***
The bedroom was ostentatiously large, as everything in Vikram Malhotra's life had been.
Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked South Delhi's most exclusive neighborhood, where old money whispered and new money shouted. Imported Italian marble gleamed under recessed lighting. The bed itself was custom-made, king-sized, draped in silk sheets that cost more than most men earned in a month.
On that bed, tangled in those sheets, Vikram had just finished what he did best:
taking what belonged to someone else.
She lay beside him now, her breathing still uneven, dark hair spilled across the pillow. Priya Khanna. Twenty-eight years old. Married for three years to Rajesh Khanna, a mid-level bureaucrat with political ambitions and a temper that everyone pretended not to notice. Vikram had met her at a charity gala six weeks ago. It had taken him exactly four days to get her number, two weeks to get her alone, and three weeks to get her here.
It wasn't love. It was never love. It was the game, and Vikram Malhotra had never lost a game in his life.
"I should go," Priya murmured, though she made no move to leave. Her fingers traced lazy patterns on his chest, and Vikram recognized the signs: guilt warring with satisfaction, shame wrestling with the addictive rush of transgression. He'd seen it a hundred times before, in a hundred different women. The psychology was always the same.
"Stay a little longer," he said, his voice carefully modulated—not commanding, but suggesting. Making her feel like it was her choice, even as he guided her to the conclusion he'd already decided. That was the trick. That was always the trick. Make them think they wanted it. Make them complicit in their own corruption.
She stayed.
Twenty-five years old, and Vikram had already accomplished more than most men managed in a lifetime.
The degrees lined his study wall like trophies: medicine from AIIMS, psychology from Cambridge, political science from Oxford, business management from Harvard, civil engineering from MIT. His family's wealth had opened doors, certainly, but it was his mind that had carried him through. Photographic memory. Analytical precision. An ability to read people that bordered on the supernatural.
World chess champion at twenty-two. Published author at twenty-three. Venture capitalist with a portfolio worth hundreds of millions at twenty-four.
And beneath it all, threading through everything like a darker current: the women.
He'd kept count once, years ago, but the numbers had lost meaning. What mattered wasn't quantity. What mattered was the conquest. The challenge. The moment when resistance crumbled and he saw in their eyes the recognition that they were his now, that something fundamental had shifted and could never be unshifted.
Married women were his particular specialty. There was something about the betrayal that sharpened the pleasure—not just the physical pleasure, which was transient and forgettable, but the deeper satisfaction of winning. Of defeating an enemy who didn't even know they were in a war until they'd already lost.
Priya's husband was nothing. A small man with small ambitions, the kind who thought securing a government posting made him powerful. Vikram had studied him from a distance, catalogued his weaknesses: insecurity masked as aggression, mediocre intelligence compensated with bluster, a need for control that revealed how little actual control he possessed. Men like that were easy to defeat. Their wives were lonely, underappreciated, starved for the kind of attention that made them feel seen.
Vikram had given Priya that attention. He'd listened to her complaints about her husband's long hours and short temper. He'd made her laugh with carefully deployed wit. He'd touched her arm at precisely the right moment, held eye contact for exactly the right duration. Each interaction was calculated, a move in a larger game, and by the time she realized she was being played, she was already in too deep to care.
"He's been talking about having a baby," Priya said quietly, still tracing patterns on Vikram's chest. "Rajesh, I mean. He wants to start trying."
Vikram felt a flicker of something—not quite satisfaction, but close. The timing was exquisite. "And what do you want?" he asked, knowing the answer, knowing that asking the question would make her feel valued in a way her husband never did.
"I don't know," she whispered, and that was answer enough.
He kissed her temple, a gesture of false tenderness that cost him nothing and bought him everything. She melted into him, and Vikram's mind was already three moves ahead, calculating how long he could maintain this before boredom set in. Six weeks, maybe eight. Then he'd engineer a slow fade, let her down gently enough that she wouldn't make a scene. By then there would be someone new. There was always someone new.
The bedroom door exploded inward.
The sound was shocking in its violence—splintering wood, the crash of the door slamming against the wall. Priya screamed and grabbed for the sheets. Vikram's mind, honed by years of competitive chess, assessed the situation with crystalline clarity even as adrenaline flooded his system.
