***
The mirror was a rare luxury in the North—polished Myrish glass, clear and unforgiving, worth more than most smallfolk earned in a year. It hung on the wall of Castor's chambers, reflecting back a face that was his and yet somehow stranger than the one he'd worn before the Lonely Hills.
He stood naked to the waist, candlelight flickering across scarred skin as he studied what the ravens had left behind.
Four furrows. Deep, jagged, running from his left temple down across his cheek to terminate at the edge of his jawline. The wounds had healed over the past weeks, stitches removed three days ago, but the tissue remained angry—silver-pink and puckered where flesh had been torn and forced back together. The edges were still tender, the nerves underneath firing phantom sensations that made his face itch in ways he couldn't scratch.
Castor reached up slowly, fingertips hovering over the topmost scar. When he made contact, the sensation was strange—part numbness, part hypersensitivity.
The scar tissue felt different from the surrounding skin, thicker and tighter, like leather pulled taut over bone. He traced the furrow down, feeling where it crossed his cheekbone, where it carved through the meat of his cheek, where it ended just shy of his jaw.
In his past life as Vikram Malhotra, this would have been catastrophe. A disfigurement that would have ended his conquest of Delhi's elite circles, that would have marked him as damaged goods in a world that valued physical perfection alongside intellectual achievement. He'd have paid fortunes for reconstructive surgery, spent months obsessing over every imperfection visible in mirrors and photographs and the eyes of women who no longer found him flawless.
But here, in the cold stone of the Dreadfort, Castor found he didn't mind the scars at all.
They're a receipt, he thought, studying the marks with something approaching satisfaction. Proof of payment for surviving something that should have killed me. For facing down a god and walking away with power stolen from his broken mind.
The scars were a ledger written in skin—ten men's lives, three days of fever, the price of gold and magic and knowledge that no living person should possess. Every time he looked in the mirror now, he'd remember the void, the weirwood, the ancient thing called Bloodraven screaming as alien consciousness tore through his network of sight and power.
Worth it. Every fucking inch of scar tissue was worth it.
Movement in the reflection caught his attention—not in the room, but deeper. Castor's eyes unfocused slightly, his breathing evening out as he let his awareness drift outward. The gift that had awakened in that confrontation hummed beneath his scarred skin, constant as a second heartbeat.
He felt them. The rats in the walls.
His consciousness brushed against theirs—tiny sparks of animal awareness, driven by simple needs. Hunger. Safety. The endless search for food and shelter that consumed their small lives. There, behind the stone two rooms over, a nest of them huddled in the space between walls. He could feel their warmth pressed together, the rapid patter of their hearts, the way they twitched and rustled in sleep.
Castor pushed his awareness further, testing. Up through the keep, past his chambers, toward the rookery three towers away. The ravens were harder—their minds moved faster, thought in patterns that didn't translate easily to human consciousness. But he found them anyway, dozens of black-feathered bodies roosting in the dark, heads tucked beneath wings. One stirred as his presence brushed against it, and for a moment he saw through its eyes—the wooden perches, the sleeping forms of other birds, the square of night sky visible through the rookery window.
The world felt thin. That was the only way to describe it. Like the boundary between his consciousness and everything else had worn gossamer-thin, ready to tear at the slightest pressure. He could slip through that boundary now, slide into animal minds with practice that grew easier every day.
Bloodraven had this, Castor thought, pulling his awareness back into his own skull. A network of eyes across the entire realm, seeing through weirwoods and ravens and every beast that moved. But he was spread too thin, too extended. Made him vulnerable when something pushed back.
The headache bloomed behind Castor's eyes—sharp and immediate, price for using the gift. He grimaced, pressing his palm against his forehead, feeling the scar tissue pull tight with the expression. The pain would fade in minutes, but it was a reminder.
A warning.
This power wasn't free. Push too far, stay out too long, and he might not find his way back.
He'd nearly lost himself in a raven two nights ago, the freedom of flight so intoxicating that he'd forgotten what it meant to have hands instead of talons, to think in words instead of instinct and hunger.
