Chapter 7: The Deception
The power tasted different now. It was not the clean, sharp cut of a blade, but something thicker, richer, like blood pooling in a cavity. It was the knowledge that he could give a man exactly what he wanted while stripping the pleasure of asking for it. Aemond wore that knowledge like a new skin as he strode through the keep, the phantom taste of Criston’s release still a ghost on his tongue. A reward. Not for loyalty. For breaking.
His mother’s chambers were on the other side of the castle, a world away from the sweat and stone of the White Sword Tower. Here, the air was still, perfumed with dried jasmine and regret. He entered without announcement. Two of her ladies-in-waiting froze, their embroidery hoops hovering mid-stitch. A single look from his sapphire eye sent them scurrying from the room, a flutter of silken cowardice.
Alicent Hightower sat by the window, a ledger of household accounts open but unread on her lap. The fading light caught the silver threads in her auburn hair, the new lines of strain around her mouth. She looked up, and for a fractured moment, he saw not the Dowager Queen, but the woman who had once paced these floors waiting for a father who saw only a piece on a board, for a king who saw only a ghost.
“Aemond.” Her voice was carefully modulated, a instrument she had tuned over decades. “To what do I owe this… intrusion?”
He didn’t answer. He crossed the room, the sound of his boots swallowed by the Myrish rug. He stopped before her chair, looking down. He saw the subtle tremor in her hands as she closed the ledger.
“You are tense,” he stated, his voice flat.
A flicker of irritation crossed her features. “The realm is at war. Your brother is a husk. Forgive me if I find repose elusive.”
“I can make you forget,” he said. It was not an offer. It was a declaration of fact.
Her sharp, watchful eyes narrowed. “I do not require your… remedies.”
He leaned down, placing his hands on the arms of her chair, caging her in. The scent of her—jasmine soap, the faint, clean smell of her skin, the underlying bitterness of sleepless nights—filled his senses. “You lie to the court. You lie to the gods. Do not lie to me.”
Before she could form another brittle denial, he closed the distance and kissed her.
It was nothing like the knight’s rough submission. Her lips were soft, startled, then resistant. A muffled sound of protest vibrated in her throat. He ignored it. He kissed her with a deliberate, consuming pressure, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, fingers tangling in the intricate braids. He tasted the tea on her tongue, the subtle salt of her shock. He poured every ounce of his cold, chaotic dominion into that kiss, a conquest of silence.
She went rigid, then, by imperceptible degrees, she melted. A shuddering sigh escaped her nose. Her hands, which had risen to push at his chest, unclenched. One palm came to rest, feather-light, against the black velvet of his doublet. It was not an embrace. It was a surrender to a gravity too immense to fight.
He broke the kiss, his breath mingling with hers. Her eyes were wide, dark pools of confusion and a dawning, horrified hunger.
“Aemond…” she whispered, the word a plea and a condemnation.
“Quiet,” he murmured, his thumb stroking her cheekbone. He began undressing her with a methodical patience that felt more violating than haste. The laces of her gown yielded to his deft fingers. The fabric, a heavy green brocade, sighed as it pooled from her shoulders, down her arms. He worked without passion, like a man disassembling a mechanism. The linen shift beneath followed.
She did not help, but she did not hinder. She sat, bare to the waist in the cool air, her arms crossing instinctively over her breasts. She was watching his face, searching for the boy she’d scolded and nursed. She found only the prince regent, his expression as carved and remote as a statue’s.
“Stand,” he commanded.
She stood, her legs unsteady. The last of her garments fell to the rug. The firelight painted her skin in gold and shadow—the curve of her hip, the soft plane of her stomach, the neat triangle of auburn hair at the junction of her thighs. She trembled, a slight, constant vibration. Shame flushed her chest and throat. Arousal, betrayed by the glistening hint of moisture on her inner thighs, was its twin.
He led her to the large, canopied bed. She lay back against the silken covers, her body a tense line. He produced a length of dark, soft silk from within his own doublet—a blindfold. Her eyes went wide with fresh alarm.
“No,” she breathed. “Aemond, please. Don’t hide from me.”
“It is not for me,” he said, his voice low and certain. “It is for you. To feel. Without the burden of sight. Without the ghosts in this room.”
