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Lynn's gaze dropped to Myrcella's palm. Still bleeding.
His brows knitted hard.
The wound wasn't deep, but she'd been clenching her fist so tightly it had gone ugly. Bright red against skin so fair it was nearly translucent. The contrast made him wince.
Her eyes, that clear, pool-green that was usually her best feature, were swimming. One blink and the tears would fall.
Lynn said nothing.
He grabbed her wrist, pulled her inside, and shut the door with a bang.
The sudden motion made her stiffen. Just for a second, barely perceptible. Then she relaxed and let herself be led to the table without protest.
He didn't acknowledge her pitiful expression. He went straight to the cabinet, found clean linen and wound salve, brought over a basin of water, and pressed her hand into it.
The cold water bit at the wound. Myrcella's body gave a small shudder.
She lifted her head and fixed those glistening green eyes on his face, that insufferable face, unblinking. Her lips parted slightly. She wanted to say something. Couldn't make herself do it.
Anyone else would have melted on the spot.
Lynn felt a flicker of unease instead.
Too fast. The shift was too fast.
Not twenty minutes ago this girl had been a lioness. Sharpest words she owned, coldest attitude she could manage, declaring war with both hands. And now? A harmless little rabbit, trembling and dewy-eyed?
When something's this far out of the ordinary, there's always a reason.
Something was off. He knew it.
Lynn said nothing. He cleaned the wound, dried it carefully with the linen, spread the green salve across it in an even layer, and wrapped it round by round with clean cloth. Methodical. Silent.
The room felt like it was pressing in.
Myrcella looked like the silence alone might break her.
"Lord Lynn..."
She finally cracked, voice already fraying at the edges.
"I... I really do know I was wrong."
"I saw you and Lady Sansa..."
"I just — my mind went blank. I was jealous of her. I was afraid... afraid you'd stop wanting me..."
Her voice kept shrinking. By the end it was nothing but muffled sobs.
"I went back to my room and the more I thought about it, the worse it got."
"I didn't mean to break things. I just didn't know what else to do..."
"If you like Lady Sansa, I can accept that..."
"I only ask that you don't abandon me..."
As she spoke, her uninjured hand found his sleeve and clutched it, shaking it gently.
"Please don't be angry with me anymore. Please."
"I won't do it again. I'll listen to you. Whatever you say, I'll listen..."
The tears came at last. They slid down her pale cheeks and dropped onto the back of his hand.
Lynn looked down at her. That perfect picture of a girl undone, tears on her face like rain on white petals.
Not bad.
Better than the lead actresses in half the minstrel troupes in King's Landing, honestly.
But that flicker in the depths of her eyes, that cool, calculating glint he'd seen so many times on Cersei's face, didn't escape him.
This seemingly harmless little princess had been through some storms. And in the process, she'd learned things she probably shouldn't have.
Lynn let out a quiet breath.
He closed his eyes.
His consciousness plunged into darkness.
Green Sight.
Activated.
Fragments came rushing in like a tide, time unraveling backward in a torrent of broken images. They slowed. Settled.
Last night.
Myrcella's bedroom.
...
His awareness hovered beside her bed.
He watched.
He watched that usually composed, graceful girl, as the sounds from the next room grew impossible to ignore, move through every stage of it. First the shock. Then the revulsion. Then something else. Something worse. The slow slide from confusion into surrender.
She was curled beneath the velvet quilt, the cold fabric pulled tight around her. That silk nightgown had long since gone damp with sweat, clinging to every curve of her body, outlining something that made the scene feel almost unbearably intimate.
Her cheeks burned with feverish color.
Her green eyes had lost all focus, gone hazy and distant.
And then a sound, barely a sound, thread-thin, slipped from between her dry lips.
Her eyes snapped wide open.
Her fingers clawed into the bedsheet beneath her, twisting the fine fabric into ruins.
She felt like a fish flung onto scorching sand. Desperate for water that wasn't coming.
"Lynn..."
A murmur, barely louder than a dream.
"Lord... Lynn..."
Her mind had gone somewhere else entirely. She didn't know what she was doing. Didn't know what she wanted.
She only knew she needed him.
The man who had pulled her from Winterfell's glass gardens and dropped her into this filthy world.
