#Car Body Painting in Dubai | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

goldcranes · 2 years

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LARCENY daemon x rhaenyra, modern au, explicit This is the first part of a fic I have lost motivation for. I may come back to it in the future, but for now this is what I have. It's unfinished and ends abruptly, fair warning!

After a lot of back and forth, I’ve chosen to swap High Valyrian out for Welsh. They have nothing in common linguistically, but in their comparative rarity and the pride their speakers take in them I think make them a decent match. Tolkien called Welsh “the senior language of the men of Britain” and took inspiration from it, and as George RR Martin is a Tolkien fan, I think it’s nice to bring it back in.

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The car pulls up outside while she’s cupped in the gables above her room, smoking a cigarette stolen from her housemate’s stash, prodding at her rage the way one might provoke a caged tiger. Her uncle unfolds from the driver’s seat, a tall line of black against the sidewalk, shoulders nudging broad through the open car door. His eyes lift to her almost immediately. Filings to magnet.

It’s been two years since she saw him last. His mouth pulls to the side, just a little. Hers pulls right back.

He doesn’t look away as she shoves the cigarette between her lips and slides down the tile, swinging in through her open window without a sound. She’s already packed. All there is to do is go downstairs, but she pauses in front of her vanity, tosses her cigarette, paints her mouth a vicious red. Her mother always advised against it. In that gentle, directive way of hers. Avoid black, my darling, and red. It’s a little much with our colouring, don’t you think?

Rhaenyra swivels her hips to check the fit of her black leather pants, tucks her black blouse a little more tightly into her waistband, pushes a black headband into her pin-straight hair. When she turns back to herself in the doorway, her lipstick is like a mouthful of blood. She looks like her uncle’s niece. Which is to say that she looks like trouble.

By the time she pulls open the front door, he’s lounging back on his car. Hands in his pockets. All the time in the world.

“Darling,” he says, his eyes sinking down her as she strides towards him. “It’s been too long.”

“Well.” She stops in front of him. Tips her head back to keep his face in view. “You’re the one who fucked off to Dubai for two years.”

His smile stretches. She’s missed that smile with a furtive and all-encompassing shame. It’s a smile that’s a wall. Behind it, him and whatever has amused him. Outside it, everything and everyone else. Her whole body heats as he pushes off the car and bends to kiss her, hand to her throat, mouth pressing right to the corner of her lips. Her eyes close as her fingers fasten around his wrist. Sometimes, she knows, she is on the other side of his smile too.

When she opens her eyes, he’s still holding her. Face too close. Searching her eyes. She gives him a smile of her own. Small and opaque and challenging.

“My bags are in my room,” she tells him, and pulls open the car door. “Top of the stairs, second left.”

He gives his surprise away with his stillness. Her smile stretches, and she closes the door in his face.

The car is new. “A coming home present,” he tells her, whipping away from the curb. “From me to me. Only released last week. A caraxes.”

“Aw.” She tilts her head, hair smearing up against the seat. “Dad not buy you anything?”

“His exact words of welcome when I got to the house were, ‘what the fuck are you doing here?’” Daemon’s fingers tap, tap, tap on the wheel. “And then he said he didn’t have time to deal with me because he had to come and pick you up. So I let the air out of the tires on all the cars I could find and came to get you myself.”

This, Rhaenyra thinks, is half the problem. Not that he’s said it or done it but that there is no apology in it. Just that familiar, idle possessiveness. The other half of the problem, of course, is that she’s delighted by it.

“It’s nice,” she concedes, leaning forward to run a finger along the expensive chrome of the dashboard. “No Tesla, but—”

“Christ. You and your fucking Teslas.”

“Just because you want to beat Elon Musk to within an inch of his life—“

“I want to kill him—“

“It doesn’t make the cars bad, you know that.” She slouches back, lets her head fall against the window, watching the New England suburbs slip by. The trees have oranged the last week, dropping leaves already clogging up gutters, a fall chill threatening in the early morning blueness.

“—all bullshit, do you have any idea how much money they’ve even lost,” her uncle is saying, gesticulating, barely watching the road. “But look at this thing,” he floors the accelerator even though they’re only barely sliding out of her tiny college town, neat front yards still on either side. The car surges forward with a jolt so intense Rhaenyra’s flattened back against her seat, adrenaline cresting, a startled laugh breaking out of her before she can get a hold of it.

“Yeah but that’s,” she argues, even though she’s still laughing, belly quivering, one hand on the door and one on the console, “any EV can do that, can’t they, my housemate’s fucking Nissan Leaf has torque like you wouldn’t believe, like—”

“Nissan Leaf,” he repeats, eyebrows and outrage climbing. The speedometer’s still edging upwards. He fishtails around a pair of parked cars, flinging her against her seatbelt, making her sputter with glee. “See your housemate’s fucking Nissan Leaf do this.”

They explode out of town onto the highway. One long straight line through the riotous trees and Daemon takes it like a runway, car flat to the ground like a greyhound, a look on his face so fierce and satisfied it makes her ache.

Rhaenyra gives up arguing with him about it. There’s so much they share and this is one of those things, the absolute joy of phenomenal speed. She braces forward, core tight, and leans into it like she can push them faster still. When she glances sidelong at him, eyes and body alight, she finds him watching her instead of the road. Gaze so heavy she wants to lie down under it and let it bury her.

“Here.” He pulls to a stop so abruptly the car’s tires screech a protest. Rhaenyra’s jolted forward this time, seatbelt bruising between her breasts. She feels the aftermath of speed like the prelude to an orgasm, fluttering through her, making her fingers curl. Daemon’s already unclipping his belt, pushing his door open. “Your turn.”

She doesn’t need telling twice. She shoves out of her seat, crosses paths with him at the car’s fender. Her hips tilt as she slides around him and his eyes go down and stay there, measuring, turning over his shoulder as she floats around the bumper.

