all the angels

[THE WHIR OF A CAMERA. FOCUSING IN ON A YOUNG WOMAN, EARLY 30’s. JUST OFF SCREEN, SOMEONE SHUFFLES PIECES OF PAPER. THE DATE FLICKERS IN THE CORNER OF THE SMALL SCREEN. NOVEMBER 27th, 1992. SHE SITS ALONE IN A METAL FOLDING CHAIR, HANDS FOLDED IN HER LAP. THERE IS NOTHING ELSE IN THE ROOM.]

“Please state your name and position for the record,” the psychiatrist asks, voice loud as if sitting close to the camera, just out of frame. 

The woman huffs. “Special Agent Alicent Hightower. Is Harrold actually going to make me sit through a psych eval?”

“Affirmative,” the psychiatrist hums, voice masculine and firm. “Do you care to tell me why you were placed on leave?”

Alicent shifts slightly in her seat, crossing her arms against her chest. Where one leg is crossed over the other, her leg bounces slightly. She looks anywhere but at the camera. “My partner was killed in the line of duty.”

“Not just killed, mutilated. You were the one to discover him, as well. That sort of thing can have an effect on the mind, make someone unfit for duty. This is why you were put on leave, not just because he was killed, do you understand this?” The psychiatrist asks, but the question is plain—more for the record than for Alicent. They both understand why she is here. 

“Yes, I understand,” she mutters, finally sparing a glance at the camera. A flicker and then gone again. “I chase serial killers for a living, this sort of mutilation is nothing new to me.”

“You don’t usually know the victims, do you, though? Were you and Special Agent Montgomery close?” 

Alicent bristles at the question, eyes dropping to the floor. “We were friends, yes. To a degree. Work friends, at best. We’d worked together since I was first brought on as an agent from the academy.”

“But nothing more than work friends?”

Alicent hesitates briefly and then shakes her head. 

“Was there a reason for this?”

She looks around, shrugging after a moment. “I don’t know. I’ve never had many friends. David was no exception.” 

“So, you feel nothing from his death?”

Her eyes remain on the floor, her words carefully selected. “Not nothing. I feel grief, of course. I feel bad for his wife, obviously. Personally, though, I do not feel as if I am suffering any long term effects from my discovery back in July. I am confident and ready to be back on the case, despite what Harrold thinks.”

“Why is it you’re asking to be put back on the case now?”

Alicent scoffs, as if it were obvious. “There was another body. In three months, they’ve gotten nothing done without me and now someone else is dead. It’s very clear to me that I need to be on this case. Are we done now?” 

“Yes, I think I have enough, we can be done.” 

     [NOTES: 

          — disassoc. from grief; deflecting 

          — avoids eye contact 

          — impatient ]

STATUS: Cleared for Duty

***

December 7th, 1992

Alicent has yet to find a way to access the two teenage daughters of Richard Gould and it’s driving her crazy. She knows what school they attend, she knows their entire routine, but she shouldn’t—she can’t approach them without permission from their father. Which means she either has to go back and speak to Richard Gould (unlikely) or she has to catch them off guard and pray no one catches her in a lie. Either way, nothing has gotten done and Alicent can feel her resolve slipping.

Everyone in the office has gone home save for Alicent and Rhaenyra—an occurrence that has become more frequent over the course of the week. Night fell around four-thirty, the clock on the wall now inching closer to eight. It’s snowing, which means driving home will feel damn near impossible, but Harrold will kill her if she starts sleeping in the office during a case again. 

“The prostitute just makes no fucking sense,” Rhaenyra huffs, sitting cross-legged on top of the table. Alicent herself stands beside her, small of her back pressed against the wooden edge as she drums her fingers against the table. Her hand is not far from where Rhaenyra’s boot clad foot rests beneath her thigh. Normally, she would say something about a grown woman working a professional job sitting criss-cross applesauce on a table, but it’s late enough in the day that she can no longer bring herself to care. “It’s a complete deviation from the norm. You’re absolutely sure she wasn’t a member of the church?”

Alicent shakes her head, “No, but we can’t find any family for her which makes that hard to figure out. I have someone working on tracking down her real name and where she may have come from, which might be able to help us put some pieces together. Worst case, I go down there Sunday morning with a photo of her and start asking questions.” 