The man who made her jealous, made her furious, made her utterly unable to stop.
"Lynn..."
"I want..."
Her voice fractured into something close to tears.
"My lord..."
A soft, helpless sound.
"...Hm?"
When the first pale light finally crept into the sky, Myrcella lay flat on her back, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Drenched in sweat. Like something dragged out of deep water.
...
Lynn's awareness pulled free of that strange, tangled memory.
He opened his eyes slowly.
So. She'd been awake for all of it.
No wonder she'd come at him like that this morning.
He looked at Myrcella again, still crying softly in front of him, still playing the wounded innocent, and his expression had gone complicated in ways that were difficult to name.
A lot had happened to her. More than he'd realized.
No wonder she'd changed.
The Green Sight shifted.
Cersei, now.
He watched.
He watched Cersei walk into that wrecked room. Watched her find her daughter on the edge of falling apart and then deliver her particular brand of education. Cruel. Precise. Twisted by years of surviving things most people would never survive.
He heard the secret. The one that would shake Westeros to its foundations if it ever got out.
He saw Myrcella's face the moment she heard it. Watched the color drain away until she was white as paper. Watched her entire understanding of the world crack and give way.
He saw Cersei lay out her humiliations, her degradations, framed as confession, framed as sacrifice, framed as something done for her daughter's sake. Selfishness dressed up as love, and somehow the more devastating for it.
Cersei Lannister.
What a move.
She wanted to use all of this to chain Myrcella to her permanently. To reshape her daughter into a mirror of herself: a woman who'd stop at nothing, rationalize anything, burn everything for the sake of power.
His woman. He wasn't going to abandon her.
But not like this.
This way made him feel like a piece on Cersei's board. Like her clever little maneuver had already half-worked.
And she'd miscalculated something else, too.
She didn't know that every scheme, every performance, every careful calculation she'd put into this, all of it was a transparent joke to a man with eyes that could reach into the past.
Lynn let the thoughts go.
He looked at Myrcella, still performing earnestly in front of him, and found that the flare of irritation he'd felt at being played had already burned itself out.
What was left was harder to name. Pity, maybe. A reluctant kind of amusement. And something that might have been genuine admiration.
This girl had watched her world collapse. Had sat through her mother's particular brand of venom dressed up as wisdom. And she hadn't shattered.
She'd adapted. Faster than anyone had a right to. She'd picked up the weapons available to her, tears, fragility, the careful performance of helplessness, and she'd started using them.
Myrcella thought she was the one running this.
She thought she was following Cersei's script. Thought she was staging her tragedy to perfection, pulling his sympathy out of him piece by piece.
She had no idea her prey had already seen through every layer of it.
Had looked past all of it, all the way down to the deepest, most unguarded part of her. To the thing she'd never say out loud. The truest, most desperate want she had.
So. What now?
Expose her?
Tell her that her little tricks meant nothing, that he'd seen through them without blinking?
Tell her he knew she wasn't here to apologize, she was here to perform?
Tell her he knew exactly what she'd been doing in bed last night, alone in the dark, his name on her lips?
No.
That would push this girl, already fractured, already barely holding together, over the edge for good.
She'd break.
She would absolutely break.
With Cersei, he could go at her head-on. No hesitation.
Myrcella was different.
Lynn finished tying off the final knot of the bandage.
He raised his head and looked at her.
She was irritated, he could feel it underneath the surface, but not a trace of it showed on that soft, sorrowful face. Whatever resentment was building in her chest, she was keeping it perfectly buried.
The script wasn't going right.
According to what her mother had told her, she should have been crying longer. Harder. She should have kept it up until his heart gave out and he promised, out loud, to keep himself away from other women.
But now...
Nothing. No promise at all.
Was Lynn really that kind of man?
Then, abruptly —
"I'm sorry."
The apology came from Lynn.
Myrcella went still.
Those tear-bright green eyes filled with something between shock and confusion.
"It's my fault."
Lynn stood, then sat beside her. His voice carried something that sounded genuinely like guilt.
"I shouldn't have... shouldn't have let you see that."
He didn't name it. He didn't need to. Myrcella understood immediately.
Sansa Stark.
He thought that was what this was about. He thought she'd fallen apart over him and Sansa.