Rajesh Khanna stood in the doorway. He was smaller than Vikram, shorter, stockier, with a face red from exertion or rage or both. In his right hand he held a pistol—a Glock 19, Vikram's mind supplied uselessly, as if identifying the model mattered when it was pointed at his chest.
"You fucking bastard," Rajesh said, and his voice was surprisingly calm. That was the dangerous part. Men who screamed could be reasoned with, could be talked down. Men who spoke quietly had already made their decision.
"Rajesh, please—" Priya started, but her husband's eyes never left Vikram.
"You thought I wouldn't find out?" Rajesh asked, still in that terrible quiet voice. "You thought I was stupid? I know who you are, Malhotra. Rich boy genius, right? World champion. Published author. All those fucking degrees on your wall. But you're just a thief. You steal other men's wives because you're too broken to build anything of your own."
The words should have stung, but they didn't. Vikram's mind was racing through scenarios: lunge for the gun, try to talk him down, use Priya as a distraction. His krav maga training had covered disarming techniques, but theory and practice were different things, and the distance was wrong, the angle was wrong, everything was—
"I loved her," Rajesh said, and now there was anguish beneath the calm, a crack in the facade. "I gave her everything. And you—you just took her because you could. Because it was a game to you."
"It wasn't—" Vikram started, but he didn't get to finish the lie.
The first shot hit him in the chest, and it felt like being kicked by a horse. All the air left his lungs. He fell back against the headboard, and his mind—brilliant, analytical, always three steps ahead—finally caught up to what was happening.
He was going to die.
The second shot hit his shoulder, spinning him sideways. Priya was screaming, a sound like an animal in pain. The third shot missed, punching through the silk sheets and into the imported Italian marble. Vikram tried to stand, tried to move, but his body wouldn't obey. Blood soaked the sheets, darker than the silk, spreading like a stain.
The fourth shot hit him in the throat.
There was no pain anymore, just cold. Spreading from his extremities inward, claiming territory with inexorable patience. His vision tunneled. He could hear Rajesh sobbing now, could hear Priya begging, could hear sirens in the distance—too late, always too late.
His last thought, as consciousness bled away like the blood soaking into five-thousand-count Egyptian cotton, was crystalline in its clarity:
I won't make this mistake again.
Then darkness took him, and Vikram Malhotra died at twenty-five years old, killed by the husband of a woman whose last name he would have forgotten within a month.
***
292 AC, Dreadfort, North
Cold.
That was the first sensation. Not the numbing, spreading cold of death, but something sharper, cleaner. The kind of cold that bit at exposed skin and turned breath to fog. The kind of cold that said north in a fundamental way that transcended geography.
Castor Bolton opened his eyes.
Wrong. The name was wrong. His name was Vikram Malhotra, and he'd been shot four times by a cuckolded bureaucrat in a bedroom in South Delhi. He'd died. He remembered dying, remembered the cold spreading through his limbs and the tunnel-vision and the final, futile gasping for air that wouldn't come.
But he was breathing now.
He sat up, and the movement felt wrong. His body was smaller, lighter, the proportions unfamiliar. His hands—he stared at his hands—were a child's hands. Pale skin, unmarked by the calluses he'd built up over years of fencing and martial arts training. Small fingers, not yet fully grown.
What the fuck?
The room around him was stone. Not the sterile, expensive architecture of modern Delhi, but genuine medieval stonework—thick walls, narrow windows, a fireplace with a real fire burning low in the grate. Furs and wool blankets covered him instead of silk sheets. The bed was smaller, harder, less comfortable than anything he'd slept in since childhood.
No. Less comfortable than anything Vikram had slept in. The distinction felt important.
Memories pressed at the edges of his consciousness, foreign and familiar at once. He knew this room. Had slept in it for years. Had woken in it this morning—no, yesterday—no, every day for twelve years. The memories were there, overlapping his own, a double-exposure of two lives that shouldn't coexist but somehow did.
Castor Bolton.
The name settled over him like a mantle, and with it came everything else: The Dreadfort. House Bolton. The North. Roose Bolton, his father—cold and calculating and quietly terrifying. His mother, Lady Bethany, with her silver-gold hair and violet eyes and the sadness that clung to her like perfume.