“You haven’t done that already?” Rhaenyra asks, leaning back on her hands and tilting her head. Her jacket had been lost somewhere in the office (probably the floor) leaving her in just a white button-up. The heat is always jacked up during the winter to over-compensate for the weather outside which means somewhere along the way, Rhaenyra undid her top two buttons. Alicent’s eyes betray her, lingering on the barely exposed flesh longer than is probably appropriate. 

She turns back to the board in front of them. “The thought of attending a Sunday service is… a strange one. It’s been a while.” 

“Since your father?” Rhaenyra asks and Alicent whips around to face her. “Don’t look at me like that, you know I read all the interview transcripts.” 

“Don’t mention him, please,” Alicent asks tersely, her voice meek and quiet. Her eyes meet Rhaenyra’s for a moment, wide and pleading. Rhaenyra’s expression shifts as she nods, immediately understanding the underlying desperation of the request.

Rhaenyra bites her lip, seeming to contemplate saying something before eventually deciding to reveal, “I watched your psych eval.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?” Alicent spits, her entire demeanor shifting as she moves away from the table so she can face Rhaenyra head on. “Are you investigating the case or me? How do you even have access to that?”

“I’m friends with Jake, the records guy,” Rhaenyra shrugs nonchalantly and Alicent’s eye twitches. She wants to reach forward and smack her, but instead her hands settle at her sides, fingers flexing with discomfort. A twisting, gnawing feeling climbs up her spine, riddling her with discontent. “Harrold mentioned you were kind of an odd one and he wasn’t sure how you were handling the death of your partner. I wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into. You give a good interview, you know, good face for the camera.”

Alicent opens her mouth to say something about that particular remark, but closes it again.

“You got weird when he asked if you were friends with David, why?”

“Like I said. I’ve never been the type to have many friends,” Alicent bristles, hands clenching into fists so tight she can feel the press of her blunt nails into her palm. “I don’t see why any of this matters. Him and I were not friends, no, we were colleagues, just like you and I. Nothing more, nothing less. I did not realize that was apparently going to be such a problem until he was fucking dead.”

Rhaenyra watches her similar to the way children peer at zoo animals. And she looks one breath away from tapping on the glass. “Are you always this defensive?”

“When someone tells me they watched a classified psychological evaluation, yes, Rhaenyra, I am always this defensive,” Alicent spits. “If you want to study me, just ask. But I am trying to catch a serial killer. Stop distracting me.”

“Like we were getting anything done anyway,” Rhaenyra bemoans, falling back and letting her head thunk against the wood of the table. She straightens out her legs so they hang over the edge, kicking her feet softly. Alicent has never really registered how tall she was until she sees her laid out like this. “I’ll go to the church on Sunday with our prostitute’s photo to try and find out if anyone knew her. You can wait in the car. I know you’ll want to come, you have control issues.”

“Because you know so much about me.”

“There’s something you weren’t saying. About David,” Rhaenyra tries again, staring up at the ceiling. Alicent forces herself to turn away after finding her eyes lingering on the way the seam of Rhaenyra’s black slacks climbs up the inside of her thigh. She thinks Rhaenyra might be wearing men’s pants, too, but she can’t be too sure. She’d have to look at the inseam measurements or pocket size to know exactly. Not that it matters. Rhaenyra is an innate curiosity to her, she simply does not voice it aloud as much as Rhaenyra seems to about her.

Alicent breathes in a deep sigh. Harrold told her to play nice and she’s not entirely against the idea of throwing Rhaenyra a bone, she just wishes the woman made it easier. If she didn’t ask Alicent the hard questions, questions regarding things she hated thinking about. Questions with answers she spent every single day shoving down further and further into the tar pit of her soul. Her eyes land on the window, watching a thin sliver of moonlight highlight a small strip of the falling snow. Aside from one street lamp, everything else is dark. 

She clears her throat. “If you must know, he… made a pass at me. Not long into our partnership.”

“I thought he was married.”

“He was,” Alicent reiterates, her voice strained. “Even if he wasn’t, I would have rejected him.”

“You don’t fuck co-workers?”

“Do you really have to be so… vulgar?” Alicent asks with a tepid groan. Rhaenyra seems to have a special affinity for finding every single button of hers and pushing them all at once, akin to an over-excited child in an elevator. “I just… wasn’t interested in him. Like that. He was… older than me. And once again, married.”

“So, you like ‘em younger? Cougar.”