Burning from the inside, she buckles herself into the driver’s seat. She has to fiddle with the ten million buttons on the side of the seat for a minute to bring everything up and forward, pretending to ignore his grin, that familiar limpidness settling down inside at her at the reminder of the size of him compared to her, his height, the length of his legs. The fact that her toes couldn’t even reach the pedals when she first sat down.

If he were her father, he’d sit there fussing until he’d touched every dial on the dashboard. He’d check and double-check her seatbelt. Ask her to ease into it, light on the gas, speedometer safe and slow.

“Get on with it, then,” says Daemon. She grins. Stomps so hard it feels, just for a moment, like taking flight.

They get home to a party in full swing. Lights glittering all up the snaking driveway, expensive cars tucked neatly to one side by valets, people in evening gowns spilling out onto the terraces and lawn.

Daemon takes them all in from the passenger seat, almost reptilian, his expression utterly blank.

“Fuck,” says Rhaenyra, and pulls the caraxes up at a contemptuous angle right in front of the steps. “I forgot it was Aegon’s birthday.”

There’s a valet already bouncing down the steps towards them, a nervous expression on his face. Rhaenyra stymies him by shoving out of her door and slamming it behind her, her heels digging into the gravel with a crunch.

Daemon slams his door too; Rhaenyra tosses the keys to him without looking. The valet’s throat works as he watches them arc through the air and smash, with a muted jingle, into her uncle’s palm.

“Trunk’s unlocked,” Daemon announces, eyes glittering with malice, “see her bags get to her room, won’t you?”

Rhaenyra ignores the valet’s begging look and allows her uncle to pull her into his side.

“Um, sir, if you – please—” tries the valet helplessly, casting a gaze out wide for someone more senior, unable or unwilling to make the challenge himself. Daemon tucks the keys into his pocket and puts his hand in after them, as if to underscore the point. Rhaenyra turns her face into his shoulder to hide her smile.

They go up the steps like that, perfectly matched, her neck in the crook of his elbow. He smells rumpled and sharp, new car leather and aftershave, the drive thick on him. His fingers move carefully over her collarbone, distracting, as the crowd parts in front of them. All of them sparkling, tipsy, champagne flutes in hand. Ridiculous, to have a black-tie soirée for a four year old’s birthday. Rhaenyra’s dislike for them all is an ocean, heaving with storms.

Daemon’s fingers dive a little lower and still. There’s a pleasedness to the angle of his body beside hers, and she knows he’s found the necklace. She will never tell him that she still doesn’t take it off. Not to shower, not to exercise, not for dates or sex.

He guides her left. She goes easily, content to be steered this once. Confident in his intent on causing a scene if nothing else.

They find her father and stepmother in the ballroom, resplendent in jewel tones, her half-brother red-cheeked and overtired in his mother’s arms. Daemon lets her go as they stride forwards, two ominous notes of black in a glittering rainbow. Still, their elbows brush on every step.

She always feels like more, when she’s beside him. Like she’s capable of all kinds of wonderful and terrible things.

Alicent is pregnant for the third time. It’s not a surprise – Rhaenyra stalks her Instagram during particularly low moments – but it’s still unpleasant to see it in person.

Daemon halts in front of them, a carefully measured distance away, so they’ll have to have the conversation loud and not discreet.

“Brother,” he says, sliding both hands into his pockets, tilting his head back. “Looks like congratulations are in order. Again.” His gaze slides onto Alicent, over her like oil on water, and back to Rhaenyra’s father. It’s that contempt for which Rhaenyra idolised him as a child and she basks in it now, the glorious wound of it, as Alicent’s mouth tightens and her cheeks colour beneath her blusher.

“Rhaenyra, I’m glad you’re home.” Her father’s number one line of defence against Daemon has always been ignoring him, and he deploys it now, hastening forward to clutch her to him. This tells her for certain what she suspected – that he knew Daemon was back. Has been hiding it from her. She disappears inside the hug, into the familiar comforting scent of dad, and allows herself the weakness of hugging him back. She loves her father. It would be easier if she didn’t.

When they part, she catches her uncle’s eye in passing. He’s always thinking, that brain whirring, unknowable enormities catching and clicking away inside his head. She blinks at him, slow and steady like a cat. His lips pull up.

“My niece is more beautiful than ever, no?” he asks of Alicent, slouching a little closer. All around, eyes go to Rhaenyra, measuring her up. Nobody much likes Daemon, but they crave his approval all the same. “College suits her.”

Rhaenyra says nothing. Shoulders back, chin tilted, her face blank and unforgiving. Her eyes caught on his, the mocking laughter in them. It’s the sort of compliment everyone can carefully choose to take as it ought to be meant. Proud and avuncular only, maybe a little possessive. Forgivable. They will all pretend the desire in his eyes isn’t there. Pretend she doesn’t glow in the heat of it like a coal in a fire.

“Daemon,” says her dad at last, quietly reprimanding, “as you’re here, we may as well discuss Dragonstone.” The family company, sprawling and many-headed. “Come on, let’s find Otto.”

He leaves Alicent with a kiss on her cheek, a warmer kiss for Aegon. He is a man compromised of many flaws, Viserys, but he loves his children desperately. Rhaenyra accepts the hand he presses over her head like a benediction, turns to watch him lead her uncle out of the room. Daemon looks back at her in the doorway. That wall of a smile meant only for her.

“He came to get you?” Alicent’s tone is a lesson in restraint. Rhaenyra turns back to her, flicks her hair over her shoulder.

“Yep. When’s the baby due?” She doesn’t care. Or maybe she wants desperately not to care. It’s hard to tell.

“January.” Alicent’s hand comes to rest over her belly. Rhaenyra watches it, has to make an active effort to stop her lip from curling.

“Do you remember,” she asks amiably, snagging a glass from a passing waiter and draining half of it in one gulp, “summer break, eleventh grade?” She steps up to stand beside Alicent, cups her half-brother’s head with one gentle hand. His hair is so soft beneath her palm, the same silver-blonde shade as hers. “We put our plans in that jar and buried it in the yard. I was going to make Forbes’ thirty under thirty before I was twenty-five. You were going to move to LA and win your first Oscar before I even managed that.” She lets go of Aegon. “We were both going to stay single and carefree and absolutely not tied down until we were thirty at the earliest.”

