Chapter 4: The night after their escape, Jaime claims Rhaenys with primal intensity against the cold stone of Casterly Rock, marking her as his as the castle sleeps.
The west welcomed them with a slash of rain and the thunder of waves against stone. Casterly Rock was not a home; it was a fortress hewn from the bones of the earth, a golden cage built on a mountain of gold. Jaime felt its weight settle on his shoulders the moment the portcullis rose. He was no longer a knight here, nor a kingsguard. He was Lord Lannister. And she was his lady.
Their chambers were vast, high in the rock, with a balcony that overlooked the ceaseless sea. The air smelled of salt and cold stone, a clean, brutal scent that scoured away the perfumed intrigues of King’s Landing. Here, the enemies were not whispers, but wind and wave. And yet, Jaime found himself erecting new walls. The guards at their door were his, utterly. The servants who attended Rhaenys were chosen from families whose loyalty to him was older than memory.
For a fortnight, a fragile peace held. Rhaenys’s body continued to change, her waist thickening, her breasts growing heavy and tender. The sickness passed, replaced by a voracious hunger and a deep, abiding tiredness. She spent hours on the balcony, wrapped in furs, watching the grey sea churn. She was a dragon in a lion’s den, but the den was magnificent, and the lion who kept it… he was a puzzle.
He was gone often during the day, buried in the business of the Rock—ledgers, mines, shipwrights, garrisons. But he returned to her every evening. He didn’t always take her to bed. Sometimes he simply sat with her before the fire, a cup of wine in his hand, telling her of the day’s trivialities. It was in these quiet moments that she saw the man beneath the armor of guilt and legacy. A man with a dry, cynical wit. A man who was trying.
One evening, he brought a gift. Not jewels or silk. A book. Its covers were worn supple leather, its pages thick vellum.
“The Conquest of Dorne,” he said, placing it in her hands. “Not the Maester’s history. A personal account by Daeron I’s own squire. I found it in the lowest library. It’s… unfiltered.”
She traced the embossed title. It was a gesture of profound understanding. He was giving her back a piece of her own history, unvarnished and real. “Thank you.”
He nodded, awkward. “I thought… you might want to know. The truth of things. Not just the songs.”
That night, the distance between them on the large bed seemed to shrink. She read by candlelight, occasionally reading a passage aloud about the Dornish heat or the cunning of the Prince of Dorne. He listened, his eyes closed, a faint smile on his lips. When she finally blew out the candle, he turned to her in the dark.
His kiss was soft, an inquiry. She answered by opening her mouth to him. This was becoming a language they shared, one that needed fewer words each time. He undressed her slowly, his hands warm and sure on her skin. When he pushed her shift up and bent his head to her stomach, she tensed.
“Jaime?”
“Shhh.” His lips brushed the taut skin. Then he went lower, his mouth trailing through the dark thatch of curls between her thighs. He parted her with his thumbs and licked a slow, deliberate stripe up her seam.
She gasped, her head falling back. His tongue was relentless, circling her clit, then plunging shallowly inside her, over and over. The pleasure was a deep, slow-building wave, different from before, richer and more diffuse. He feasted on her, one hand sliding up to cup her heavy breast, his thumb rasping over her nipple. She came with a low, shuddering cry, her hips lifting off the bed to meet his mouth.
Before the last tremor faded, he was moving up her body. He was already hard, his cock jutting thick and urgent from his body. He positioned himself at her entrance, his eyes glinting in the firelight.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice rough.
She did. He pushed in. The stretch was glorious, a filling ache that made her whimper. He sank to the hilt and paused, letting her body adjust, his own trembling with the effort of his control.
“Mine,” he whispered, but it wasn’t a snarl. It was a marvel.
He began to move, a deep, rocking rhythm that made the bed frame creak in time with the distant sea. Each stroke dragged against that perfect, sensitive place inside her. She clawed at his back, her legs locking around his hips, pulling him deeper.
“Yes… right there… fuck, Jaime…” The filthy words spilled from her, encouraged by the dark and the primal slap of their joining.
He grunted, a sound of pure male satisfaction. “You take me so well. This perfect cunt. My perfect cunt.” He drove into her harder, faster. The pleasure coiled tight again, a spring about to snap. “Come for me. Let me feel you.”
His command, raw and guttural, tipped her over. She shattered, her inner muscles clenching around him in rhythmic pulses. The intensity ripped a scream from her throat. He followed instantly, his own release tearing through him with a hoarse shout. He poured into her, hot and endless, his hips stuttering against hers as he emptied himself deep inside her womb.