And beneath these local, immediate memories, something larger stirred: Westeros. The Seven Kingdoms. A Song of Ice and Fire.
Vikram—no, Castor—no, both—felt laughter building in his chest. Hysterical, inappropriate laughter that he swallowed down because the body he inhabited was twelve years old and servants might hear and think him mad.
He had died and been reincarnated. Into a child's body. In a medieval fantasy world. As a Bolton, of all the fucking houses he could have landed in.
The laughter escaped despite his best efforts, high and sharp and slightly unhinged. He pressed both hands over his mouth until it passed, until he could think clearly again.
Assessment. That was what he needed. Clarity. Analysis. He'd built an empire in his previous life through careful planning and ruthless execution. This was just another game, albeit one with different rules and significantly higher stakes.
He was Castor Bolton, twelve years old, eldest son and heir to the Dreadfort. The year—he searched through the younger Castor's memories—was 292 AC. Robert Baratheon had been king for nine years. The realm was at peace, relatively speaking. The major players were still moving into position for the great game that would begin when Jon Arryn died and everything went to hell.
He knew what was coming. Every major plot point, every betrayal, every death. He'd read all the books, twice. He'd devoured fanfiction by the thousands of pages, exploring every possible permutation and alternate timeline. He knew this world better than most of the people living in it.
The strategic implications were staggering.
But beneath the immediate tactical considerations, something darker stirred. Something that had nothing to do with politics or survival and everything to do with the realization now crystalizing in his mind:
He was a Bolton. In the North. In a medieval world where laws were suggestions and power was the only currency that mattered. Where the Dreadfort's reputation for cruelty preceded it, where lords had near-absolute authority over their smallfolk, where women were property to be traded and used.
He'd died because he'd been careless. Because he'd underestimated a desperate man with nothing to lose. But here? Here there were no angry husbands with firearms. Here there was only strength and cunning and the willingness to use both without restraint.
Here, he could be what he'd always been beneath the veneer of modern civilization: a predator without limits.
The thought should have disturbed him. Instead, it felt like coming home.
Castor stood—the name fit better now, sliding on like a well-worn glove—and walked to the window. The Dreadfort spread below him, grey stone against greyer sky. Snow dusted the battlements. In the distance, the forest stretched dark and forbidding, and somewhere beyond that, the rest of the North waited: the Starks in Winterfell with their honor and their direwolves, the Karstarks and Umbers and Manderlys and all the other great houses that bent knee to the King in the North who wasn't a king anymore.
And threading through all of it, hidden in marriages and maesters' chains and the whispered complaints of unhappy wives: opportunities.
Castor smiled, and it was not a child's smile.
He had work to do.
***
The days that followed the awakening were an exercise in controlled paranoia and meticulous observation. Castor moved through the Dreadfort like a ghost in his own life, studying everything with the double vision of Vikram's adult consciousness trapped in a child's body.
The castle itself was exactly as brutal as its reputation suggested. Thick walls built to withstand sieges. Narrow windows designed more for defense than light. Dungeons that went down three levels, though young Castor had never been permitted to explore the lowest levels where his father kept his... projects. The flaying chambers were on the second level, closed off behind iron doors that bore stains too dark and persistent to be rust.
The household ran with efficient, quiet fear. Servants moved quickly and spoke little. His father's presence hung over everything like a pall, even when Roose himself was absent. The current Lord Bolton was a lean man with pale eyes and a voice like silk over steel. He never raised that voice. He never needed to. People obeyed because the alternative was unthinkable.
Castor studied his father carefully, cataloguing mannerisms and patterns. Roose Bolton was intelligent—genuinely, dangerously intelligent. Not a genius perhaps, but possessed of a cold pragmatism and patience that made him formidable. He treated his son with the same measured distance he applied to everything else: assessing, calculating, showing neither warmth nor cruelty unless either served a purpose.
In their private conversations, Roose tested him. Lessons on history, on strategy, on the proper way to rule through fear rather than love. The younger Castor had absorbed these lessons dutifully. The current Castor absorbed them hungrily, seeing in his father's philosophy a reflection of truths he'd learned in a different life: power was the only reality that mattered, sentiment was weakness, and control was everything.
