Chapter 4: The Captain's Jealousy
The sharp, clean scent of oiled leather and blade polish did nothing to clear the fog from Aelin’s mind.
Standing in the center of the obsidian training yard, the mid-morning sun a white-hot coin in a hard blue sky, she felt disjointed. Her body, usually a weapon of precise, lethal grace, felt like a foreign instrument—one still thrumming with the echoes of a different kind of exertion. Between her legs, a pleasant, persistent soreness pulsed with every shift of her stance. The high-collared training leathers she’d donned itched against the skin of her neck, a deliberate armor against the evidence Dorian’s mouth had left there. Evidence she’d caught a glimpse of in her looking-glass that morning: twin bruises, the color of storm clouds, just below her jawline.
He’d marked her. The thought sent an unwelcome, proprietary thrill through her, which she immediately smothered.
“You’re drifting.” Chaol’s voice was flat, a captain’s voice, cutting through the clatter of practice swords from the far end of the yard.
She blinked, refocusing on him. He stood ten feet away, a broad-shouldered silhouette against the glittering frosted silver of the courtyard wall. His own practice sword was held loosely, but his posture was coiled, ready. His brown eyes, usually so warm when they looked at her, were chips of flint.
“I’m right here,” she said, forcing a lightness into her tone that felt brittle. She hefted her own blunted blade.
“Your eyes are here. The rest of you is somewhere else.” He began to circle, his boots silent on the polished stone. “Did you sleep poorly?”
The question was innocent. The undercurrent was not. She’d slipped from Dorian’s chambers as the first grey light diluted the stained-glass colors, moving through the silent palace like a ghost. Chaol knew her routines. He knew when she was restless, when she trained to chase away demons. He also knew she hadn’t come to his door.
“The palace beds are too soft,” she deflected, mirroring his steps. “I’m used to a firmer mattress.”
A lie. Dorian’s bed had been cloud-soft, and she’d slept in it like the dead.
Chaol’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “Then let’s give you something firm to focus on.”
He attacked.
It was not the measured, probing opening of their usual spars. It was a swift, aggressive lunge, his blade a grey streak aimed for her ribs. She parried, the impact shuddering up her arm. The force of it knocked her back a step. Her muscles, lethargic and satisfied, screamed in protest.
He didn’t let her recover. He came again, a relentless combination of blows—high, low, a slash at her knees she barely jumped. The clash of their practice swords was a percussive, ugly sound, out of sync with the rhythmic drills around them.
“Faster,” he grunted, his breath already coming harder. He wasn’t playing. This was a test.
She gritted her teeth, pushing the lingering heaviness from her limbs. She pushed back, her movements gaining fluidity, the ingrained instinct of a warrior overriding the body’s memory of a lover. She ducked under a swing and swept her foot towards his ankles. He jumped back, nimble for his size, and came in with an overhead strike she blocked with a cross of her wrists.
They stood locked, blades pressed together, their faces inches apart. Sweat beaded at his temples. His eyes dropped, just for a fraction of a second, to the collar of her leathers. The fastenings had loosened with the fight. The edge of one of the bruises was visible.
His gaze snapped back to hers. Something cold and sharp flickered in the brown depths—confirmation, and a pain so swift and deep it looked like anger.
With a roar of effort, he shoved her back, breaking the lock. She stumbled, off-balance. He pressed the advantage, his attacks becoming sharper, less controlled. A slash whistled past her ear, missing by a hair. Another nearly took her hand at the wrist.
“Chaol,” she warned, blocking a blow that jarred her teeth.
He didn’t answer. His silence was worse than any taunt. It was a wall, and behind it, something was boiling over.
He feinted left and drove his shoulder into her chest. The air left her lungs in a whoosh. She fell back, hitting the obsidian hard enough to see stars. Her practice sword skittered away. In an instant, he was over her, the blunt tip of his blade hovering at her throat.
His chest heaved. Sweat dripped from his chin onto her leathers. The yard had gone quiet. The other guards had stopped their drills, watching their Captain pin the notorious King’s Champion to the ground.
“You’re dead,” he breathed, his voice low and rough.
She stared up at him, gasping. The sun haloed his head, leaving his face in shadow. But she could feel the tremor in the sword at her neck. It wasn’t from exertion.
“Then kill me,” she challenged, her own voice a scrape. “Or get off me.”