Only the desperate clutching at his own identity—
I am Castor Bolton, I am human, I have purpose beyond this
—had dragged him back into his own flesh.
Dangerous.
Addictive.
Invaluable.
Worth the risk, he decided, studying his reflection. Every tool has a cost. This one just happens to be measured in sanity and the chance of losing myself entirely. Small price for perfect intelligence and control.
The chamber door opened without ceremony. Bethany Bolton entered, and Castor didn't turn from the mirror. Just watched her reflection as she closed the door behind her with careful quietness.
She'd changed in the months since he'd taken her on his nameday. Still beautiful—the Blackwood blood gave her that, dark hair and fine features that age had only refined—but now there was something else.
A glow, people called it.
The particular radiance that came with new life growing beneath the heart.
Her hand went to her belly before she'd taken three steps into the room. Instinctive, protective, the gesture of every pregnant woman since the first humans had learned what swelling bellies meant.
Beneath the loose robe she wore—dark blue velvet that pooled around her feet—the curve was visible now. Small but undeniable. Two and a half months along, the maester had said. Right on schedule for a child conceived on Castor's sixteenth nameday.
My child, he thought, watching her approach in the mirror's reflection. Growing in my mother's womb. The kind of thing that would get us both executed in civilized places. But this isn't a civilized place. This is the North. This is the Dreadfort. And here, in these walls, power matters more than morality.
Bethany moved behind him, her reflection joining his in the glass. Her eyes—pale grey like his but without the violet patterns inherited from distant Valyrian blood—tracked over his scars with an expression that wasn't horror or pity.
It was worship.
"You're staring at them again," she said softly, her hand lifting to hover near his shoulder but not quite touching. Waiting for permission.
"They're new," Castor replied, his voice neutral. "Takes time to adjust to a face that's not the one you've been wearing."
"The maester says the redness will fade." Her fingers finally made contact, ghosting across unmarked skin near the scars but not the damaged tissue itself. "Within a year, they'll be silver lines. Distinguished, he said. Marks of survival."
Castor turned to face her, breaking the mirror's spell. Up close, the changes in her were more pronounced. Her breasts were fuller beneath the robe, preparing for what would come. Her face had softened slightly, the sharp angles of cheekbone and jaw gentled by pregnancy hormones.
And her scent had changed—something about the way pregnant women smelled was different, sweeter somehow, marking them as vessels for new life.
"Let them stay red," he said quietly, catching her wrist and guiding her hand to his face, pressing her palm against the furrows.
The pressure sent those strange mixed signals through damaged nerves—numbness and hypersensitivity warring. "The men need to see them. Need to remember I bled with them in those hills. That their lord stood when ten of their brothers fell."
Bethany's eyes searched his, understanding dawning.
"Shared trauma," she murmured. "A chain stronger than fear alone."
"Fear keeps men obedient," Castor agreed, his thumb stroking the inside of her wrist where her pulse beat steady and strong. "But shared suffering? Shared survival? That makes them worship. They'll follow me into the seven hells now, because I've already walked through them at their side."
She smiled then—proud, possessive, the expression of a mother watching her child demonstrate brilliance. Except the pride was mixed with other things, darker things, the kind of emotions that shouldn't exist between mother and son but had become their reality anyway.
"You're perfect," Bethany whispered, her free hand moving to rest on the small swell of her belly. "Everything I hoped you'd become. Everything Roose never was. Strong and cunning and cruel when you need to be, but brilliant enough to make that cruelty purposeful."
She's fully corrupted, Castor thought, studying her face. No shame, no guilt, no horror at what we've done. She loves this. Loves that I took her, loves that she's carrying my child, loves being part of whatever I'm building here.
"Come here," he said, and she stepped closer immediately, her body pressing against his bare chest. His hands moved to her hips, feeling the subtle changes pregnancy had brought—wider, softer, preparing to bear the weight of the child growing inside her.
Bethany tilted her face up for a kiss, but Castor paused with his lips inches from hers. "Tell me," he commanded softly. "Tell me what you are."