The logic, perverse and intimate, disarmed her. She believed him. She always believed her sons, even when they lied. She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
He tied the silk gently but securely around her head, plunging her world into warm, rose-tinted darkness. Her other senses sharpened instantly. She heard the rustle of his clothing, the crackle of the fire. She felt the immense weight of his gaze upon her nakedness.
“Wait,” he said, his voice now seeming to come from near the door. “Be still.”
She heard the door open and shut. A cold spike of panic pierced her. Abandoned, exposed, blind. But then she heard it reopen, lighter footsteps. His. He was back. Relief, warm and dizzying, washed through her. She heard the soft sounds of disrobing—the whisper of leather, the heavier drop of a belt, the slide of fabric. The bed dipped profoundly as he joined her.
His hands were on her again, different. Calloused in a way she didn’t remember, rougher. She attributed it to the sword, to the dragon, to the weight of the crown. He touched her breasts, his thumbs brushing over her nipples until they hardened into aching peaks. A low whimper escaped her lips. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, his mouth hot and demanding, but he did not kiss her lips again. It felt like punishment. It felt like mercy.
He parted her thighs. His fingers found her, slick and ready despite her fear. He stroked her, a blunt, thorough exploration that made her hips lift off the bed. “Please,” she heard herself beg, the word torn from a place deep and forgotten.
He positioned himself. The blunt, solid heat of him pressed against her entrance. He was bigger than she recalled, the sensation more overwhelming. She gasped.
And then he was inside her.
It was a deep, relentless, filling thrust that stole the breath from her lungs. A cry, sharp and unfiltered, broke from her throat. He began to move, and any lingering thought shattered.
This was not the careful, dutiful coupling of a king. This was a fucking. Hard, deep, piston-strokes that drove the breath from her body in ragged gasps. The bed frame groaned a rhythmic protest against the stone wall. His hands gripped her hips, his fingers biting into her flesh, holding her open for his brutal pace.
“Gods… Aemond…” she moaned, her head thrashing side to side on the pillow. The blindfold was soaked with her tears, but they were not tears of sorrow. It was a breaking of a dam. Years of perfect posture, pious words, and clenched control were being pounded into dust. She met his thrusts, her own hips rising to meet his, her nails scrabbling against his sweat-slicked back. She was saying things, filthy, desperate things she never knew were in her vocabulary. Pleas, obscenities, prayers all tangled together.
He grunted with each drive, a raw, animal sound. He fucked her with a frantic, starving energy, as if he could exorcise every demon in the Seven Kingdoms through this single, connected point. His pace was unforgiving, the slap of skin on skin a violent music in the quiet room.
Aemond stood by the hearth, his own clothing perfectly arranged. He watched, his sapphire eye unblinking. He watched the powerful muscles of Criston Cole’s back work as he hammered into the Dowager Queen. He watched his mother’s face, a mask of ecstatic ruin beneath the silk, her mouth a soft ‘o’ of continuous shock and pleasure. He saw Criston’s face, turned slightly, his eyes clenched shut in a worship so profound it bordered on agony. This was the reward. Not the act itself, but the watching. The absolute dominion over the secret hearts of the two people who thought they understood power.
Criston was losing his rhythm, his thrusts becoming erratic, jagged. “Fuck,” he snarled, the word ripped from the depths of his soul. “Oh, fuck, yes…” He was speaking to her, to the fantasy, to the decades of stolen glances and impossible yearning.
Alicent felt the change, the coiling tension in the body above her. “Inside me,” she chanted, lost, delirious. “Please, my son, inside me…”
Criston’s control snapped. With a final, brutal plunge that lifted her from the mattress, he came. A ragged, broken shout was torn from him as he emptied himself deep inside her, pulse after pulse, his entire body shuddering with the force of it. The sensation, the hot, claiming flood, triggered her own climax. She shattered around him, a silent, breathless convulsion that arched her back like a drawn bow, her cries trapped in the shuddering of her ribs.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their desperate, heaving breaths.
Criston slumped over her, his weight crushing, his face buried in the hollow of her neck. He stayed there, buried inside her, as the tremors subsided. Slowly, he turned his head. He opened his eyes and saw Aemond, watching from the shadows. The prince gave a single, slow, deliberate nod.