Alicent shifts her weight uncomfortably. Rhaenyra pauses, smiles, and drains the rest of her champagne. “I suppose you were already fucking my father by then.”

“Rhaenyra—”

But she’s already walking away.

The next morning, hungover, she puts on a short red skirt and digs the keys to her beloved syrax out of her dresser. The Tesla’s waiting for her in the lot beneath the house, gleaming yellow, more familiar and adored than any of the rooms in the sprawling mansion above her. Sliding into the driver’s seat is like finding peace. She runs her hands over the spotless white leather, the luminous buttons.

She takes the drive too fast, spraying gravel, and whips out onto the road like an oncoming storm. The car sings beneath her, around her. The thrill of it sets her whole body tingling.

Driving in the city is always bullshit. The only balm is the admiring glances her car earns her as she inches through the New York traffic, the syrax purring against the tarmac. She smokes through the open window, tapping ash out onto the tarmac, leaving a smear of red lipstick around the white filter.

Central Park slides away to her right as she turns into the lot. The security guard needs just one look at her face and hair to wave her through, reaching for his radio as she glides down the ramp and into the dark underbelly of the building.

Her uncle’s caraxes is charging in one cavernous corner. She nudges the syrax in next to it and leaves the cars beside each other, both an exercise in overindulgence, their red and yellow a fiery blaze in the harsh fluorescent lighting.

She hasn’t been here in years. Still she remembers it intimately – the polished steel of the elevator, the tall row of buttons, the one at the top that requires an ever-changing code. She rides it to the floor below that, navigates on pure memory, and slips out of the fire escape. Somewhere an alarm will be ringing. She takes her time regardless, up the iron steps and onto the sprawling balcony, expensive tables and chairs set at neat right angles to one another.

He’s cracked the folding window open the way he always used to. Rhaenyra eels through and shakes her hair out, pausing with the wind at her back to listen. The low hum of electronics, the stillness and quiet that only money can buy you in this city. Her eyes slide over the red wine rings on the kitchen counter, the splay of hundred-dollar bills on the monumental table, what looks suspiciously like the bloody imprint of knuckles on the industrial concrete wall that separates the living room from the dining space.

Footsteps patter somewhere off to the right, and she straightens up as a woman emerges from the corridor. Rhaenyra’s standing still enough that the woman doesn’t notice her at first. She’s wearing a man’s shirt – Daemon’s shirt, Rhaenyra understands immediately, her eyebrows drawing down – and nothing else. She’s young. Maybe her age. Around her size too. Her hair bleached too blonde, almost white. It doesn’t suit her. But it settles Rhaenyra still, to look at this knock-off version of herself and understand what her uncle was seeking.

“Oh my god.” The woman notices her at last and leaps backwards, hand over her heart. “Fucking hell! You scared the shit out of me.”

Rhaenyra just blinks. “Where’s my uncle?”

“You – who?”

“My uncle,” she repeats, tilting her head like the woman’s an idiot. “Daemon?”

The woman blushes bright red. “Oh, I – he’s, um, in bed still. I was going to make coffee.”

Jealousy flares again, armed and vicious. This stranger in his space, using his things. “Good,” she says, voice clipped and bored, “I’ll take a latte. No sugar. Oat milk’ll be in the fridge.”

The woman’s mouth opens like a fish. Rhaenyra leaves her behind without another word. Daemon’s bedroom is second on the right. She kicks her heeled boots off as she goes, bare feet cold against the wooden floor, and weaves around his doorframe like a cat. Daemon’s still in bed as promised, the duvet loose around his bare waist, one hand propped behind his head and an iPad nestled in his lap.

His face transforms at the sight of her, displeasure to surprise to delight.

“Darling. Come here.”

She goes. Of course she goes. Up the end of the huge bed like a child, crawling towards him, letting him yank her down to him. He settles her contentedly, her shoulder blade to his chest, his forearm looped over her clavicle.

“You disappeared last night.” His tone is faintly disapproving. His thumb strokes over the bump of her necklace. “I looked for you.”

“Went to bed.” She switches to Welsh. The language they’re all taught at their parents’ knees, a particularly Targaryen affectation, a scrap of heritage so old and buried it arises nowhere else. Rhaenyra’s never been to Wales. Still she clings to the songlike vowels and complicated consonants like a first-generation immigrant clawing for the feeling of home. Revelling each time she speaks it at the otherness it brings her.

She takes the iPad from him, flicks into the news story he’d been reading. The dollar is rising, the S&P500 looking promising, Dragonstone lofty above them all, as calm and unimpeachable as a cyclopean wall. “Didn’t particularly feel like celebrating.”

“No.” He joins her in the language he loves too. His thumb hooks into the chain, tugs lightly, so the clasp bites into the top of her spine. “How is the birthday boy this morning?”

She shrugs. “I left before they were up.”

He presses his face against the top of her head. She can feel the curve of his smile.

“You cut your hair,” she offers next, flipping to a new story. Relaxed there against him like she so rarely is. He laughs, a low thrum through the back of her ribcage.

“It was hot in Dubai.” His free hand lifts, tugs at the end of her hair. “You grew yours.”

“Mm. You like it?”

He doesn’t say anything. But his chest swells, like he’s breathing her in, and Rhaenyra smiles down into a thinkpiece on PwC audits. His bare skin is hot through the thin of her blouse, and she knows without needing to see that he’s not wearing anything under the duvet. If she wanted, she could pull it up and slip right under it with him. He’d let her.

“Oh, I—” The woman appears in the doorway. She’s holding three mugs, dark eyebrows peaked up, gaze travelling nervously over the pair of them. “I… made coffee?”

“Go on,” Daemon commands, still in Welsh. He takes his arm away, gives Rhaenyra a pat on her lower back. She casts a glare sideways at him, but she clambers over him anyway and slides to the floor, an impossible distance from his ridiculous bed.