Her breath hitched, pupils dilating with arousal and something deeper. "Yours," she breathed.
"Mother and lover and vessel for your will. Yours, completely and permanently."
Good answer.
He kissed her then, hard and claiming, his tongue pushing past her lips to taste her. She melted against him with a soft sound of need, her hands clutching at his shoulders. When he finally pulled back, her breathing was uneven, her face flushed.
"The child?" he asked, his hand moving to cover hers on her belly.
"Growing strong." Joy suffused her features, pure maternal pride untainted by shame.
"The maester examined me yesterday. Everything is perfect. Healthy heartbeat, good position, no complications." She pressed his hand more firmly against the swell. "Our child thrives, Castor. The fruit of what we created together."
Our child.
She said it so naturally, so proudly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. As if there were nothing wrong with a mother carrying her son's baby, nothing twisted about the incestuous pregnancy hidden beneath the fiction of Roose's posthumous gift.
The world was so fucked up. And Castor loved every goddamn minute of it.
***
Bethany's fingers trailed from the swell of her belly to his chest, mapping the hard planes of muscle with a touch that claimed as much as it caressed.
"I need you," she breathed against the hollow of his throat, her lips ghosting over the throb of his pulse. "This child quickens everything within me. I wake in the night hungering for you, for the weight of you upon me. Even by day, my thoughts stray to that first claiming—how you made me yours, body and soul."
Castor cupped her chin, lifting her gaze to his. Her eyes, dark as weirwood leaves, held a fire that tugged at the edges of his control, stirring something deeper than mere possession. "Does it torment you, what we have wrought?"
"Nay." The denial came swift and sharp, like a blade drawn. "Why should it? You are of my blood. My son. The only man to stir such flames in me—to make me feel desired, potent, alive beyond measure."
Her hand ventured lower, fingers working the clasp of his belt with the ease of long familiarity.
"Roose took me as one might a duty owed—cold, precise, as in all his leechings. But you... you set my blood to boiling."
These quickening hormones twist her Blackwood madness into a blaze, Castor thought, even as heat coiled low in his gut at her nearness. She yields not from weakness, but from a craving that mirrors my own hunger.
He seized her wrist, stilling her—not in refusal, for his cock stirred thick and insistent against the wool of his breeches—but to hold the reins firm. "The maester. Does he harbor suspicions?"
Bethany's laugh rolled low, a conspirator's murmur that warmed the chill air.
"Tybald accepts our tale without question. Believes Roose sowed this seed in his final hours. He named it a 'gift of the gods,' a mercy from the Stranger himself." Her eyes gleamed with shadowed mirth, the Bolton cruelty peeking through her Blackwood grace.
"If the pious dotard knew the true sire, he'd choke on his own inks."
She wrenched her wrist free and loosed the belt, her palm sliding within to enfold his length in a grip both bold and knowing.
"I told him the flux took me hard in those last days, that we lay together the eve he weakened. He scrawled it in his ledgers, unquestioning. To the Seven Kingdoms, this babe is my lord husband's dying legacy."
"And at the birthing?" Castor pressed, a rough edge to his voice as her hand worked him with slow, deliberate pulls. "If the hair gleams silver-gold, not dark as his? If the eyes bear my stamp over Roose's?"
Her fingers tightened, stroking with intent. "We shall lay it to my grandsire's blood. The Blackwoods carry echoes of old Valyria—faint, yet writ in the chronicles. I shall weep as a widow ought, claim the gods have granted me a child in my own likeness, sparing me the sight of Roose's weathered visage." She drew near, her breath a hot whisper against his ear. "No man questions a lady's grief. I shall see it sealed."
She has foreseen every snare, Castor knew, his hips shifting into her rhythm unbidden. Not merely ensnared by desire—she stands as my confederate now, sharp as any flaying knife.
"Well played," he growled, the words gravel-thick. His hands found the sash of her robe, tugging it undone;
the heavy velvet slithered to the rushes at her feet, baring her to the hearth's glow.
The marks of her quickening showed plain: breasts grown full and taut, nipples shadowed deeper, aching at the brush of air.
