Disclaimer: This chapter gives a brief,yet poignant interlude into the complex, dynamic relationship between Roose and Ramsay Bolton. Everyone who has either read George R. Martin's books or have watched the HBO series are aware of Ramsay's conception. In this chapter, there are depictions of rape and sexual assault. May the reader be advised.

Chapter Four

Roose Bolton eyed his son carefully, critically. His breath held in anticipation as he searched for some sign, some hidden clue, that all appearances of calm equanimity and control that was before him now would suddenly transform into a paroxysm of ranting, raving and chaos. Careful now...Careful...One always had to tread carefully-cautiously-when speaking to Ramsay. One false or thoughtless move was all it took.

There was a tic in his jaw, faint but evident. Oh Gods...his bastard was angry. Roose glanced down at his hands-scarred and calloused, so unlike a true lord's hands-and visibly grimaced. To the outside observer, they were innocuous. A testament of the bastard's hardship in a cold, unforgiving world. Yet, Roose knew better. Those hands, with their spider fingers and paled skin untouched and unacquainted with the summer sun, were the hands of a monster. A demon wrapped tightly in meat, sinew and bone.

Roose was not stupid, for he knew what fellow lords and servants alike were saying about his bastard. His flesh and blood. A mad dog, a wild animal. They would whisper surreptitiously among themselves. Never to his face, of course not, no. But always in hushed, terrified tones, always out of reach and into the air of nothingness and obscurity.

Roose had just returned from Winterfell after receiving a raven from Ned earlier that morn. Not wanting to believe the news, he procured his fastest horse posthaste. Gone...Sansa Stark had gone. Vanished into oblivion three days prior while riding her mare near the Wolfswood Forest. And with her, all of their carefully constructed plans.

In some strange show of solidarity, Roose was secretly glad Sansa had gone, fled her sham of an engagement and untethered herself from a madman's grasps. Yet, standing here now, taking his son in-the tic in his jaw, the clenching and unfurling of his fist, the shallow breathing, the quietness-all Roose could do at that moment was damn Sansa Stark to the deepest pit of the seven hells for her stupidity. When he had first heard the news, he had initially dismissed it all as gossip, idle and nonsensical chatter of bored and lack-witted servants. However, when he had received the raven while breaking his fast, glimpsing at the yellow parchment and the seal of the ferocious direwolf, the official seal of the North, he knew something was wrong. And here he was now, trying desperately to appease the seething, savage beast that was his son.

Son...Gods, the word felt like nettles on his tongue. He never wanted him, the bastard. When the boy's mother arrived at the Dreadfort with the young boy in tow, Roose had been ever quick to send them off, supplying the woman-the miller's wife-with a large sow, a hundred gold dragons, and a foul-smelling servant, all in the attempt to shut her up and conceal his crime.

He had returned from a hunting trip when he had first spotted her. Millicent. After so many years of denial suppression, Roose was finally able to concede what he had done. To admit his transgression which had long come back to haunt...

She was a pretty little thing, with her burnt chestnut hair and womanly curves. Alone on her lands-a small squat of ground consisting of a river and a few sparse trees and the wheat mill. She had been alone, washing laundry near the small stream behind the stone cottage. Her husband away in the village...Roose's britches tightened at the thought. Such a beauty left alone, just ripe for the plucking...

She tried to fight him, further spurring his excitement and ire, his body a panting heap of exertion and lust. She had then fainted, due to an accumulation of shock and pain, enabling Roose to finish quickly. He thrust into her once, twice, three times before he spilled into her, his hot seed seeping and pulsing. He felt boneless then, weak, as he shuddered and convulsed.

Looking down at her now, her split lip, her bloodied and bruised form, her shredded peasant garb, she was hardly worth the rape, Roose decided. After cleaning himself up, concealing the deed as best as he could, Roose left, leaving Millicent's broken and bruised body where she had fallen without so much as a backward's glance. It was calloused, Roose acknowledged, and cruel. No woman-peasant or highborn-deserved that type of mistreatment.