“Thanks,” she says to the woman as she takes two of the mugs off her, her own latte and Daemon’s double espresso. When she turns her back, a startled noise follows her. Daemon grins at her, a cat that got the cream.

“You can go,” he tells the woman, flicking the briefest of glances at her. “Speak to Rick downstairs, he’ll take you wherever you want.”

“Oh. I thought—”

Rhaenyra hands Daemon both coffees, hops back up, nestles back down exactly where she was. The woman’s still just standing there, holding her own mug, watching them both like she has no idea what she’s seeing, like she can’t quite believe it’s happening.

Rhaenyra lifts one eyebrow. Takes her latte from her uncle and says, “Bye.”

Daemon’s arm settles over her again. His thumb swipes at her cheek, the metal of his signet ring warm against her neck. She smiles, settling deeper. The woman has been slowly pinkening; she flushes red now and closes her mouth. Turns around and leaves with her dignity intact. A sensible decision, Rhaenyra would tell her if she cared enough to, she won’t find what she’s looking for here.

“She seems nice,” she comments once the sound of footsteps have retreated. Daemon snorts and flicks at her, then pulls her closer so he can read over her shoulder.

His double espresso kicks in half an hour later and Rhaenyra leaves him arguing into his phone in furious Arabic, pacing up and down in front of his huge windows in nothing but a pair of designer sweatpants, gesticulating like he wants to reach down the line and strangle whoever’s on the other end of it.

He hangs up, swears viciously and comprehensively in Welsh, and dials immediately into another call. Rhaenyra slides out of the room with a smile. She makes herself another coffee, takes it out onto the balcony to enjoy with a cigarette as the city hums far below.

Dragonstone owns the whole building, from this penthouse to the underground lot where her syrax nests. There’s an empty apartment a few floors down with her name on the lease, she knows. She’s never been in it. The principle of it stops her – the knowledge that she’s her father’s eldest child, that everything his will be hers. That he promised it the day she turned eighteen. And yet Daemon is one week back on US soil – she checked last night, stealing through her father’s diary like a thief – and already he’s installed himself back here, in the roost that should be hers. Over and above them all.

It’s an odd thing, what lies between her and him. The understanding that one must take what the other covets. This unyielding tension, a bow drawn tight. Desire and contest and knowing, all wrapped up into something strange and knotted. Rhaenyra feels like she never quite grasps the full shape of what it all is. What it might be.

“Calon bach.” He’s done with his call. Loping out onto the deck to join her, prising the mug from her hand to steal a swallow. Despite herself, she preens at the endearment, little heart, her thighs pressing together. “Let’s go for a drive.”

He takes her to an airfield. A couple of sleek jets parked neatly to one side and acres of unspooling tarmac ahead. He’s been watching her the whole way here, his head turning in the corner of her field of vision, that busy mind racing. She’s managed not to look back once.

“Go on then,” she says, facing him at last, “show me what this thing can do.”

The speedometer tops out at two-eighty. Rhaenyra feels the speed all the way through her, electric, impossible. She’s laughing madly, braced in her seat, her hair caught in her open mouth.

“Okay,” she admits when he at last screams to a halt, breathless, hand pressed over her ribs, “yeah, it’s pretty cool.”

His grin was wide already. It widens so much now his eyeteeth show. “Better than your syrax?”

She pretends to consider it for a moment. And then she turns her nose up and says, “Nothing’s better than my syrax.”

“Blasphemy,” he tells her, but he says it through a laugh.

He drops her home, driving too fast up all the winding lanes. She’s still thrumming, the speed hangover like witchery inside her, tangling with being close to Daemon, tucked away inside the warm interior of his car.

Her phone buzzes in her jacket pocket as he pulls up across the steps. She slides it out and sees the name on the message, Harwin, thinks she might text him back later if only to have him do something about the wet ache between her legs.

Daemon’s jealous attention goes from the phone in her hand to the enormous house looming above them.

“We’re in trouble,” he tells her in Welsh, conspiratorial and irreverent, and leans across her to open her door. It presses him right up against her and she lets him hear the hitch in her breathing. He withdraws slowly, dragging his hand across her bare knees. Higher, she wants to demand, more. Instead she smiles at him, slow and languorous, and pushes out of the car.

Alicent is waiting on the steps, her green dress sensible and elegant, a far cry from the skintight jeans she put on so often in high school that she wore right through the inner thighs. She has one hand on her belly, the other holding her phone in a white-knuckled grip.

“Your dad was about to send a search party out,” she says as Rhaenyra comes up the steps towards her. Daemon follows, three steps back, tall enough they’re on a level. “We were worried.”

Rhaenyra rolls her eyes. “I’m twenty-two, I can do what I want. It’s not hard to remember, it’s only a year younger than you.”

Alicent takes that like a punch. “Please,” she says softly, “I never wanted it to be like this.”

Rhaenyra pauses. Phantom speed still thrilling through her, Daemon at her shoulder, his whole body coiled tight, waiting to see what she’ll do. She feels it the same way she did last night, with him beside her, like she really could do anything at all. She could grab Alicent and push her down the stairs. She could hit her. She could kiss her.

Instead she looks her up and down once, contemptuous and slow. She asks, “How the fuck did you think it was going to be?”

Daemon snorts. Loops an arm over her shoulder and draws her into the house.

He makes her a drink, way too strong, and pulls her down onto the sofa. His fingers slip back under the neckline of her shirt, find the thin chain of her necklace, pull it taut against her skin. After her first burning sip, he takes the tumbler off her and drinks too, his mouth right where hers went.

“Tell me about Dubai,” she demands, tilting her head back, letting him press the drink to her lips, feed her another mouthful. “What did you do there?”

His laugh thrums up through her. “Oh, I caused all sorts of trouble.”

“Dad said he was sending you to Singapore.”

“He was. I made new plans.” A beat, and then he drinks again, a swallow so long the glass is almost empty by the time he passes it back to her. Rhaenyra finishes it with a toss of her head. His fingers come off her necklace, lift to caress the soft skin of her neck.