Criston lowered his mouth to Alicent’s jaw. He licked the salt from her skin, nipped lightly at her earlobe. She made a soft, satiated sound, her hand coming up to weakly card through his sweat-damp hair—his dark, not silver, hair. She was already drifting, collapsing into the void of spent release.
He pulled himself from her body, the separation drawing a faint sigh from her lips. He dressed quickly, his movements silent. He did not look at Aemond again. He slipped from the room, a ghost returning to its tomb.
Aemond waited until her breathing settled into the deep, regular rhythm of sleep. He walked to the bed. He looked down at his mother, naked, gloriously ruined, Criston’s seed leaking from between her thighs onto her fine silken sheets. He reached down and gently untied the blindfold. She did not stir. In sleep, her face was soft, unguarded, younger.
He folded the silk, stained with her tears and sweat, and tucked it back into his doublet. He pulled the covers up over her body, a gesture almost tender. He extinguished the lamps, leaving only the fire’s glow.
He stood at the door, looking back at the sleeping queen. The power was complete now. He held the strings to both puppets, their most secret desires now chords he could pluck at will. The victory was absolute.
It tasted like ashes.
He closed the door and walked into the darkness of the hall, the echoes of the bed’s pounding and his mother’s cries haunting the silent stone around him, a crown of thorns he had forged himself.
The crown of thorns became a harness. It dug in, a constant, aching pressure that was the only thing that felt real in the fog of rule. For Aemond, the days bled into a procession of strategies and shortages, of ravens bearing ill news from the Riverlands. The memory of that night was a polished stone in his pocket, cool and smooth, its edges worn from constant mental touch. He wielded it in the quiet moments, watching Criston Cole.
The Lord Commander was a ruin.
The disciplined stoicism was gone, sanded away by a single hour in a perfumed bed. Criston’s eyes, once bitter and focused, now held a hollow, hungry sheen. He flinched at sudden noises. He drank more, a constant, low-grade tremble in his sword hand that he tried to hide by clenching it behind his back during reports. He watched Aemond with the devout, desperate intensity of a starveling watching a man with a key to a granary. He said nothing. For weeks.
Until he broke.
He cornered Aemond in a secluded archway overlooking the training yard, the sounds of clashing swords a distant punctuation to his agony. “You have to let me,” Criston hissed, his voice scraped raw from sleeplessness and cheap wine. He didn’t specify. He didn’t need to. The wanting was a stink on him.
Aemond took a slow breath, letting the man simmer. He watched a recruit get knocked into the mud below. “Let you what, Lord Commander? Speak plainly.”
Criston’s face contorted, a mix of fury and utter degradation. “You know. Don’t make me fucking say it. Please.”
The ‘please’ was the key turning in the lock. Aemond turned his sapphire eye on him, a glacial stare. “You believe you’ve earned another taste?”
“I’ll do anything.” The words were a exhale of total surrender. “Anything you require. Just… let me have her. Again.”
Aemond held the silence, let it stretch until Criston’s breathing became ragged. Then, he gave a single, slight nod. “Tonight. The hour of the bat. Be clean. Do not speak a word to her.”
The gratitude that flooded Criston’s features was more vile than any hatred.
Alicent was waiting by the fire, a book of devotions open and unread in her lap. The jasmine scent was stronger tonight, almost cloying. She had drunk a full cup of hippocras, seeking a calm that wouldn’t come. Her body hummed with a treacherous memory, a phantom ache between her legs that flared at odd moments. When the door opened, she stood, a reflex. Her son’s silhouette filled the frame.
“You called for me,” she said, her voice too formal.
“You seem restless,” Aemond replied, closing the door. His movements were economical, precise. He approached, and she didn’t retreat. The space between them crackled with the unspoken thing, the secret that had blossomed in her bed and now curled, vine-like, around her every waking thought. “The realm’s burdens are heavy. I can offer you a respite.”
She wanted to refuse. The good queen, the pious mother, screamed to refuse. That woman’s voice was faint, drowned out by the liquid heat pooling in her belly. She gave a nearly imperceptible nod.
He undressed her with the same terrifying efficiency, his fingers neither tender nor cruel, simply functional. The clothes whispered to the floor. The cool air raised gooseflesh on her skin. He produced the blindfold, the same dark silk. This time, her protest was weaker, a token. “Must you?”
