Beneath the Hightower - Ormund Hightower

Alyssa Targaryen was born of duty, not love.

The only child of Prince Daemon Targaryen and Lady Rhea Royce, Alyssa grows up caught between two ancient houses and two parents who can scarcely stand the sight of one another. Runestone is her home, Rhea her certainty, and Daemon the brilliant, infuriating father whose rare affection she spends her childhood desperately collecting-until she becomes old enough to understand the cost of loving a man who always leaves.

Then her mother dies.

And everything Alyssa believed about her father begins to unravel.

As the realm creeps toward civil war, Alyssa finds herself increasingly estranged from the Targaryens whose name she bears. Her future instead becomes entangled with Ormund Hightower, heir to one of the most powerful houses in Westeros: disciplined where she is defiant, calculating where she is impulsive, and possessed of ambitions far darker than the polished Andal lord he presents to the world.

Ormund has little love for dragons or the blood that rides them.

Yet he intends to marry one.

What begins as a political arrangement slowly becomes something far more complicated-a marriage built on attraction and resentment, tenderness and control, loyalty and manipulation. And while Ormund seeks to shape his Targaryen wife into something he can understand, Alyssa must decide how much of herself she is willing to surrender to the man she loves.

When King Viserys dies and the realm fractures between green and black, Alyssa must finally choose between blood and loyalty.

Between the cousin her mother once swore to defend and the husband beside whom Alyssa has built her life.

Between the father whose face she inherited-

and the mother whose death she has never forgiven.

By the time the dragons descend upon Tumbleton, Alyssa Targaryen will learn that there are some things even fire cannot cleanse.