"The Starks rule through honor," Roose had told him three days after Castor's awakening, during one of their regular lessons in the lord's solar. "They inspire loyalty through oaths and justice and all the pretty words that make men feel noble. Do you know why that makes them weak?"
"Because honor is predictable," Castor had answered, drawing on Vikram's understanding of game theory and human psychology. "A man bound by honor can't adapt when circumstances require it. His enemies know his limits before he does."
Roose's pale eyes had studied him for a long moment, and something that might have been approval flickered in their depths. "Good. But incomplete. Honor makes them weak because it requires reciprocity. They must trust that others will honor their oaths in return. That trust is a vulnerability. We Boltons have no such weakness. We are feared, and fear requires no trust. Fear simply is."
The lesson had continued, but Castor's mind had already leapt ahead, applying the principle to broader contexts. His father ruled through fear. The Starks ruled through honor. Both were tools, and tools could be learned, wielded, combined. A man who could inspire loyalty while simultaneously cultivating fear, who could appear honorable while operating without conscience—such a man would be unstoppable.
But Roose was not the most important person Castor needed to understand. That distinction belonged to the woman who had given him life in this world: his mother.
Lady Bethany Bolton, née... the exact maiden name wasn't clear from young Castor's memories, deliberately obscured by Roose perhaps, but the bloodline was unmistakable. Targaryen. Two generations removed, but the blood ran true: silver-gold hair that caught light like precious metal, violet eyes that marked her as foreign in the grey North, features so delicate and aristocratic that she seemed carved from alabaster rather than born of flesh.
She was beautiful. Heartbreakingly, impossibly beautiful in a way that Vikram's memory insisted women in the modern world had never quite achieved, even with all their makeup and surgery and digital enhancement. This was pure genetic fortune, the lottery of Valyrian blood expressed in its most refined form.
And she was utterly, devastatingly lonely.
Castor saw it now, where the younger version of himself had understood it only as a child understands a mother's moods: the careful distance she maintained in public, the mask of calm dignity that slipped only when she thought herself unobserved. The way she moved through the Dreadfort like a prisoner in a gilded cage, performing the duties of Lady Bolton with mechanical precision while her thoughts were clearly elsewhere.
She had been married to Roose for thirteen years. Castor knew, from the memories he'd inherited, that theirs was not a love match. Political expediency had bound them: Roose had wanted the prestige of dragonblood in his lineage, and whatever remained of Bethany's family had wanted her safely distant from Robert Baratheon's purge of Targaryen loyalists.
The marriage had produced one child: Castor himself. One heir, and then... nothing. Roose visited her chambers perhaps once a year, duty rather than desire, and the rest of the time she was simply there. Present but peripheral. Acknowledged but not valued.
Vikram's mind, experienced in reading the subtle tells of dissatisfaction and emotional starvation, recognized immediately what he was seeing: a woman starved for attention, for validation, for the simple recognition that she existed as more than a decorative vessel for precious bloodlines.
It was, in every respect, perfect.
The thought came unbidden and unrepentant: She would be easy.
Castor sat with that thought for three days, examining it from every angle. In his previous life, he'd been twenty-five, and the women he'd seduced had been adults capable of consent, even if that consent was manufactured through manipulation. The ethics had been grey at best, the morality questionable, but he'd operated within the loose boundaries of what modern society grudgingly tolerated.
This was different. He was, physically, twelve years old. She was his mother. The taboo was absolute, the transgression unthinkable by any standard of decency.
And yet.
He was not actually twelve. Vikram's consciousness, his memories, his adult sexuality—all of it was intact, simply housed in a younger body. Philosophically, was he more defined by his biological age or his psychological one? The question was meaningless, because the answer wouldn't change what he wanted.
As for the mother-son aspect: the Targaryens had married than any lord I've met. And you have the blood. You have *my* blood. If the dragons do wake, they'll wake for you."
He smiled, carefully humble, carefully grateful. "You have more faith in me than I deserve. But I promise you, Mother—I won't let your blood mean nothing. Whatever I achieve, whatever I build, it will honor what you gave me."