“You missed my graduation,” she informs him at last, leaning forward to put the glass on the table. No coaster. Fuck Alicent. “I was top of my class. Dad was very proud.”

“You know I’d have been there if I could, dynan.”

Her lips curve at this pet name, a familiar one from her childhood, little woman, little wretch. She switches to Welsh to ask him, “Did Mysaria go with you?”

“Jealous?” he inquires in the same language, to which she responds with only the eye roll it deserves. “She did, yes. Not for long, though. She was in Milan last I heard.”

“Hm.” She settles back against him, her head on his shoulder. “Have I changed a lot since you left?”

He strokes down the side of her face, over her cheek. His fingers winding into her hair.

“Not at all,” he tells her, “and entirely.”

She tilts her head so she can hold his gaze. They’re slotted together, hip to hip, her side curved up over his ribs. He’s so long, stretched out, D&G pants an endless black line against the cream carpet, Prada shoes up on the table. That thing between them hangs in the air, ever-shifting, impossible to learn the dimensions of. If she were cleverer, she’d have taken this and turned it into something less fraught a long time ago. But when you get down to it, she’s really no better than all those hangers-on last night. Because she’s ravenous for his attention the same way they are, willing to do anything at all to get it.

The problem being, of course, that he’s ravenous for hers right back.

“Rhaenyra.” Her father’s voice is an unwelcome intrusion. She jerks upwards, twisting, and finds him standing in the doorway. His face, as it so often is, collapsed into unhappy lines. “Where have you been?”

“Out.” She stands up, one fluid movement, and stays where she is out of recognition that this puts her ass right in Daemon’s eyeline. “Is that allowed, or do I need to sign in and out with you?”

Daemon’s knee knocks into hers, quietly approving. Still slumped down on the sofa, he’s facing away from her father and the door, one arm propped over the back of the couch, louche and elegant in a way his older brother has never been.

“I’d prefer it if you took some security with you.” Her dad comes further into the room. The light brings the bags under his eyes into even sharper relief. “I worry about you.”

“We agreed no security now I’m at college.”

“You’re not at college right now,” he points out, tired, not eager to have this argument again. “But anyway. We’re having pasta for dinner, will you join us?”

It takes Rhaenyra less than a second to picture sitting around the huge mahogany table with him, Alicent and her half-siblings, and barely more time than that to let her lack of interest in the idea show on her face.

“Rhaenyra,” he tries, and she just pushes her weight onto one hip, presses her knee harder into Daemon’s.

“I left the syrax in the city. I need to go collect it.”

“You can do that tomorrow, surely.”

Daemon surges upright, stretches his arms back, cracks his shoulder with a wince of relief. “I’ll drive her.”

Her dad hesitates. It’s always been interesting, watching him lie to himself. The careful way he turns his head so he can tell himself he’s not seeing what he saw that day two years ago. His brief struggle – if he says no, does it mean he admits there is something here he needs to put a stop to? If he says yes, might he be granting whatever this is leave to continue?

As usual, Daemon takes the decision out of his hands. “Come on, geneth.” He prods her forwards. “We need to go if we’re going to be back in time for dinner.”

“Oh,” says her dad, an abortive noise that gives away the lack of invitation to Daemon. Rhaenyra smiles down at her shoes and lets Daemon crowd her right back out of the house. She wonders, as they climb back into the caraxes, why he even bothered stopping here. Why he didn’t just take her straight back to his place.

It occurs to her a while later, watching him in stolen little glances, some weird, performative Icelandic thrash metal over his speakers, that maybe he hasn’t changed all that much over the past two years either. That maybe he still craves her father’s attention the same way she does.

She’s wondered often whether that’s what drove him to it at last that morning on the Italian Riviera. Summer hot and green, her teasing him by the pool, lilting Welsh firing back and forth between them. His eyes on her behind his sunglasses, the little white triangles of her bikini. Both of them still hungover from her birthday dinner the night before. Her father inside somewhere on a call – Alicent, she’d find out later – and her mouth and head cottony with an expensive Burgundy.

They’d flirted often and unapologetically before this, a note of provocation in every conversation, the only way she really knew to talk to Daemon. Challenging him with every word: look at me. Want me. Love me. Never sure exactly how she meant it. What she was pushing for.

She’d made some crack about his girlfriend, about him being criminally unable to settle to anyone, then leaned on the fence, ass pushed out, her hair short around her ears and the glittering coastline spread out below her.

She hadn’t heard him come up behind her. All she’d felt was the sudden shock of sun-warmed skin against hers, his trunks still wet from the pool, his body all muscle up her back. He’d clasped the necklace on her then and there, wound his fingers into her hair and pulled up so he could press a kiss right to the top of her spine, over the thin gold chain. The antique pendant dangling warm and heavy above her breasts, solid gold and circular, the family crest engraved into it. A perfect match for the ring on his little finger. Undone, summer-drunk, she’d pushed back against him. His silence had said it all. His breath hot against her ear, all of him curled down around her, the spread of his body caging her in. One hand bracing on her hip, big and hot and owning.

He’d murmured it then, how can I settle for them, when here you are? Her heart had pounded, her body clenching. A blush spreading over her cheeks and down her neck, ruddying her tan, aware all at once of how badly she wanted it.

She’d turned fast, reaching, winding her hands into his hair. Up on her toes, searching, mouth open and hungry. Burning up even before he kissed her. Burning up more when he pulled away abruptly, his eyes ferocious on her face, his thumb pressed over her lower lip as if to hold her down.

And then her father had come out of the house, his fury incandescent. Daemon was gone the next day. Still, Rhaenyra felt the phantom heat of him on her for weeks.

Into the warm quiet of the caraxes, she asks, “Did you fight? Back then, did you fight to stay?”

The glance he slides at her burns. “No.”

The hurt is instant and all-consuming. She sniffs, turns her face out of the window.

“I love my brother.” His hands flex on the wheel. “And you were too young. If I stayed… you were too young.”

“And now?”

“Now…” he says quietly. And then nothing more.

They don’t talk after that. In the Dragonstone building, she’s retrieving her keys from his apartment when her phone rings.