The gentle rise of her belly drew his eye, a living testament he could not look away from. Her hips had broadened for the bearing, thighs softened to velvet.
And at her core, when his hand claimed the heat between, she yielded slick and ready, her dew anointing his fingers at once.
"Seven hells," he muttered, the proof of her want pulsing against his palm. "You spoke true of this endless thirst."
"I warned you." A hitch in her breath as he parted her folds, his thumb seeking the pearl of her pleasure and circling with measured pressure. "Ah—the gods—every sense burns brighter now. I yearn for you without cease. In dreams, I take my pleasure alone, but it pales... oh, there, hold there—"
He delved deeper, two fingers breaching her warmth, curling to stroke the inner walls that clenched fierce around him. Her gasps built to soft cries that bounced from the stone, her body arching into his touch like a bowstring drawn taut.
"To the bed," he commanded, withdrawing. She mewled at the sudden void but complied swift, reclining amid the furs and bolsters, her form a map of invitation in the candle's dance.
Firelight limned her curves—the belly's subtle arc, the heave of her breasts with each labored breath, the flush blooming from throat to bosom. Her thighs splayed wide, the sheen of her arousal tracing paths down her skin.
In that other life, across the poison water, I hunted wedded women as sport, Castor mused, shucking his breeches to stand bare before her. His cock rose heavy, veined and unyielding, the great length of it—twenty inches of corded muscle—throbbing with the weight of his bollocks, swollen and brimming with seed beyond mortal measure. I reveled in their fall, twisting oaths to my will. But this—my own mother's womb, heavy with my get, parted and pleading? It binds tighter than any chain I forged there.
He knelt between her legs, the broad head of him nudging her entrance. She bucked with a raw keen, seeking to draw him in.
"Please," she gasped, hips lifting in supplication. "Castor, I beg—do not torment me so. I must have you."
"Speak it plain," he demanded, teasing the breach without mercy, the tip slick with her. "What do you crave?"
"You within me." The plea spilled unashamed, fierce as a weirwood's roots. "My son's shaft, staking its claim anew. Take me fierce, that I bear your mark for days hence. I beseech you—"
He surged forward, sheathing to the hilt in a single, unyielding thrust. Bethany's cry rent the air—"Yes! Oh gods, yes!"—her spine bowing from the mattress, breasts thrusting skyward as her depths gripped him like a velvet fist.
Her heat enveloped him utterly, the quickening lending her walls a new fervor, rippling in waves that milked his length with every plunge. Each hilt drew a ragged gasp from her lips; each withdrawal, a whimper of loss. He set to with grim purpose, hands clamping her hips to bruise, the bedframe groaning in protest, the carved head thudding against the wall in ceaseless cadence.
"Harder," she implored, voice fracturing, nails scoring crimson trails down his back. Her legs locked about his waist, heels digging to haul him deeper. "By the old gods—harder, I would feel you to my marrow—ahh! "
He granted it, pounding with the force of conquest, the wet clash of flesh echoing lewd through the chamber. Her breasts swayed with the onslaught; he bent to seize one peak between his teeth, nipping sharp enough to wring a scream from her throat.
"You revel in this," he snarled against her skin, the words a lash of truth. "In yielding to your own blood. In bearing my seed while I spend anew within."
"Aye!" The confession tore free, stripped of all pretense. "I revel in it all. You are mine—mine by blood and bone—and I yours, let the world burn for it—"
The raw claim in her voice hooked deep, a snare for the flicker of tenderness he guarded close.
Not mere possession, but a mirror to his own fierce hold on her—the woman who had birthed him, now forging his line in her flesh. She believes it binds us equal, he thought, shifting to strike truer, deeper. And the gods curse me, but a part of me yearns to let it.
Her breaths shattered into sobs, her form quaking, inner grips fluttering wild about him. The precipice loomed.
"Yield to me," he urged, his hand rising to her throat—not to crush, but to command, fingers splayed over her racing pulse. "On your son's length, Mother. Let me taste your surrender."
