Chapter 6: The Captain's Oath
The world had narrowed to a series of distant, muffled sensations. The lavender scent in her room was now a nauseating blanket. The velvet drapes swallowed sound. Clara lay on the floor because the bed seemed too far, a continent away across the sea of polished wood. The chemical fire inside her had banked to a deep, throbbing ache, but the feeling of violation was a film on her skin, in her lungs, that no bath could scrub away.
She was still wearing the torn gown. She hadn’t let the maids touch her. They’d left a tray of food and a fresh pot of tea by the door, whispering behind their hands. She heard the words “fits” and “hysteria.” Hoyt’s narrative was already spreading.
A part of her watched, detached, as her body shook. Fine tremors, like a plucked wire. The laudanum haze had receded, leaving a crystalline, hyper-alert clarity ringed with exhaustion. Every sound from the corridor—a boot scuff, a exchanged murmur—made her muscles lock. She waited for the door to open again. For Roland. For Hoyt. For more guards.
The lock clicked.
She didn’t look up. She curled tighter, her face pressed against the cold floorboards, willing herself to become a pattern in the grain.
The door opened and shut. Heavy footsteps, not the light, quick steps of a maid or the measured tread of Imperial Guards. These were purposeful, armored. She stopped breathing.
He stopped just inside the room. The silence stretched, thick and terrible. She could feel his gaze on her, a physical weight.
“Princess.”
Sir Jared’s voice was low, a rumble that seemed to vibrate through the floor. It wasn’t a question. It was an assessment.
She didn’t move. Couldn’t.
His boots came closer. He knelt. The leather of his gear creaked. She caught the scent of oiled steel, cold outdoor air, and something else—sweat, the kind from hard training or a frantic run through the palace. He didn’t touch her. His breath hitched, a sharp, controlled intake.
“Report said you refused care. That you were… disturbed.” His voice was closer now, just above her. It was stripped of its usual formal cadence. “Clara.”
The use of her name, raw and unadorned, cracked something open. A small, broken sound escaped her throat.
“Look at me.” It wasn’t an order. It was a request, strained at the edges.
With monumental effort, she turned her head. Her vision was blurred, but she saw him. Not the Captain of the Guard, the imposing statue of duty. His face was pale beneath its weathering, his jaw clenched so tight a muscle ticked. His eyes, a dark, stormy grey, swept over her: the torn neckline of the gown, the bruise blooming on her jaw where the marble had met her face, the way her arms were wrapped around herself, holding her very pieces together.
His gaze dropped to the hem of her skirt, rucked up around her calves. To the dark, smudged stains on the inside of her thigh, visible against her pale skin. Blood and other things, dried now. His eyes flicked back to her face. The last fragment of professional detachment in them shattered.
“Who.” The word was a scrape of gravel.
She just stared at him, her eyes wide and empty. Telling him felt like inviting the violence into this last, fragile space. Making it real for him would make it final for her.
Jared’s massive hands, usually so sure resting on his sword hilt, hovered in the air between them. They trembled. He looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. Then, with a tenderness that was utterly devastating in its contrast to the fury on his face, he reached out.
He didn’t pull her up. He slid one hand beneath her shoulders, the other under her knees. He gathered her, broken china, against the hard, cold plates of his chest armor. She was rigid, a board in his arms. A wounded animal frozen in terror.
He stood, her weight nothing to him. He carried her to the bed, not the ornate four-poster, but the small divan by the cold fireplace. He sat, settling her across his lap, her head cradled in the crook of his arm. He didn’t speak. He just held her, his chin resting on the top of her hair. His heart hammered against her ear, a frantic, furious drumbeat through the steel.
The heat of him began, slowly, to seep through the layers of leather and metal. The rigid lock of her muscles began to soften, increment by terrifying increment. A tremor started in her shoulders, then her whole body was shaking, great, wracking shudders that felt like they would tear her apart. A high, thin noise leaked from her, a wire of sound stretched to breaking.
Jared’s arms tightened. He pressed his face into her hair. His voice, when it came, was a thick, visceral whisper, muffled against her scalp, vibrating through her skull.
“I will kill them all.”
It wasn’t a vow. It was a statement of fact. The simple, devastating truth of a man who had just seen the ledger of his duty and found the sum unforgivable.