“I don’t—why do you keep asking about my dating life?” Alicent turns the conversation on its head, desperate to get the subject matter away from herself. “What about yours? How do you like your boys?” 

Rhaenyra scoffs, sitting up on her hands and eyeing her up and down. “Hightower, everyone in this office swears up and down you’re the best detective in this place. You’re seriously telling me you haven’t figured it out?”

Alicent’s brow furrows. “What are you talking about?”

“Let’s just say I’m a friend of Jodie Foster’s. Rosie O’Donnell… Dorothy?” Rhaenyra tries, waiting for a flicker of recognition in Alicent’s face. When none comes, she groans. “I don’t date men, Alicent. At all.” 

“Oh,” Alicent stands up straighter than before, arms crossed against her chest as she looks Rhaenyra up and down, taking her in with the new light shone upon her. Men’s shirts. Hm. “Jodie Foster isn’t gay. Neither is Rosie O’Donnell.”

“Sure,” Rhaenyra hums, staring at her with a bored expression. “Does that bother you? I know you’re all—” she pauses, making a Hail Mary against her chest, though she does it in the wrong order.

Alicent shrugs, turning away from Rhaenyra. “I don’t… I don’t know. The bible doesn’t say anything about it, really, you know. It’s a mistranslation. The verse everyone talks about.”

“How do you know?” 

“I speak a little Greek,” Alicent admits, returning to where she had been leaning across the table. Rhaenyra’s leg bumps absentmindedly against her waist, an accidental motion that has Alicent jumping slightly. “I needed it for a case once. Then, I found a bible in Greek and read it to see if I could.”

“You read… the bible in another language to see if you could?”

Alicent nods. “It was a boring summer. Barely any homicides. Easy ones.”

“You’re so weird.”

“Like you’re any better,” Alicent huffs, eyes tracing up and down Rhaenyra, drinking her in again and again. She thinks of what Rhaenyra might look like to a woman. Well, to a woman who is attracted to that sort of thing. Her boyish charm would work well, Alicent thinks. A tilt of the head, a crooked grin and that floppy blonde hair would have anyone melting into her touch. She thinks of what Rhaenyra might look like, say, approaching a woman in a bar. A beer in her hand—she’d drink beer from the bottle so she could hang it between two fingers—always so casual. “I was curious about the men’s shirts. Couldn’t put it together. I didn’t think… I tend to forget about things like that.”

“World’s best detective,” Rhaenyra scoffs, hopping down from the table and landing beside Alicent. Their hips brush and Alicent doesn’t think about it until she does. Until Rhaenyra’s arm is brushing against hers where she crosses hers against her chest. Alicent’s skin burns, embarrassed by the way this conversation has gone. “Stumped by dykes.”

“I—that’s not fair,” Alicent scoffs. “It’s not my fault I’ve been focusing on the case. You’re the one sitting around asking things like "if I have a boyfriend.” 

“Was curious about the kind of emotional attachments you form in your life,” Rhaenyra admits, turning to look at Alicent. Their eyes meet, forearms barely touching one another where they stand. “You’re more off-putting than you think you are. At times, you’re almost doll-like in your detachment. I was curious to know if you had the capacity to form emotional attachments at all.”

Alicent sucks in a breath, biting the inside of her cheek. “And what was your conclusion?”

“Inconclusive,” Rhaenyra breathes out, searching for something in Alicent’s eyes she can’t seem to place. “You’re tough to figure out. When you’re here—in your element, I suppose, you can almost be charming. Funny. Spit you out anywhere else and you are one creepy motherfucker, Alicent Hightower.”

“I can do this, too,” Alicent retorts, trying not to take offense to Rhaenyra’s statements. These are all things she knows about herself, things she’s made her peace with long ago. She didn’t spend years getting made fun of by girls on the playground just to be an adult who gets offended when someone tells her she’s off-putting. Alicent, in her line of work, likes being able to make people uncomfortable when she needs to. When she can drop the mask and change her entire demeanor to get what she wants. She’s a chameleon, a keen suspect told her once. She had given him a tense smile as they hauled him off to holding. That was exactly what made her good. 

“Oh, can you?” Rhaenyra asks, her voice more teasing than it was before. It’s not patronizing in the way Alicent thought it would be. This is a game to her, yes, but it’s one where she and Alicent no doubt stand on equal footing. 