He collapsed, his weight a welcome anchor. They lay tangled, slick with sweat, their breathing the only sound.
And then she felt it.
A flutter. A tiny, impossible bubble of movement deep within her, where his seed still pooled.
She went utterly still.
“Jaime.”
He heard the change in her voice and lifted his head. “What is it?”
“I… I felt something.”
Understanding dawned on his face, wiping away the post-coital haze. He shifted quickly, rolling to her side, his hand spreading wide over her lower belly. He waited, his expression one of fierce concentration.
It came again. A delicate, unmistakable ripple against the palm of his hand.
His breath caught. He looked from her stomach to her face, his green eyes wide. All the hardness, all the cynicism, fell away. He looked, for a moment, like a boy who had been shown a miracle.
“Gods,” he breathed.
He bent and pressed his lips to her skin, right where the movement had been. A kiss of pure, uncomplicated wonder. When he looked up, his eyes were bright. “A lion,” he said, but his voice was soft. “Or a dragon.”
“It’s just a babe,” she whispered, her own throat tight.
“It’s ours.” He said it with a finality that held no violence, only a staggering, newfound truth. He pulled her into his arms, holding her as if she were the most fragile and precious thing in the world. They slept like that, his hand never leaving her belly.
The peace lasted until the raven came.
It arrived a week later, amidst a pile of business ledgers. The scroll bore the small seal of the Master of Whisperers, a plain thing, but its contents were venomous. Jaime read it standing by the hearth, his face hardening into a mask of cold stone.
Rhaenys watched from her chair. “What is it?”
He threw the scroll into the fire. The parchment blackened, curled, and vanished. “A rumor. Starting in the capital.” He turned to her, his jaw tight. “They are saying the child is not mine.”
The words hung in the air, ugly and absurd. “What?”
“That you were not as closely guarded as all believed. That a loyalist, perhaps a guardsman with a fondness for dead dragons, found his way to your bed before we wed. That the babe comes too early for the timeline of our marriage.” He recited it flatly, but a muscle ticked in his cheek.
Rhaenys felt a cold rage, cleaner than any she had known. “And you believe this?”
“No.” The word was a hammer blow. “I know whose child it is. I feel it kick.” He walked to the window, staring out at the turbulent sea. “But Robert will believe it. He’ll want to. It gives him a reason to set aside our marriage, to take the Rock, to be rid of the last Targaryen taint once and for all.” He laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Cersei’s work. It has her elegance.”
The fear was back, a cold serpent coiling around the warmth they had built. “What do we do?”
He turned from the window. The soft man who had felt his child move was gone. In his place was the Kingslayer, his eyes calculating, his body poised for war. “We give the rumor nothing to feed on. We stay here. We secure the West. And we wait for the child to be born. When it arrives with Lannister hair and Lannister eyes, the rumor dies screaming.”
“And if it has my eyes? My hair?”
He crossed the room in three strides, cupping her face in his hands. His touch was firm, undeniable. “Then it is my child, with its mother’s eyes. And any man who says otherwise will learn how a lion defends its own.” He kissed her, hard. It was a seal, a vow written in flesh.
But the poison had been planted. That night, as he moved inside her, there was a new desperation, a frantic edge to his possession. He took her against the stone wall of their chamber, her back to his chest, his hand splayed across her belly as he pounded into her from behind.
“Tell me,” he growled in her ear, each thrust a punctuation. “Tell me who fucks you. Who knocks you up. Whose bastard grows in your belly.”
“You!” she cried, the stone rough against her cheek. “You, Jaime! Only you!”
He came with a roar, filling her, marking her again as his. But later, as she slept, he lay awake. Staring at the canopy. Listening to the rumors chase each other in his mind. The seed of doubt, once sown, was a subtle, creeping thing. It didn’t make him doubt her. It made him fear the world that would use any weapon to tear them apart.
He pulled her sleeping form closer, his hand returning to the swell of her stomach. The tiny flutter came again, a silent answer in the dark.
Mine, he thought, with a ferocity that would have scared him once. I will burn down every kingdom in Westeros before I let them have you.
The days hardened like cooling steel after the raven's news. Jaime’s presence, once a fluctuating current of guilt and desire, solidified into a constant, vigilant force. He drilled the guards himself in the yard below, the ring of practice swords a sharp, metallic heartbeat echoing up the stone veins of the Rock. Rhaenys watched from the balcony, the sea wind tangling her wild curls. She felt the child turn, a slow, somersaulting reminder of the life taking shape inside the fortress of his making.