“Yes,” he said, and the finality was a comfort. She allowed him to tie it. Darkness. Amplified sensation. The rustle of his clothes. The bed dipping.
But the hands were different.
They found her immediately, claiming her breasts, her throat, her thighs, with a familiarity that bypassed exploration and went straight to possession. The mouth on her neck was hungry, biting, not kissing. She gasped. “You’re… different.”
A low grunt was the only reply. The body that covered hers was heavier, more solid, smelling of steel and hard soap and a faint, sharp sweat that was not her son’s. The thought was a splinter of ice in her fever, but then his calloused hand slid between her legs and her mind shattered.
He found her already slick, wet for the memory, for the fantasy. He plunged two thick fingers inside her without preamble, curling them. A sharp cry tore from her lips. “Gods, yes…”
“Shut up,” a rough voice growled against her ear, a voice deepened by desire and a lifetime of command. It was wrong. It was so profoundly right. The splinter melted, vaporized by a lightning strike of pure, illicit pleasure.
He removed his fingers. She heard the muffled sound of him spitting, then the thick, blunt head of his cock was pressing against her, wider, more insistent than she remembered. He shoved into her with one brutal, shearing thrust that buried him to the hilt.
Alicent screamed. The sound was raw, unfiltered, swallowed by the hangings of the bed.
Criston Cole was lost. The scent of her, the feel of her tight, wet heat clenching around him, obliterated every vow, every shred of identity. He was a starving animal at a feast. He fucked her with a punishing, frenzied rhythm, each drive punching a choked sound from her throat. The bed slammed against the wall. His hands gripped her hips hard enough to bruise, holding her down, opening her up for his frantic, pistoning strokes.
“Take it,” he snarled, his face buried in her hair. “You fucking take all of it, you queen…”
She was sobbing, her nails raking down his back, drawing blood. She was meeting him thrust for thrust, her heels digging into the backs of his thighs, pulling him deeper. The blindfold was soaked. “Harder,” she begged, the words slurry and broken. “Don’t stop, don’t you dare stop, fuck me…”
He was incoherent, a string of grunts and curses. His balls slapped against her, a wet, rhythmic beat. The coil in his gut wound tighter, a searing knot of pure need. It crested, ruptured. He came with a shattered roar, pouring himself into her in deep, pulsing waves, his vision whiting out at the edges.
Spent, he collapsed on her, the sweat from his chest slick against her breasts. He gasped, drowning in her scent, in the feel of her still clenched around him. And then he felt it.
A thickening. A resurgence. The heat of her, the clench of her inner muscles milking him, the impossible reality of being inside Alicent Hightower, refused to let him soften.
He was still hard.
A broken sound escaped him. He began to move again, a slow, experimental rock of his hips.
“You’re still…” she whispered, awe and lust blending in her voice.
“Quiet,” he ordered, his voice wrecked. He rolled his hips, then drove into her again. He was oversensitive, every nerve screaming, but the desperation was a sharper whip. This was a stolen prize, a miracle he might never hold again. He would wring every second from it.
He built a new rhythm, slower, deeper, more grinding. It was less about frenzy now and more about absolute conquest, about marking his territory from the inside. She wrapped her legs around his waist, locking him in, her moans continuous. He kissed her throat, her shoulders, his mouth everywhere but her lips, worshipping the vessel of his damnation.
The second peak took him by surprise, a deeper, more convulsive wave. He came again, a weaker but profound gush, a final, desperate claim. His body went rigid, then completely limp.
He collapsed on top of her, a dead weight, his face pressed into the pillow beside her head. He could not move. He did not want to. The world had narrowed to the heartbeat against his chest, to the warm, wet join of their bodies.
In the corner, shrouded by a tapestry, Aemond Targaryen watched the rise and fall of Criston’s back, the knight’s ragged breath fogging the silk of the blindfold still tied over his mother’s eyes. He watched until their breathing slowed, synchronized in exhausted satiation. Then, silent as a shadow, he turned and left them there, entangled in their shared, sacred ruin. The harness of thorns tightened, a comfortable, familiar pain. He had given the wolf a second taste of the lamb. Now the wolf would never be able to think of anything else.