The Sapphire Prince | Aemond Targaryen |

8.

"How do you feel?" Thanatos asked sincerely while setting a plate on Verena's lap.

Snatching a sweet from her plate, she bluntly replied, "At least now I can move my arms, but when I breathe, it feels as if I'm being stabbed."

His hand was placed over his heart as he sighed wistfully, "Princess, we've discussed this, I was-"

"Merely doing my duty ordered by the king blah blah blah. I have the sentence engraved into my mind Thanatos." The pair simply laughed taking a generous sip of their wine.

"Why do you keep coming to see me? I've only been awake for two days, and I've seen you more times than I can count." Verena eagerly questioned as the man who tortured her for weeks now sat on her bed while they shared a meal.

Aside from the maester and a knight who delivered her meals Verena unexpectedly found a friend in her torturer of all people. With not many options around she chose to take on the solitary person whose company she actually enjoyed. In spite of the opinion others might have of their bizarre friendship, neither of them seemed to care.

"Because you fascinate me, Princess. I've brutally tortured many men for lengths more limited than yours and have seen them never become the person they used to be. But you-" he merely waved his hovering arm up and down round her body, "you seem sane."

"I have been bound to this stupid bed until I can fully regain the function of my legs and when I do Thanatos you best pray to the gods I don't find you."

Thanatos swayed his head at a threat he knew she would entice, he stood and walked to the table and grabbed a vial then returned to his comfortable position on Verena's bed. When Verena marked the vial, she tweaked her nose in disgust and turned away upon recognizing what it was, "No." she resisted her arms.

"It's medicine."

"It's vile."

"True but you still must take it."

Annoyed Verena snatched the horrid vial from his hand and pinched her nose, in one motion she drank the contents and almost gagged, "Funny first you torture me now you're healing me."

He smiled taking the vial from her hands, "I am a man of many talents."

"I'd rather be tortured for a month straight again than drink that."

"Again?"

"Do you truly think you're the first person who's tortured me in captivity." she smiled to herself upon the memory, "It's actually how I met my husband." Verena fondly remembered the first meeting with her husband as she looked at her nervous fingers, picking at the raw skin round her brittle nails. Held in captivity, it was her first husband who had rescued her from the unfortunate fate she had accepted already.

"Prince Aemond?" But her joyous memory was irretrievably ruined the moment Thanatos said his name.

Verena snapped and turned her head to Thanatos, "No, not that cyclops."

They sat in prolonged silence for a few passing moments when Thanatos with curiousness asked Verena, "What happened to him."

Her ragged breath shook, Verena breathed in and excluded the searing pain in her sunken chest, "He died in battle." she looked back to her fingers, pricking the bleeding skin around her nails, "I lost my husband and our child in the same night. I don't think I can go through that again." The tragic memory of her bloodcurdling screams echoed in her sensitive ears of that haunting night. She recollected how Jace arrived immediately after a raven was sent for him. The way he clung to her as her deafening screams echoed in the castle she took over while her husband's father watched in acute agony.