He returned to their chambers one afternoon smelling of sweat and cold salt air. He dismissed her maid with a glance. The door thudded shut, a final sound. He did not speak. He simply looked at her, his green eyes scanning her face, her swollen body, as if verifying her reality against the phantom of the rumor.
“They’ll use anything,” he said, his voice low. He pulled his sword belt over his head and let it fall with a heavy clatter. “A look. A whisper. A servant’s gossip. They’ll try to get inside this room.”
“They are not in this room.” She stood her ground, though her heart thrummed.
“They’re in my head!” The confession burst from him, raw and frustrated. He ran a hand through his hair. “I see a guard looking at you too long. I watch a maester touch your wrist to check your pulse. And I wonder. Not if you betrayed me. But if they are imagining it. If they are picturing you beneath them while they smile to my face.”
She crossed the space between them. She took his face in her hands, forcing him to look at her. “Then give them nothing to imagine but your possession. Be so absolute it silences them.”
A dark heat ignited in his gaze. He understood. This was a language they had forged, the only one that burned the poison away. His mouth crashed down on hers, not with tenderness, but with a consuming hunger. It was a claiming, a branding. His hands gripped the neckline of her gown and tore, the expensive silk splitting like rotten sailcloth.
He backed her toward the ancient stone wall beside the hearth, the rock cold and unyielding through the thin shreds of her shift. His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her thighs, hiking them up around his hips. He fumbled with the laces of his breeches, freed himself, and guided the thick, blunt head of his cock to her entrance. She was already wet, her body anticipating this violent communion.
“Look at me,” he growled, and she did, her purple eyes dark and defiant. He slammed into her in one brutal, deep thrust, sheathing himself fully in her tight, clutching heat. The force drove a sharp gasp from her lungs. He held her there, impaled against the stone, his body pinning hers. “Whose cunt is this?”
“Yours.” The word was a pant.
He pulled out almost entirely and drove home again, a relentless, punishing rhythm. “Say it again. Louder.”
“Yours! Jaime, it’s yours!” Her nails scraped down the back of his leather jerkin. Each powerful surge of his hips ground her against the rough stone, a dual sensation of violation and utter fullness. The friction was exquisite, building a coiled, desperate heat low in her belly. “Only yours. Fuck, only you…”
He grunted, a primal sound of agreement. His mouth ravaged her neck, her collarbone. “I’ll fill you with lions until you forget your dragon blood.” His pace became erratic, ferocious. “I’ll put another in you the moment this one is born. I’ll keep you so full of me there’s no room for their fucking whispers.”
The vulgarity, the raw intent, pushed her closer to the edge. Her internal muscles fluttered, tightening around his pounding length. She could feel his balls slap against her, could smell their mingled sweat, could hear the wet, filthy sound of him taking her. The world narrowed to this: the cold stone, his burning body, the exquisite stretch and drag of him inside her.
As his thrusts became shorter, harder, a final, desperate bid for union, she turned her head and sank her teeth into the corded muscle of his neck.
The pain arced through him like lightning. He froze for a split-second, a sharp, shocked inhale catching in his throat. Then a guttural roar tore from him, part agony, part transcendent release. It tipped her over the precipice first. Her climax ripped through her, a silent, seizing wave that clamped down on him with viselike intensity.
That fierce, pulsating milking threw him into his own abyss. He came with a broken shout, pumping his release deep into her welcoming womb in hot, pulsing jets. He collapsed against her, his weight pressing her into the stone, his breath ragged gusts against her ear. He stayed there, buried inside her, for a long time. Slowly, he lifted a trembling hand to his neck. His fingers came away smeared with blood and saliva.
He looked at the red on his fingertips, then at her mouth. A slow, wild smile touched his lips—not a Lannister smirk, but something feral and approving. She had marked him. She had answered his violence with her own.
He carried her to the bed, his movements suddenly gentle. He cleaned the bite on his neck with a cloth, then tended to her, wiping the evidence of their joining from her thighs. The silence now was dense, saturated.
“Good,” he said finally, lying beside her, his fingers tracing her jaw. The word was soft, final. The specter of the rumor was gone, burned away in the salt and iron of their sweat and her blood on his skin. Outside, the sun dipped below the sea, setting the water on fire. The child stirred once, peacefully, in the warm, claimed dark between them.