She pulled him into an embrace then, sudden and fierce, and Castor folded his arms around her in return. She was warm despite the cold room, and she smelled of lavender and something else, something indefinably her. He felt her breath against his neck, felt the way she clung to him as if he were the only solid thing in a shifting world.
When she finally pulled back, her eyes were bright with unshed tears. "Sometimes I think you're the only good thing I've ever done," she admitted. "The only thing that makes this life worthwhile."
"You're everything," he told her, and meant it in ways she couldn't yet understand. "You gave me life. You gave me knowledge. You gave me purpose. I am what I am because of you."
The words settled between them, heavier than they appeared. Bethany touched his face, a gentle, maternal gesture, but her hand lingered, tracing the line of his jaw with something that might have been wonder.
"You look so much like my father," she murmured. "The same eyes. The same bearing. Sometimes when I look at you, I see everything we lost. Everything that could have been."
"I'm here," Castor said quietly. "Not in the past. Not in what was lost. Right here, right now. And I swear to you—I will make that blood mean something. I will make *you* mean something."
She kissed his forehead then, a gesture of benediction, and Castor closed his eyes and accepted it. But inside his mind, Vikram's consciousness was coldly calculating: Another year. Maybe two. Let her grow accustomed to my touch, to needing me, to seeing me as man rather than child. Then we push further.
The storm lasted four more days. By the time it finally broke, Castor had progressed the conditioning significantly. They'd spent hours in close proximity, built a shared language of private smiles and meaningful glances, established a pattern of physical comfort that bypassed her maternal instincts and planted seeds of something else. Something that, given time and care, would grow into exactly what he needed.
When Roose finally emerged from his solar and the household returned to its normal rhythms, Castor felt satisfied with the groundwork laid. His father noticed the increased closeness between mother and son, but said nothing—likely viewing it as harmless, perhaps even useful. A son devoted to his mother was easier to control, in Roose's estimation, tied down by emotional bonds that could be exploited.
Roose didn't understand that those bonds could flow both ways. That dependency created leverage regardless of which party felt the need more strongly.
And Castor was very, very good at creating dependencies.
***
The months turned. Castor continued his education—both the formal lessons with the maester and his father, and the private curriculum he'd designed for himself. Combat training with the master-at-arms. Expanding his network of servants and slowly, carefully, extending that network beyond the Dreadfort's walls. He cultivated relationships with the sons of minor lords who visited, building the foundation for future alliances and future exploitation.
And always, always, he paid attention to his mother.
He watched how she moved through the world: the careful mask she wore in public, the way she retreated into herself when Roose was present, the small tells that indicated her mood and state of mind. He learned to read her the way a musician learned an instrument, understanding exactly which notes to play and when to produce the desired response.
By his fifteenth nameday, in the year 295 AC, Castor stood six feet tall and still growing. His body had filled out with lean muscle from daily training. His face had lost the last softness of childhood, settling into the angular, aristocratic features that would mark him for the rest of his life. He was beautiful in a way that made people uncomfortable—too perfect, too controlled, something predatory in the stillness he carried.
And Bethany had begun to look at him differently.
He noticed it in small ways: the way her eyes would linger when she thought him unaware, the flush that rose in her cheeks when he stood too close, the way her breath caught when his hand brushed hers during their lessons. She was fighting it, he could tell. Pushing down inappropriate thoughts, reminding herself he was her son, trying to maintain boundaries that he'd been systematically eroding for years.
The conditioning was working.
Castor knew, with the cold certainty of someone who'd orchestrated this exact progression dozens of times before, that she was maybe a year away from breaking. Maybe less. He just needed to continue applying pressure in the right places, continue being the one source of warmth and validation in her cold life, continue blurring the lines between maternal affection and something hungrier.
But he didn't rush. Rushing ruined everything. This had to be her choice—or at least, it had to *feel* like her choice when the moment came. That was the art of it: making people believe they wanted what you'd been engineering them to want all along.
So he waited. And planned. And grew into the monster he'd always been, wearing the face of a beautiful boy with dragon blood and a smile like winter.
The Dreadfort's stones held many secrets. Soon, they would hold one more.
***