The dam broke. A sob ripped out of her, harsh and ugly. Then another. She turned her face into the unyielding leather of his gorget and wept. She cried for the pain, for the shame, for the years of silent terror. She cried for the physician’s cold hands and the Crown Prince’s hot breath. The tears were a flood, soaking into his uniform, and he just held her, one broad hand moving in slow, steady circles on her back.
He didn’t tell her it would be alright. He didn’t offer hollow comfort. He just repeated it, a low, steady mantra against the storm of her grief. “I will kill them. I will burn this fucking place to the ground. I swear it.”
When the tears finally subsided into exhausted hiccups, the room was darker. The sunset bled violent red through the gaps in the drapes. She was limp in his arms, spent. The silence was different now. Charged, but not with fear. With a terrible, focused potential.
“Was it him?” Jared asked, his voice quiet. “On the stairs. And today.”
She nodded, a minute movement against his chest. “He and the physician. They work together.”
Jared went very still. The hand on her back stopped. “Hoyt.”
“He examined me. After. He said it was treatment.” Her own voice was a ragged thing. “It was… another part of it.”
Jared carefully shifted her, just enough to look down at her face. His eyes were black in the dim light. “Tell me. Everything. Don’t leave a detail out. I need to know what I’m killing him for.”
And so she did. In a flat, detached whisper, she told him. The private room. The guards who looked away. Roland’s words. The feel of the marble. The physician’s probe, his tincture, his ledger. The way he called her a state resource. She left nothing out. It was a clinical recitation of her own destruction.
By the end, Jared was breathing in slow, controlled pulls, as if oxygen had become toxic. The air around him crackled with contained violence.
“Okay,” he said when she finished. Just that. He gently moved her to sit beside him on the divan. He stood up, his frame seeming to fill the entire chamber. He paced to the fireplace, then back, a caged predator. “Kellen made noise. Freir gave you medicine. They’ve shown their hands. Now he does this.” He stopped, looking at her. “It’s a message. To them. To you. To me. He’s saying the noise changes nothing. That you are still his.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“He’s wrong.” Jared knelt before her, bringing himself to her eye level. His gaze was terrifying in its certainty. “You have three husbands. He sees that as a problem. I’m starting to see it as the only advantage you’ve got.”
“You’re bound by oath to the Empire.”
“I swore an oath to protect the royal family,” he corrected, his voice iron. “You are royal family. My wife.” He said the word with a new, fierce possession. “The Empire is the man who did this. The man who allowed it. The man who cleaned up after it. My oath to them is void. It’s ash.”
He reached for her hand, his own engulfing it. His palm was calloused, sword-rough. Real. “Listen to me. You are not alone in this room anymore. You have me. And you have them. Whether they like it or not, they’re in it now. Their pride, their schemes, their petty alliances—they’re all tangled in you. We’re going to use that.”
“How?”
“First, we make you unsafe to touch.” A cold, strategic light entered his eyes. It was the Captain of the Guard, but his allegiance had shifted. “Hoyt wants to treat you? Fine. From now on, I am present for every examination. He will have to look me in the eye while he touches you. My men will rotate on your door. Not the Emperor’s. Mine. Men I trust with my life. Which means I trust them with yours.”
He stood, pulling her up with him. “Second, we talk to the others. A united front, even a fractured one, is harder to break. Kellen has political clout. Freir has… resources outside the channels. I have the Guard.”
“They don’t trust each other. They don’t even like me.”
“They don’t have to. They just have to dislike what was done to you more.” He led her to the washbasin. He picked up a clean cloth, wet it, and with unimaginable gentleness, began to wipe the tear tracks from her face. “We start tomorrow. You will let the maids dress you. You will eat. You will look like you’re recovering. Because you are. Not the way they want. But you are.”
He finished, cupping her cheek. His thumb brushed her cheekbone. “I have to go. I need to post my men and have a very unpleasant conversation with the Head Physician about protocol. But I will be back. And no one,” he said, his voice dropping to that lethal whisper, “will come through that door unless I allow it.”
He turned to leave, a soldier returning to a war he’d just redefined.
“Jared.” Her voice stopped him.
He looked back.
“Thank you.” The words were inadequate, but they were all she had.
A bleak, brutal smile touched his lips. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything yet.”
He left, closing the door softly behind him. A moment later, she heard the low exchange of voices outside—his, and two others. A new shift taking post. The lock turned, but for the first time, the sound didn’t feel like a sentence.
It felt like a barricade.
She looked at the tray of cold food. She walked over, picked up a piece of bread, and took a bite. It was like eating dust. She swallowed.
She took another bite.