The child stirred once, peacefully, in the warm, claimed dark between them.
But peace was a currency the realm had little of. While Jaime’s seed dried on Rhaenys’s thighs, a different stain was spreading in King’s Landing. Cersei sat before her mirror, the reflection a queen of ice. The sellsword, Bronn, leaned against her doorframe, picking his teeth with a nail.
“The rumor’s taken root,” he said, his voice a dry rustle. “Like you said it would. They’re whispering it in alehouses. Mumbling it in septs. Seems every other drunkard’s certain the little dragon whore spread her legs for half the Targaryen loyalists in the capital.”
A sliver of satisfaction cut through Cersei’s hollow core. “Whispering is not enough. It must be given a face. A name.” She turned from the mirror, her eyes boring into him. “Find one. A guardsman from the old Red Keep garrison. Someone impressionable, preferably in debt. He will remember a night of passion. He will describe the color of her nipples, the sound she made when he fucked her.”
Bronn’s eyebrows lifted. “And if he’s never seen her?”
“Then you will describe her to him. In precise detail. And you will make him believe the memory is his own.” She stood, gliding toward him. The scent of her was oppressive. “Gold can do that. Or a knife. Use whichever he understands best.”
“And after he confesses to cuckolding the Kingslayer?”
“He will not live to see the sunset after his confession.” She smiled, a thin curve of lips. “A guilty conscience, leading to suicide. A tragic end to a sordid tale. The truth dies with him, but the doubt… the doubt remains, a gift to my brother.”
Bronn nodded, a pragmatic gleam in his eye. “Costs extra. Creating memories and then silencing them is messy work.”
“You’ll be paid from the royal treasury. See it done.” She dismissed him with a flick of her wrist. As the door closed, she poured a cup of wine, her mind already leaping ahead. A named confessor was a good weapon, but it was blunt. She needed something finer, something that would cut Jaime to his soul.
Her thoughts returned to the clearing, to the sight of his hand splayed on that swollen belly. The child. The living proof. A plan, cold and intricate, began to assemble itself in her mind. It would require a different sort of agent. Not a sellsword, but a healer. Someone with access.
She summoned a different sort of creature next: a nervous, twittering maester from the Citadel, recently attached to the royal household. His name was Ollidor, and his fingers were stained with ink and the faint, sweet smell of nightshade.
“The Queen Regent requires a specific tincture,” she said, her voice low and confiding. “For a lady’s delicate condition. To ensure robust health. You understand.”
Maester Ollidor paled. “Your Grace, I… my vows…”
“Your vows are to serve the realm. I am the realm.” She placed a heavy purse on the table between them. The coins inside were Lannister gold, not royal. A personal touch. “It is a simple thing. A blend of moon tea and pennyroyal, but… weakened. Just enough to cause discomfort. To suggest a weakness in the womb. To make a birth seem perilously premature, no matter when it occurs.”
The maester’s eyes were locked on the purse. “Weakened? But the dosage would be…”
“You will perfect it. You will send a supply to Casterly Rock, with my compliments and well-wishes for my good-sister’s health. It will be lost amongst other tonics.” She leaned forward. “No one will be harmed. We merely shape a story. The story of a sickly, early babe, whose timing is… unfortunate.”
She saw the moment he broke. It was in the slight sag of his shoulders. He took the purse.
“A wise man.” Cersei took a sip of wine. “The raven carrying your instructions flies tonight. See that your mixture follows within the fortnight.”
Alone again, she walked to her window, overlooking the city. Two strands of the web were now spun. A sordid confession to shame the mother. A medical trick to cast doubt on the child. But the master stroke, the one that would truly break Jaime, required patience. It required the child to be born alive.
She needed someone inside the Rock itself. Not a guard, who Jaime would scrutinize. A woman. A maid, or better, a midwife. Someone who could be there in the blood and chaos of the birthing chamber, who could hold the squalling, violet-eyed thing and whisper the final poison in Jaime’s ear at his moment of triumph.
It doesn’t look like you, the woman would say, her face a mask of pity. Look at those eyes. So dark. Like the sellsword who confessed.
Cersei’s reflection in the window glass smiled back at her, a phantom in the gathering dusk. The plot was no longer a single thread, but a tapestry of ruin. She would weave it until Jaime’s newfound certainty unraveled into screaming, helpless doubt. He would look at his child and see her vengeance.
And then, he would have nothing. Nothing but her.