She picks up just in time to stop it ringing out. “Harwin. I can’t talk now.”

Daemon had disappeared into his bedroom to change; the noise of rustling stops now, heavy footsteps treading over the wood towards his door. Rhaenyra’s still in the cavernous sitting room. She tucks herself just around the corner, leans against the wall so he can come closer without being seen.

Harwin’s already halfway to fucked up, downtown somewhere on a stag, his voice a little slurred.

“You can always talk, baby.” A wild yell goes up behind him, distorted by the line. “Jason got strippers in and, man, I was just looking at them thinking they’re nothing compared to you. Got me all hot and bothered thinking about you, it did.”

“Mm.” She’s hyper-aware of Daemon, maybe only a body-length away, of his absolute silence. She turns into the phone a little. “I’m at my uncle’s. It’s not the best time.”

“Sure, sure. What are you wearing?”

Every time he’s asked her this over the phone, she’s told him to come to her and find out. But today – today the penthouse around her is still, and she’s been wet since she slid her syrax in beside Daemon’s caraxes. She’s ready to prod this shapeless thing and find out where its boundaries lie. Find out if it’s the way it was going before her father sent him away.

“Red skirt,” she tells him, letting her voice drop low, “you remember? I was wearing it for that party at the start of the semester. We fucked in the bathroom.”

“Shit, yeah. Got panties on underneath it this time?”

She laughs. It’s a little forced, but who’s going to know apart from her? “Obviously. I told you, I’m at my uncle’s. Those black ones. Lacy.”

“Of course it’s those ones.” A door slams somewhere, Harwin’s voice suddenly easier to make out, the raucous sounds around him dimmed. “Fuck, babe, you’ve got five minutes, yeah? I’m hard as a fucking rock.”

“I,” she starts, and doesn’t get any further. Daemon stalks round the corner, face dangerously blank, and takes the phone off her without a word. He hangs up. Pockets her phone. He’s only got as far as putting on pants, the fly open, fury painted red down his chest.

She shoves off the wall, mouth opening, but he catches her and pushes her right back against the concrete. One hand at her throat. Not choking, not hurting. Just holding her there, his fingers and thumb wrapped right up into her hair. Her whole body goes loose in the hold, pliant, her eyes already glazing over.

He searches her face with furious intensity. He’s so close. Still not close enough.

“Careful, uncle.” She winches herself forward, harder into his grasping hand. “Dad doesn’t like it when I get hurt.”

He says nothing. He’s still studying her, that brain racing away behind his eyes. What would she have to do, to make him close the distance?

She doesn’t get the chance to find out. He rips himself away, anger crystalline in his face, and prowls back down the corridor to his bedroom. She realises only after a moment, sinking back against the wall, her heart pounding in her throat, that he still has her phone.

The syrax is silent. Rhaenyra’s trying to be casual about it, like she hasn’t noticed the way his knuckles are pressing up white. They’ve made it out of the city without a word from him, and she’s not feeling inclined to fill up the silence.

Carefully, gradually, she’s been working her skirt up her thighs. It’s slow enough she can make it look like an accident. Just the natural consequence of braking and accelerating. They’re into Connecticut by the time it surrenders to gravity and slips, silky, right to the line of her panties. She nudges herself down just slightly in her seat.

When she sighs, a world-weary sound she perfected age thirteen, Daemon’s head whips right towards her. She can tell from the stillness the moment when he notices her skirt. The tan of her thighs beneath it, the lace-edged black of her underwear.

His voice, when he speaks, is dangerously low. “Is that how it is?”

She flicks a glance at him. Gives him a smile – so similar to his own, bold and reckless and challenging. “I think you know that’s how it is.”

He pulls in a breath. Sharp and sudden. “There’s a lane up ahead. Take it.”

She ends up face down over the hood of her syrax, her hair in her mouth, long and pale over the car’s yellow paint.

One of her college housemates walked in on her with her ex, once, and expressed surprise later that night that Rhaenyra was willing to take it like that. You just seem like the dominant sort, she’d remarked, and Rhaenyra hadn’t known how to tell her how wrong she was. She doesn’t like to work during sex, not in any capacity. Past boyfriends have been either perturbed or delighted by this. Daemon is neither. He takes it simply as a given.

He has her wrists trapped in the small of her back, the fingers of one hand wrapped around them. He’s holding tight enough to bruise and she wants him to hold tighter still, to wear the manacles of his possession for days after this.

His other hand is drifting thoughtfully over the swell of her ass. “One day,” he says, and slaps it hard enough that she jolts forwards with a gasp of pleasure, “I’m gonna fuck you here.”

She mashes her cheek against the still-warm metal. “Not now?”

He laughs. Vicious delight. “You’d like that?”

“I’d like you to get the fuck on with it.”

“Of course you would,” he tells her, his belt jingling, his fly unzipping. Her toes curl in anticipation.

Criston used to go down on her for hours. Working her up and up, almost worshipful, like he couldn’t believe he was allowed to touch her. It drove her halfway insane, the disbelief on his face every time he saw her naked. That’s not what she wants from sex. She doesn’t want to be revered. She wants to be used.

Daemon doesn’t give her any warning. One moment he’s ripping her panties away and the next he’s pressing inside her, no warning, no preamble, planting his free hand by her head. It hurts, a burning pinch. Her breath punches out of her, a gasp of absolute pleasure. He doesn’t wait for her to adjust. He just leans over and takes, still holding her wrists, setting an ache into her shoulders. She’s moaning already, swollen and hot for him, so wet she can hear herself. It’s not long before he’s moving easily, splitting her open, parting her around the swell of his cock.

She’s had boys dirty talk to her before. Harwin in particular likes to hold her down and call her names. She quite enjoys that, though she’s never admitted it to anyone. All the times she’s thought about Daemon like this, she figured he’d be like that too. Call her a filthy slut, pathetic little whore. She imagined she’d like it. She imagined she’d want him to do it more.