The press of his hold, woven with those forbidden words, hurled her over. Bethany went rigid, her core clamping like iron, a wail of his name spilling forth— "Castor! Gods, Castor, aye, aye—"
—as ecstasy wracked her, waves clenching to drag him under.
It undid him. Two more savage drives, and he rooted deep, his massive shaft pulsing as release claimed him—torrents of seed, five liters of fertile essence, flooding her in endless, claiming surges, mingling with the life already rooted there. The blasphemy of it sharpened the bliss, a dark sacrament sealing their bond.
They slumped entwined, sweat-slick and heaving, the air thick with their mingled scents. Bethany burrowed close at once, cheek to his shoulder, one hand splayed possessive over his heart, the other shielding the curve of her belly.
Silence cloaked them, broken only by the settle of breaths. Then her voice, hushed yet unyielding:
"When the child draws breath, the realm shall hail it as Roose's shade's final boon. But we shall know its truth. Ours, evermore."
Castor's fingers threaded through her raven locks, the touch lingering soft, a rare gentleness born of the ache she kindled in him. That warmth bloomed faint in his chest—for her, this fierce bearer of his blood, swollen with their shared sin. "Aye. Ours."
"You will hold to the veil?" he murmured, his palm settling warm over her belly, thumb tracing the swell. The subtle stir beneath—a kick, perhaps—tugged at him, weaving threads of guardianship amid the shadows.
Not calculation alone, but a vow to shield what they had forged.
"I have worn masks all my days," she replied, lips brushing his skin in a feather-kiss.
"Obedient maid. Wife to a flayer's ghost. Now the sorrowing widow, graced with her lord's last seed." Another press of her mouth, tender.
"This mask fits truer than any. I cannot forfeit you. Nor this."
He inclined his head, his hand unmoving, savoring the quiet pulse of their creation.
"Then know I require your steel at my side. The North stirs—my designs unfold to remake it entire. The Dreadfort falls to you when I depart."
Her head lifted, shadows of alarm crossing her features. "Depart? To where?"
"Across the Narrow Sea. In time." No word yet of silver queens or fire-made beasts. "More than a two and ten moons hence. First, we raise walls and whet blades here."
She settled against him once more, the knot easing. "Then the gods grant me these moons with you near, ere you court peril amid outlanders and their treacheries."
Her fingertips ghosted the scars latticing his cheek, a caress reverent as prayer. "These marred you sore when you returned. The bandits in the hills... that tale rings true?"
"Truth enough," he said, capturing her hand to press it firm to his skin. The falsehood slid easy, but her fret gnawed at him, kindling a urge to wall her from the world's cruelties. "I endured. Emerged the harder for it. The men hold me proven now, blood for blood."
She dipped her chin in accord, probing no further. Wise. It rendered her ally, not adversary—bound by trust, not chains.
"I love you." The avowal emerged soft, frayed at the edges, as if the weight of it bruised her tongue. "I ought not. Not in a way a mother should love her son. It defies gods and men alike. Yet it burns true. You alone have I truly claimed."
Love.
The echo lingered, stirring echoes in him—not illusion alone, but a shadowed mirror. He felt its pull, fierce and unyielding, for her unquenched fire, for the swell guarding their bloodline.
Not weakness.
A blade honed sharper by possession.
He drew her nearer, arm banding her waist, the silence his answer. Her breaths deepened to slumber's rhythm, her form yielding wholly, palm yet cradling the life between.
When sleep claimed her deep, he eased away with care, garments donned in hush. He lingered, gaze tracing her curled form, hand curved protective over the mound even in dreams.
She is moored, he thought, lacing his shirt. Entwined in our darkness, a sentinel fierce as any direwolf. And this draw she wields... it renders her no mere pawn. Mine to guard, as she guards me.
He quitted the chamber soft-footed, descending to the forges' depths where true dominion brewed—gold reforged, steel tempered, empires sketched in shadow.
One bond forged unbreakable. A score more to seize. But for her, he would flay the stars themselves to preserve that flame.
***
CHAPTER END