Something hit her in the chest. Not hard. Not soft. Just — there.
A different kind of grief came rising up.
Yes. I was angry about that.
But you have no idea how far beyond that it goes.
"I..."
She opened her mouth to say it. The tears came instead, entirely without her permission.
This time, it wasn't a performance.
Lynn didn't speak. He reached out and pulled her in, gently, and held her.
His arms were warm. Solid. He smelled faintly of leather and pine, and it was the kind of smell that made your shoulders drop before you could think to keep them up.
She stiffened. Some instinct told her to pull away.
But her cheek found his chest, and his heartbeat was there, steady and even, and all the resistance she had just — went. Like a string that had been pulled too tight for too long, finally snapping.
All of it at once.
"Wuah, waaah—!"
Myrcella stopped trying. She buried herself in his arms and cried the way children cry when something is genuinely, catastrophically unfair. No composure. No performance. Just the rawest sound she had left.
She cried for who she was. For who her mother was. For the blood in her veins that she'd never be able to wash out.
She cried for the girl who'd spent last night alone in the dark, lost and afraid and wanting something she couldn't name.
Lynn held her and said nothing. One hand moved in slow, steady circles on her back. He let her tears soak into his collar without comment.
He knew everything.
He chose to say none of it.
He had a role to play.
Slightly oblivious. A little guilty. Warm enough, patient enough. The kind of man she could lean on without bracing herself first.
A harbor. Somewhere she could put down everything she'd been carrying and rest.
He was going to put this broken girl back together. His way. Piece by piece.
And for that, he needed more.
Lynn held her and let the Green Sight slip open again, quiet as a door easing on its hinges.
This time he moved past the heavy things. The dark things. He skimmed through her memories the way a scholar moves through a library when he knows exactly what he's looking for, not the whole archive, just the good parts. The simple ones. The clean ones.
What did she love?
[A flash: the gardens at Casterly Rock. She's chasing a fat little white dog through the flowers, laughing so hard she can barely breathe, bright as anything.]
[A flash: the Red Keep kitchens. She's stolen a lemon cake straight from the oven, the powdered sugar still settling, and she's burning her tongue on it and doesn't care at all, face full of uncomplicated joy.]
[A flash: her own room, late and quiet. She's bent over her harp, picking out the same song again, clumsy, earnest, refusing to stop. An old melody from the Summer Isles. "The Last Kiss." Over and over, tireless.]
A puppy.
Lemon cake.
"The Last Kiss."
He held onto all three.
The crying in his arms had quieted. She'd worn herself down to nothing, a cat with nothing left, lying soft against his chest, breath still hitching in small, uneven pulls.
She felt better. The boulders that had been sitting on her chest all morning had shifted, not gone but lighter. Like her tears had taken some of the weight with them.
She lifted her head. Embarrassed, now that it was over. Her face was a wreck, red-nosed, puffy-eyed, tear-streaked, and somehow still unbearably dear.
"I'm... I'm sorry. I got your clothes dirty."
"It's fine."
Lynn brought his thumb to the corner of her eye and wiped the last tear away. Gently. Like she was something fragile he wasn't willing to damage.
"As long as you're not angry with me anymore," he said, "a few ruined clothes don't matter at all."
The way he was looking at her, patient, indulgent, like she could do no wrong, made her heart miss a beat.
For a second she genuinely couldn't tell.
Was this him performing? Or did he actually care?
Maybe Mother was right.
Men are all the same underneath. Show them enough softness, enough need, and they'll bend themselves into whatever shape you want.
The thought steadied her.
"I'm not angry anymore."
She looked down. Voice small and careful. Just the right amount of shy.
"As long as... as long as you treat me a little better, from now on."
"I promise."
Lynn took her bandaged hand and raised it to his lips. One gentle kiss, pressed against the wrapping.
"I will."
It went through her like a current.
He still cared?
The thought set her face on fire, instant, complete, red enough to bleed. She yanked her hand back, scrambled out of his arms, and was on her feet before she'd finished deciding to move.
"I — I should go."
She didn't look at him. She just ran.
Lynn watched her flee and felt the corner of his mouth pull into a curve that no one was around to see.
The little hedgehog. She'd finally shown him a sliver of her softest side.
➤ Next: Precision Strike — What Was Lost
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