“You’re not as cool as you think you are,” Alicent starts, “You walk around expecting everyone to fall for this boyishly handsome schtick, but you don’t know what to do when someone doesn’t. It’s why you don’t know what to do with me. It’s funny, you’re a detective, but you seem to play dumb, like you don’t want people to know how smart you are. But you’re also rash, you think without speaking.” She leans forward on her next words, nose almost brushing Rhaenyra’s, “You also have a strange need to stick your nose where it doesn’t fucking belong.” 

Rhaenyra is just watching her, mouth slightly open as her hands shift to rest in her back pockets. When she meets Alicent’s eyes, she’s smiling like she’s just won something. “You called me handsome.” 

Alicent just groans, taking a step back and reaching for her jacket. “We’ve lost focus. Let’s sleep on it and regroup tomorrow morning, I’m exhausted and you’re driving me crazy.” 

She expects an argument from Rhaenyra, but doesn’t receive one. Instead, the woman just fetches her jacket from where it had fallen to the floor some hours ago, shrugging it on one shoulder at a time. “Why doesn’t Harrold let you work without a partner? Someone who’s been on the job as long as you have is usually fine to just work alone and report to a superior.”

“Like you said,” Alicent’s voice is calculated, concentrated on every word, “I’m off-putting and creepy. He respects me, he knows I do good work, but deep down, he doesn’t trust me. He doesn’t trust that I won’t drown myself in every case, that I won’t do things the right way.”

They stand near the doorway to the office now, Rhaenyra’s hand on the handle, but she won’t turn it, effectively trapping the two of them as she leans against the door. Alicent could overpower her easily if she really needed to get out of here, but she’s more enraptured by the way Rhaenyra is looking at her. “And will you?”

Alicent thinks of the twins. She thinks of the name of their school rattling around in her mind. Of her plans to drive by around three on an off day, of getting them right where she wants them. “Of course not. Do you want to solve the fucking case or not?” 

Rhaenyra bites her lip, muttering, “I underestimated you, Hightower.”

“So do a lot of people. Can you move out of the way now? It’s nearly nine and I’d like to go home,” Alicent huffs, eyes darting to the clock on the wall. She’s prepared to shove Rhaenyra out of the way as needed, but the woman relents at her harsh command. 

She opens the door and holds it open for Alicent, shutting off the lights in the office before letting the door fall shut behind them. They walk side by side towards the entrance, shadows from the darkened offices chasing them. The building is so quiet, Alicent swears she can almost hear the snowfall outside. 

“By the way, after we spoke to Richard, I asked our medical examiner to look back at the bodies they had access to, examine every cut and try to figure out what kind of weapon would make cuts like that and how skilled the wounds were,” Rhaenyra explains as they continue down the winding halls. 

“Why didn’t you mention this earlier?” Alicent huffs, annoyed. The last thing she needs right now is to get a new idea that’ll have her tossing and turning all night. 

“Forgot about it ‘till now,” Rhaenyra shrugs, an answer that only serves to irritate Alicent further. They were together every day for the last week, save for the weekend, and Rhaenyra forgot to mention this. “Anyways, they said it was obvious the killer knew what they were doing with these bodies. They knew just where to cut to get just the flesh, where to bleed, where to pull. The wounds are precise, never jagged, never hurried. The killer knows exactly what they’re doing, like some sort of butcher.”

Alicent stills, just before the main door of the headquarters, one hand shoved in her coat pocket, the other one coming out to stop Rhaenyra in her tracks alongside her. “Or a hunter.”

“Or a hunter,” Rhaenyra confirms. “So, you know, if you were thinking about… not doing things the right way regarding… the daughters of a certain hunter, I’m with you.”

Their eyes meet in the quiet dark and Alicent realizes what she is offering. She bites the inside of her cheek, not happy about having been found out. It seems, irritatingly so, that Rhaenyra manages to remain one step ahead of her at all times. When Alicent doesn’t respond, Rhaenyra continues, “And don’t pretend you weren’t going to. With the information on record from the medical examiner, we have probable cause to speak to people who know Richard. We can go around Richard, get to the girls, and it can be… almost above board.”

“You knew I was going to attempt to make contact,” Alicent realizes. “You didn’t forget about this information, you withheld it until you knew what I was thinking.” 

Rhaenyra turns away, caught. Alicent steps back, a scoff falling from her lips. “Yeah, maybe. I was curious to see what you’d do if we couldn’t get to them legally.”