Instead, he’s silent. Just the rough sound of his breathing, fast and then faster still. She isn’t sure why, but it does more for her than the dirty talking of her fantasies ever has. Her like this, skirt flipped up over her back, one heeled foot thrust against the forest floor, the other looped up on the bonnet to give him better access, his hips rutting into hers with a single-minded dedication.

He grunts, a low thrust of sound. “Can you come like this?” he wants to know, voice rasping a little, his fingers flexing on her wrists.

She wriggles beneath him, sets into the pull of her shoulders. “No.”

He straightens up, her back washed cold. “What do you need?” It’s businesslike. It makes her toes curl.

“More.” She arches her back so he drives a little deeper, as deep as he can go, deep enough there’s an achy pinch that makes her flush even pinker. “Like – I don’t know, touch my clit or something.” She doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to decide. Wants him to just take her body and shove it towards an orgasm whatever way he sees fit.

He lets her arms go. The sudden release hurts more than the hold did and she gasps, cunt clenching, as blood floods back into her shoulder joints. She feels every inch of her own skin, all the places they’re touching or nearly touching, the tingling electricity as he wraps his fingers hard around her hips and starts pulling her back onto him. She lets him, bewitched, her mouth opening on no sound as the feeling surges from her cunt all the way through her.

She realises, abruptly, that she maybe can come just from this. She never has before, but then she’s never fucked him before. She’s tightening, cunt clenching, breath coming now in high little whines. His rhythm is relentless. He smacks her ass once, twice, making her yelp and then groan, his own voice punching out in pleasure as she squeezes him in response.

Then he hauls her hips higher, reaches under, and finds her clit. Her moans stutter and fade, eaten up from the inside. Her heart beating furiously in her ears and between her legs. Her whole body coiling inwards. He bends forward, right over her, chest to her back. His shirt is hot against her, sweated to his skin. For a second, all she feels is his breath wet on the nape of her neck. And then he sinks his teeth into her shoulder and pinches her clit in the same moment, twin points of furious pain.

She comes so violently she can’t breathe at all. For a full minute she convulses there, voiceless, mindless, writhing beneath him as he chokes into her skin and comes too, swelling inside her, filling her up.

They stay like that for moments afterwards, breathing together, his heart hammering against her spine. When he takes his teeth out of her shoulder, it hurts all over again. She shivers pleasantly beneath him. Shivers once more when he pushes up and drags his thumb over the mark he’s left, the purple grooves in her skin.

“Hm,” he says, and pulls out of her. She hisses, sore and swollen, and flops bonelessly over to watch him tuck himself back into his pants. There’s a ring of pink on his cock and she feels her teeth bare at the sight of it. He just smiles at her. That impossible wall of a smile.

“Don’t tell your dad.” He flips her skirt back down. Ignores the exasperated tilt of her eyebrows. “Come on. Let’s go.”

They can’t find her panties so she sits on his 100% merino wool sweater and drips a stain onto it, pink and white, the rawness between her legs keeping her on a knife-edge of arousal. He can’t quite keep his hands off her, pushing up under her skirt, teasing against her bareness, taking every flinch and hiss with a crocodilian smile.

“Pull over,” he says when they’re close enough to see the house’s lights. He fucks her again in the passenger seat, pushing and pulling her up and down with his teeth gritted. It hurts more this time, quicker. She comes even faster and harder than before.

When they get home, she puts her syrax shakily in its space and convinces herself to walk ramrod straight, no roll or wince. Despite holding herself clenched tight, she feels his cum seeping out of her as she climbs the steps to the foyer, running down her leg in a slow warm trickle.

He follows her, at her shoulder the way he’s always been, looming tall beside her. Her dad comes out of the dining room smiling, eyes narrowed as if against the sun, the expression faltering only slightly to see them together.

“I have to use the bathroom,” Rhaenyra says, the pain inside her a throb, delicious. “I’ll be right down.”

It takes every inch of her will to climb the stairs without a fuss. But she’s a Targaryen. Wilfulness is what they do best.

At dinner, maxi pad lining a fresh pair of panties, Rhaenyra tries not to shift about too much. Every time she glances up she finds Daemon’s eyes on her, glittering. She’s still seeping him. That beautiful bruising pulse inside her like a voice begging her to do it again.

They talk carefully about nothing. A recent Dragonstone acquisition, Aegon’s birthday party last night, gossip about some neighbours just down the way who are going through their third divorce.

“At what point do you just give up?” Alicent demands, almost the sly teenager Rhaenyra used to know, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “Just say enough is enough, right?”

“Ah, but when you love someone,” says her father, smiling wistfully, “enough is never enough.”

“You would have remarried Mom a hundred times, huh, Dad?” Rhaenyra says sweetly, spearing a shoot of asparagus. The wounded look on Alicent’s face is worth all the gold in the Targaryen bank vault.

The rest of the meal goes the same. Daemon simmering in silence, Rhaenyra taking carefully aimed potshots at her father and stepmother, Alicent’s temper climbing at every refusal by Viserys to call her out on it.

After dinner, she goes straight to bed. Up the stairs, aching, pulling back her cuffs to examine the imprints of Daemon’s fingers, pressing them to make them throb. He takes the stairs after her two at a time, eating up the distance between them, and crowds her into her room.

“Dad will know,” she tells him as he locks the door behind himself.

The only answer he gives is to bend down and kiss her. He didn’t earlier, not once. Even when she rode him in the car they just slid their mouths against each other’s cheeks, breathing hot and wet. But now – now he kisses her ravenously. Desperately. His mouth devouring hers, licking at the seam of her lips, opening her up beneath him.

In one fluid movement, he lifts her, wraps her legs around his waist. She goes with a hiss into his open mouth, soreness spiking, and he grins into the kiss. So smug and satisfied she sinks her hand into his hair and pulls it hard, hurting right back.

“I can’t fuck again,” she’s despondent to tell him when he presses her down onto her childhood bed, the frothy white duvet. “Or I won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”

“Who said anything about fucking?” He tugs at her sleeve to admire the marks he left, already backing off the bed, going to his knees in front of her.