Yet, she was a peasant, a lowly miller's wife, and he was a lord of an ancient and powerful house, second only to the Starks. Who in the seven hells was she to deny him? She was fortunate that he did not kill her for her insolence!

Roose was angry now, indignant, yet justified.

All she had to do was stay hidden. And then the bitch had to fall pregnant...When she had first come to him, her condition revealed and slightly straining against her threadbare home-spun, Roose had been terrified and ordered her to be beaten so severely that he was certain it would induce a miscarriage. He had hoped so, anyway. Night after night, he was a mad man, fervently praying to the gods (both old and new) that she had lost the babe. That he would be forever untethered by an unwanted bastard.

However, it prayer had fallen on deaf ears and remained unanswered. When his son, Domeric, had learned that he had a brother (half, always half) and had wished to seek him out, Roose had been incensed and forbade the relationship. Domeric was his heir, the one joy in an otherwise bleak existence laden with shit and mire. He was an erudite man, Domeric, a lover of books and horses, unmarred by the weight of the Bolton name and its horrors. Roose wanted to protect him, to keep him unblemished from the one blight that threatened to level and shatter his house's foundations.

And then Domeric had fallen ill and died under mysterious circumstances early one morning. Maester Wolkan asserted that it was an illness that claimed him, one of the enumerable passing maladies that had plagued the North that winter. But Roose knew better. Evil hands were at work. Ever since Millicent brought back the bastard to the Dreadfort, an ill-omen settled over the castle, saturating it with both unease and trepidation.

The boy, the bastard, was a demon. A living reminder of Roose's misdeeds and failed atonement. Although small and sickly, his gauntness made all the more evident by his ill-fitting clothing and pallid skin, every alarm bell rung riot in Roose's head as he gazed at the boy, more specifically, his eyes.

They were not the eyes of a human, no, not in the least. Unblinking, colder than Northern ice and devoid of all emotion and warmth, they were the eyes of a madman, a rabid and feral dog. Roose involuntarily shuddered, a reaction he was in the habit of doing whenever the bastard drew near. Steady. Steady now...

Roose tried to love him. Gods only knew how he tried to love Ramsay-to show him some form of kindness and compassion that had been deprived from him since childhood. Perhaps if Roose loved him hard enough, encouraged him more, spoken more softly to him, then maybe the gods would forgive him for his transgression and penance could be made. It had been said that if one showed kindness to a feral animal, then it could be tamed. He had already lost Domeric, surely he had paid enough. The gods were not that cruel, were they?

Standing here now, looking at his son and gauging his reaction, Roose had been wrong. Very wrong. There it was again, that tic in Ramsay's jaw. A tightening of his fist. He knew the signs well. The Mad Dog was becoming unhinged.

"Ramsay-"Roose began, slowly raising his hands in appeasement.

"Where. Had she. Gone?" Came the reply, colder than any Northern wind. Roose shuddered then, suddenly worried. He had never before been afraid of his bastard; it had always been the opposite. He was the only one who could control him. No. No. No...

"They do not know. She went out for an evening stroll on her mare and did not return. They say that she had been abducted. Some hunters had found wildling tracks in the woods. They suspect that they took her." Roose gulped as Ramsay turned to face him fully then. "'Bride-stealing,' they call it."

A moment passed. Then two. The silence between them seemed interminable. Roose waited, tensed. Oh...!

Then, just as suddenly, the bastard left the room, not once looking back. Roose let out a tired breath, his eyes slowly closing and opening. Dread sinking, like a stone, in his belly and settling there. This was just the calm before the storm. He knew his bastard, he knew his moods-as unpredictable and capricious as the Summer Sea. He was not done.

The next morning, as Roose was preparing for a morning stroll, one of the few luxuries afforded to him that truly calmed his nerves, he was greeted with the ghastly sight of the decapitated and flayed remains of the stable lad, Wilsun.

Damn you, Sansa Stark! Roose Bolton swore vehemently, fighting off both shock and nausea at the grizzly sight. May the gods damn you for unleashing this hell on us all. And may they damn me, too, for allowing it to endure.