“You—” Alicent starts before pausing, not entirely sure of what she wants to say. “You are the worst partner I’ve ever had. It’s like you don’t even want to solve this case, you just want to fuck with me. Why did you transfer here? What are you running from?” 

“None of your business.”

“You watched my psych eval, allow me to conduct one of my own,” Alicent retorts, eyes wide as she stares at Rhaenyra in the darkness. 

Before Rhaenyra can respond, something moves outside the window. Alicent’s head turns to it immediately, following the shadow she swore danced across her vision. Rhaenyra seemed to see it too, eyes tracing the same path as Alicent’s. Both of them go dead silent, staring at the small circle of snow illuminated by the one street light that highlights their work parking lot. There’s another one, but it spent the summer flickering before the bulb eventually gave out in mid-October. No one had been around to fix it yet. Alicent is starting to wish someone would. Her eyes trace every inch of outside that she can see, one hand resting on the hilt of the revolver on her hip. 

“It’s probably a raccoon or something,” Rhaenyra reasons, taking a step closer to the door. Despite the ease of her words, Alicent finds her hand resting on her gun as well. She would make a quip about it if she were not so focused on the space outside the headquarters. 

“I’m sure that’s what David said when he walked into the church,” Alicent retorts, not feeling too proud of using her partner’s death to get back at Rhaenyra. However, her guilt will not override her need to be right in every situation. “Our cars are too far apart, we should walk to one and drive over to the other.” 

“You just want more time alone with me.”

“On second thought, let’s both just run and see which one they catch first. I hope it’s you. I’m in the mood for a new babysitter,” Alicent spits, her words laced with easy vitriol as she reaches for the door with one hand, the other still on her revolver. Something uneasy crawls up her spine, the hairs on the back of her neck raising. Despite her comments, she’s not letting Rhaenyra out of her sight. No matter how she may feel about her, Alicent is not going to let another partner die on her watch. 

As they exit the building, Rhaenyra goes to step forward and Alicent reaches for her, gripping her forearm tightly. “My car’s closer.” 

She’s still looking around, catching onto every detail she can—the snow is light, slivers of moonlight still shining through the crowds. She looks down, searching for fresh footprints. She stops Rhaenyra in her tracks, looking around. It’s harder to tell off the main pathway because of the leaves falling alongside the snow, creating divots in the snow and making it easier to cover up a trace. They continue down the path, Alicent not quite letting go of Rhaenyra mainly because she isn’t certain the woman wouldn’t make the trek to her own car just to prove a point. 

As they’re about to turn to head towards Alicent’s car, she sees it—a fresh footprint, half off the path, half into the covered leaves and dirt. There’s no trail, just a bush covered with frost. Alicent looks off into the trees bathed in dew and darkness, begging something to look back. 

She pushes Rhaenyra towards her car. “Go, go.” 

They’re the only two cars in the parking lot and Alicent instructs Rhaenyra to keep her eyes on the trees as she focuses on unlocking the car. Her hands are steady, for once, as she pushes the key into the lock on the door and tugs the driver side door open, motioning for Rhaenyra to round the car and get in. As soon as the doors are slammed shut, Alicent locks them, turning on the car and getting the headlights on as soon as possible. She looks to the street to see if any cars are parked over there, if anyone is even driving by, but the roads are quiet. Her breath is shaky as her hands grip the wheel, waiting for the car to warm up. She’s acutely aware of Rhaenyra in the corner of her vision, staring at her. 

She should get out and study the footprint before the snow covers it, she should take a photo of it with the camera she keeps in her backseat—find the shoe size, assess the tracks left to figure out what brand in might be, figure out if it belongs to a man or woman, but she can’t breathe. She can’t stop seeing the doors of the church—ajar, candles flickering in the wet heat of summer. 

A hand on her shoulder forces Alicent to finally acknowledge the other woman in the car. She doesn’t realize she’s panting until she sees a cloud of her own breath in the still-freezing car. “It’s fine. We’re fine. No one is out there.”

“Someone was,” Alicent swallows around the lump in her throat as best she can, trying not to choke. “I saw—we both saw. There was a footprint, I need to go study it.”

She reaches for the door handle, but Rhaenyra stops her, yanking her back in, the door slamming shut with her. Alicent just glares at her, but Rhaenyra is steadfast, shaking her head. “If someone is really out there watching us, the only thing we need to do right now is get home and make sure we aren’t followed.” 