“Yes,” she says, delighted, rolling her hips up towards him, already reaching to wind her hands back into his hair.

His focus is predatory as he slides her panties down and lowers to her. He gives head the same way he fucked earlier – bluntly, authoritatively, no teasing build-up, no soft start. Straight in with a tongue so wicked she’s briefly glad he never made this move two years ago, because she wouldn’t have been able to handle it then, would have squirmed and blushed beneath him like a virginal maid.

“Fuck,” she spits out, suspended halfway between pleasure and pain, her clit swollen and throbbing under his tongue. She digs a heel into his shoulder, rutting her hips up into him until he lays one muscled forearm across her pelvis and holds her down.

It’s almost a fight. Her writhing into his hold, voice catching, twisting up into his mouth like she can force herself closer. Him firm, unyielding, taking her towards another orgasm by brute force.

“Oh fuck,” she hears herself panting, brightness inside her cresting, whole body drawing up and in, “fuck, fuck, fuck, yes, right there, right—” Her back bows off the bed as she comes, vision blurring, sinking her teeth into her forearm to stay quiet. He pulls off her, wiping his mouth, and stands hurriedly, unzipping his pants, pulling himself out and stroking hard and fast over himself until his hips jerk forward and he comes in hot white ropes all over her.

“Fuck,” she says again as she heaves for breath, watching him loom over her, working himself back down. “I really liked this shirt.”

“Huh.” He presses one knee onto the bed, pushes her leg down so he can admire the mess he’s made. “I like it better now.”

She sleeps better that night than she has in years, Daemon back in his own room somewhere, her whole body pleasantly sore and overused.

In the morning, she’s up early. Showers hot and thorough to scrub the smell of him off her, gets downstairs without too much wincing, and makes herself a coffee in the gleaming kitchen, sliding onto one of the bar stools under the warm yellow lights. It feels so strange to be back here, in this house. Alicent’s left her mark everywhere – the cabinets repainted, open shelving artfully arranged, pointless bowls of fruit posed on every surface. Rhaenyra misses her mother’s endless mess in a way she hasn’t for years, a sudden sharp ache that settles in her stomach.

A hand curls over the back of her neck, a mouth hot on her head. Daemon’s up too, also freshly showered. She smiles and turns into him, her cheek against his chest, and lets her eyes shut as his fingers fasten in her hair. Everything has changed and nothing. She is no less hungry for his attention and affection than she was yesterday. This thing between them settling taut, confining itself to a shape she can start to understand.

“Going running?” she inquires, pulling back to study his t-shirt and shorts.

“Yes. Then back to the city.”

Her disappointment is immediate and absolute. He grins, tilts her face up with a finger beneath her chin. “Come with me.”

“I can’t. Dad’s taking me to a bunch of meetings the next few days, it took me months to convince him.”

“Hm.” His disappointment, too, is clear. “Do I need to take you get Plan B first?”

At that, she grins. “How very responsible of you.”

“You stole my future as CEO, calon bach. You’re fucking well not getting pregnant before you’ve got the degree you need to do it well.”

“I didn’t steal anything.” She prods him in the chest, heat coalescing in her stomach at the implication behind his words, the yet she can read there. “It’s mine by right.”

His snort conveys his feelings admirably. But still he says, curling his fingers under her chin, his signet ring warm against the base of her throat, “So, a pharmacy?”

“No.” She pulls her face away, swivels her stool back round away from him. “I’ve had an IUD since twelfth grade.”

“And what were you doing to need an IUD in twelfth grade?”

She grins. Shoots him a heated look over her shoulder, through the silver tumble of her hair. “The same as you were, I’d imagine.”

“Ah,” he says in Welsh, grinning back, “that’s my girl.”

Alicent finds her on the terrace later, on her third coffee and second cigarette, sunglasses on and turtleneck covering the worst of Daemon’s handiwork.

“Is your uncle around?” she asks carefully, taking the seat beside her.

“Gone back to the city.” And he had, kissing her bruisingly in the shadow of the great oak tree on the drive, leaving her mouth tasting of him. She has a book in her lap and she turns a page, idle, wanting nothing more than for Alicent to go away.

The silence builds. It’s painfully obvious her ex best friend has something to say. Rhaenyra knew her better than anyone, once, could read every flick of her eyes and tilt of her lips. So she turns another page, sighs, and says, “Go on then, get it over with.”

“I’m just worried about you, Rhaenyra. I know you’re close with him, but – I don’t know, it just seems like a bad idea to be around him. You know what they say?”

They say a million things. One month GQ ran a glowing profile on Daemon at the same time the FT came up with what was, all things considered, a character assassination. Rhaenyra read them both back to back, proud as punch, trying to find the uncle she knew in the hero and villain the articles built.

Now, to Alicent, she just shrugs. Has another mouthful of coffee.

“He’s completely unhinged.” Alicent shifts on her chair urgently. “Nobody ever knows what he’s going to do next. Eventually your father will run out of ways to buy or blackmail him out of trouble, you know that. Do you even know why he’s back from Dubai?”

She rolls her eyes, trying to imply everything she can with the gesture. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care, doesn’t want anything right now except to not be here talking to her.

“He beat up a member of staff so badly they nearly died. The man’s still in a coma, Rhaenyra. He might not ever wake up.”

Rhaenyra just looks at her. Expectant, like she’s still waiting for her to deliver the punchline. Because – well, obviously Daemon hurts people. Not nearly as many as he ought to, the way some behave and talk around Targaryens.

Alicent’s mouth thins. “I know you worshipped him when we were younger, Rhae, but please—”

Rhaenyra snaps her book shut, pushes up to her feet. Ignores the delicious ache that spikes through her, radiating out from between her legs. For a moment, she stands there, looking down at her stepmother. The girl she used to tell all her secrets to, heavy now with Rhaenyra’s next half-sibling, one hand curved protectively over her belly.

“Fuck you, Alicent,” she says. And leaves her there on the terrace, like she means as little as Rhaenyra wishes she did.

#larceny #daemyra

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