. He fucked Rhaenyra again, twice, with a deliberate, controlled precision that left her satisfied but curiously watching him afterwards, as if he were a scroll written in a language she’d forgotten.

It was control, brittle and thin. Every glimpse of silver-gold hair in the corridor that was too short to be Rhaenyra’s made his gut clench. The sound of a particular laugh, light and unused, from the gardens below his window would halt his thoughts dead. The ghost of that dream-feeling—the impossible tightness, the defiant green eyes—would ambush him at quiet moments, a phantom punch to his diaphragm.

He found himself taking the path to the Dragonmont’s lower slopes more often, his feet carrying him there without conscious decision. It was the one place the noise in his head seemed to quiet, replaced by the deeper, older rumble of the earth and the shrieks of the dragons. They were honest in their appetites, majestic in their destruction. They wore no masks.

A week later, he found her there again.

She was seated on the same smooth rock, but she was looking out at the sea this time, not up. The wind off the water was brisk, pulling strands of her hair free from its simple braid and whipping them across her face. Stormveil circled high above, a slash of silver against the leaden sky. Visenya’s profile was composed, but her hands were fists in her lap.

He didn’t crunch the sand this time. He let his presence be known by the shift in the air, the displacement of space that always happened around him. She turned, those sea-green eyes finding him immediately. There was no surprise in them. Only a deep, waiting recognition.

“The winds are shifting,” she said, her voice barely louder than the surf below. “A storm’s coming from the east.”

“Storms always come,” he replied, lowering himself beside her. Not close enough to touch. The space between them crackled. “It’s the waiting that wears on you.”

“I’m tired of waiting,” she said, and the frankness of it was a blade. She wasn’t talking about the weather.

He looked at her, truly looked, for the first time since the dream. He saw the slight shadows under her eyes, the determined set of her jaw. He saw the girl who listened from the shadows, who understood the game but had no moves. The loneliness he’d named was still there, but it had transformed. It had hardened into a kind of furious resolve.

“What would you do?” he asked, his voice low. “If you weren’t waiting.”

She met his gaze without flinching. “I would choose something. Anything. Even if it was wrong. Even if it burned.”

Her words were dry tinder to the fire in his blood. The careful wall of his control developed a sudden, critical fracture. The roaring in his ears drowned out the wind, the surf, the distant dragons.

“Choice is an illusion for women like you,” he said, the words meant to push her away, to test her. “You are a bargaining piece. A vessel for claims. Your wants are irrelevant.”

A flash of hurt crossed her features, then it was gone, burned away by something hotter. “You told me I was a dragon,” she shot back, her voice gaining strength. “You told me my silence was a weapon. Was that just another pretty lie to placate the forgotten piece?”

“No.”

The word was a raw scrape from his throat. He moved without thought, closing the charged space between them. One hand came up to cup the back of her head, fingers tangling in the silver-gold of her hair. The other gripped her waist, pulling her toward him.

Her eyes flew wide, a startled inhalation parting her lips.

He kissed her.

It was not gentle. It was a collision. His mouth covered hers, swallowing her gasp. For a second, she was frozen, rigid with shock. Her lips were soft, impossibly soft, and utterly still beneath his. Clumsy.Inexperienced. The realization that this was her first kiss detonated in his brain, fueling his hunger further.

He coaxed her mouth open, his tongue sweeping past her lips to taste her. She made a small, desperate sound in the back of her throat, a vibration he felt in his own. Then, something in her unlocked. Her hands came up, fluttering for a moment before they gripped the front of his tunic, holding on as if the world were tilting. She began to kiss him back, her movements hesitant, then more urgent, mimicking the rhythm of his tongue with a fierce, untutored need.

The kiss deepened, turned filthy. It was all wet heat and clutching hands. He forgot the storm, the castle, his name, her name. There was only this: the taste of her, like salt and something sweet, the feel of her small body straining against his, the frantic beat of her heart under his hand.

He broke the kiss only to push her back onto the sun-warmed black sand. She went without resistance, her green eyes dazed, her lips swollen and glistening. He came down over her, settling his weight between her thighs, the hard ridge of his cock already straining against his breeches and pressing into the softness of her.

“Daemon,” she breathed, his name a prayer and a question.

He didn’t answer with words. He rocked his hips against her, a slow, grinding press that made her gasp. He could feel the cradle of her pelvis, the heat of her even through the layers of wool and linen. He did it again, harder, a desperate, rough simulation of what he truly wanted. The friction was maddening, exquisite.