Alicent focuses on the air in the car shifting from cold to warm as her heater starts to do its job. An idea flickers across her mind. “Let’s not go home, not yet. I’ll drive you back around to your car, but for now, we need to go somewhere public, somewhere not near either of our homes.”

Rhaenyra just nods, finally letting go of Alicent. Even though the touch was through the fabric of her coat, Alicent finds herself surprised to not see Rhaenyra’s hand singed into her like a brand. She puts the car into reverse and backs out of the parking spot, eyes routinely checking her mirrors as she pulls out of the parking lot. As she heads down the road, she drives slow, waiting to see if another car pulls out behind them either from the side of the road or another turn-off that might be hidden in the darkness. 

She continues down the road, turning randomly a few times just to be sure, before stopping in front of a small bar. It glows yellow amongst the white of the snow and Alicent sighs deeply as she shuts off the car. Both of them had been silent the whole drive.

“Come on, we need a drink.”

***

Rhaenyra does, in fact, drink beer from a bottle. And she lets it hang loose by her side with two fingers holding it by the top of the neck, just as Alicent pictured in her mind. They lean against the bar, cast in a hazy glow of warm light amongst a small crowd of mainly older folks and single men. Alicent supposes this is what they get for going to a bar on a Monday night. She can’t even bring herself to care. She can’t shake the chill of being watched, of something staring back from the darkness. 

“Who do you think they’ll go for this time? Me or you?” Rhaenyra jokes in poor taste, lifting the bottle to her lips and taking a hearty sip. Alicent’s own bottle has barely been drank at all. She shifts it between her hands, letting the bottom of it slide against the aged wood of the bar as she slumps against the barstool, thinking.

“Don’t even joke like that,” Alicent huffs. She looks over her shoulder for the tenth time in the last two minutes. She’s been keeping count. 

“I think it’ll be me,” Rhanyra hums, her back to the bar, arm brushing against Alicent’s. Alicent wonders if they accidentally touched this much before and she’s only just now noticing or if this is something new. If she’s only noticing it now because of what she knows about Rhaenyra. A thing she knows and is trying not to think about. Rhaenyra and… women. She tries to picture it. And then tries to stop picturing it. She wonders if Rhaenyra had a girlfriend in New York. If that’s what she’s running from. Then, she tries to think about why she cares. “I think they like you, this killer. They can sense your proclivity for religion and are trying to draw you back like some prodigal daughter.”

“That’s it,” Alicent exclaims, shooting up her seat as her hands grips the first part of Rhaenyra which happens to be her elbow. “The inscription left at the bottom of the notes—P.S. We thought it was initials or maybe a mockery of a post script, but it’s prodigal son. Of course, it’s the fucking prodigal son.”

“Explain that to me like I don’t know what that means.” Rhaenyra says this in a way that tells Alicent she doesn’t know what it means.

Alicent chuckles, feeling reinvigorated. “The Parable of the Prodigal son. The youngest son of a wealthy man asks his father for part of the estate, wanting his inheritance to be split between him and his older brother before the father’s death. He takes the money and indulges until it runs out in the middle of a famine, leaving him desolate and desperate, he envies the pigs, he views himself as lower than filth. He returns to the father and is welcomed back with open arms, celebrated even. This angers the older brother. He’s been there the whole time by the father’s side and never once has he been given the same celebration.”

“Okay, and why does this matter?” Rhaenyra tilts her head, taking another lengthy sip of her beer. Alicent’s eyes trace the way her throat bobs.

“The most common interpretation, at least in the Catholic church, is that the father is God. The elder son is just and the youngest is the sinner. If this person views themselves as the prodigal son… as the sinner…” Alicent drifts off, putting pieces together in her mind, “The killer isn’t someone mocking religion, they’re someone desperately trying to get back to it. To be seen and loved in the eyes of God once more.” 

“And this is all if the initials happen to stand for prodigal son instead of, say, Paul Simon,” Rhaenyra tosses out, eyeing Alicent curiously. 

“I don’t think our killer is one half of Simon & Garfunkel, no,” Alicent chides, finally taking a hearty swig of her beer before slamming it back down against the counter. She smiles softly to herself, shaking her head. “Prodigal fucking son. We are starting to figure you out.”