He buried his face in the curve of her neck, inhaling the scent of her skin, of dragon and wind. “Fuck,” he panted, the word hot against her throat. His hips took on a frantic rhythm, humping against her like an animal in rut. The coarse fabric of his trousers rubbed against the tender juncture of her thighs with each drive of his hips.

She was whimpering now, little broken sounds she tried to stifle. Her own hips rose to meet his clumsy thrusts, a naive, instinctive mirroring that nearly undid him. One of her hands left his tunic to slide into his hair, gripping the silver-gold strands tightly.

The pleasure built, coarse and urgent, a tidal wave pulling him under. He was lost in it, in the smell of her, the feel of her writhing beneath him, the sheer, mind-shattering wrongness of it. His entire world narrowed to the pounding of his blood and the sweet, forbidden pressure against his cock.

“I can’t— Visenya—” His words dissolved into ragged, open-mouthed pants against her skin. His thrusts became jerky, uncontrolled. The coiled tension in his gut snapped.

He came with a shattered groan, his body bowing over hers. The climax was a convulsive, violent theft of his senses. Stars exploded behind his clenched eyelids, and the world greyed at the edges, threatening to go completely black. He spilled into his smallclothes, the hot wetness soaking through, a pathetic, desperate echo of his dream. His hips kept moving in shallow, helpless spasms until the last pulse of pleasure was wrung from him.

He collapsed, his full weight sinking into her, his face still buried in her neck. His breath sawed in and out of his lungs, loud and harsh in the silence between them. The distant roar of the sea filtered back in.

Slowly, tremors began to wrack his body. Not from cold. From the sheer, devastating release of a need held too tightly in check. He was laid bare, the formidable Rogue Prince reduced to a trembling, satiated heap on top of his stepdaughter.

Her arms came around him. Tentatively at first, then with a firm, steady pressure. She held him close as he shook, her fingers stroking through his damp hair. She said nothing. She just held him, her own breathing gradually slowing to match his.

In the cradle of her arms, with the evidence of his desire cooling stickily between them, Daemon felt a terror deeper than any battlefear. This was surrender. This was defeat.

And he had never felt more completely himself.

Her body beneath his was no longer just a shape. It was a landscape of awakened sensation, thrumming with a new, hungry awareness. The hard plane of his chest pressed against her breasts, the weight of his thigh still between hers, the fading tremors in his muscles—all of it was now written on her skin in a language she had just learned to read. She stared past his shoulder at the grey, endless sky, her heart a wild, galloping thing against his. What have we done? The thought was there, but it had no heat. It was smothered under the awe of feeling him, this sharp-edged, terrifying man, come utterly apart in her arms. The damp spot on his trousers pressed against her thigh, a secret, shocking confirmation. It was wrong. It was treason. It was the most real thing she had ever felt.

He finally stirred, a harsh, reluctant movement. He pushed himself up on his arms, lifting his weight off her. His violet eyes were dark, unreadable, his face a mask of worn stone. He looked down at her, at her kiss-swollen mouth, her wind-tossed hair splayed on the sand, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and wonder.

He opened his mouth, perhaps to speak, perhaps to curse.

A distant, echoing blast of a horn cut through the air—two short, one long. The watchman’s signal. Ships approaching.

The spell shattered. The real world, with its consequences and watching eyes, crashed back in.

Daemon’s expression shuttered completely. He rolled off her and stood up in one fluid motion, turning his back as he adjusted his clothing. His shoulders were tense enough to split stone.

“Get up,” he said, his voice roughened, stripped of all tenderness. It was the voice of the Prince of Dragonstone, not the man who had just trembled in her arms. “Go back to the castle. Use the lower postern gate. Don’t be seen.”

Visenya pushed herself up on shaking arms. The place between her legs throbbed with a strange, empty ache. She fumbled with the skirts of her gown, her fingers clumsy.

“Daemon—” she began, the name feeling both foreign and intimately hers now.

He glanced over his shoulder, his gaze slicing through her. “Not a word. Not here. Go. Now.”

The dismissal was absolute. It was a door slammed in the face of the vulnerability they had just shared. The awe curdled, ice forming around the edges of her newfound heat. She scrambled to her feet, brushed the sand from her dress with trembling hands, and without looking back, she fled up the winding path, the taste of him still on her lips and the sound of the warning horn blaring in her ears.