For a long, suspended moment, he didn’t move. The pressure of the blade against her windpipe was a promise. Then, with a sound of pure disgust, he flung his practice sword aside. It clattered against the stone, spinning wildly. He didn’t offer her a hand. He turned on his heel and strode towards the archway that led to the interior armory.
“We’re done,” he tossed over his shoulder, not looking back.
Humiliation and a hot spike of anger burned through her. She shoved to her feet, ignoring the curious, pitying stares of the guards. She retrieved her sword and followed him. She wouldn’t let it end like this, with his unspoken accusations hanging in the air between them.
The armory was a long, windowless room lined with racks of gleaming weapons and stands of armor. The air was cool and metallic, smelling of sharpening stones and old iron. Chaol was at the far end, his back to her, violently unbuckling the practice guards from his forearms and throwing them onto a bench.
“What was that?” Aelin demanded, her voice echoing off the stone walls.
“Training,” he said, not turning.
“That wasn’t training. That was you trying to take my head off.”
He yanked the last strap free and finally turned. His expression was carved from stone, but a muscle ticked in his cheek. “You were distracted. Sloppy. In a real fight, you’d be bleeding out on the cobblestones. I was reminding you of the stakes.”
“The stakes,” she echoed, advancing. “Or were you reminding me of something else?”
His eyes darkened. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you?” She stopped a few feet from him. The silence in the room was thick, pulsing. “You saw. Go on. Say it.”
He looked at her then, really looked, his gaze a physical touch tracing the line of her collar, the disheveled hair, the faint, smug soreness she knew her body carried like a scent. His control snapped.
“Was it worth it?” The words were quiet, lethal.
“Was what worth it?”
“Him.” He bit the word off. “The prince. The champagne. The whispers. Was it worth coming here smelling like his sheets, moving like he fucked you sore, wearing his marks for the whole damned court to see?”
There it was. Laid bare in the cool, rational light of the armory. The truth of last night, which had felt so private, so separately real, now sounded tawdry in his mouth. It ignited her temper.
“My body is my own,” she snarled. “To do with as I please. It doesn’t belong to you, and it certainly doesn’t belong to your judgment.”
“I never said it did!” he shot back, his own volume rising. He took a step toward her, his large frame crowding her in the narrow aisle between weapon racks. “But I’m not a fool, Aelin. And I’m not one of your courtiers who will simper and pretend not to notice. I was there first. Or did you forget that in his library?”
The memory crashed over her—not of Dorian, but of Chaol. The cramped quarters in Rifthold. The whispered confessions in the dark, his trembling hands mapping her skin as if she were holy ground. The gentleness that had almost undone her. It had been real. It had been first.
“I forget nothing,” she said, but some of the fire left her voice.
“It sure as hell seems like it.” The pain was raw in his eyes now, bleeding through the anger. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? To see you look at him across a council table? To know he can offer you palaces and titles and… and whatever the hell that was last night? I’m just the Captain. I have a bunk in the guards’ tower and a duty that will never, ever allow me to be with you openly. He can. And he did.”
He was breathing heavily, his confession hanging in the air between them, stark and vulnerable.
Aelin’s anger melted away, leaving a cold, complicated shame. She had used Chaol’s quiet, steadfast love as an anchor. And then she had sailed into a storm with Dorian, simply because she could. Because the storm was bright and thrilling and demanded nothing of her heart.
“Chaol,” she said, her voice softening.
He shook his head, as if to clear it. “Don’t.” He turned away again, his shoulders rigid. “Just don’t.”
But she couldn’t leave it like this. The sight of his broad back, rigid with hurt, was a physical ache. This was Chaol. Her friend. Her first. The man who had seen Celaena Sardothien and accepted her, who now saw Aelin Galathynius and still stood by her. She crossed the space between them and put a hand on his arm.
He flinched as if burned.
“Look at me,” she said.
He didn’t move.
She stepped around him, forcing herself into his line of sight. His eyes were glassy, his face pale beneath its tan. The raw hurt there was worse than any anger.
Without thinking, she reached up and touched his face. His breath hitched.
Her touch was his undoing. The last of his restraint shattered.
He moved so fast she had no time to react. One hand encircled the back of her neck, not gently. The other gripped her waist. His mouth came down on hers.
It was nothing like Dorian’s playful, skilled kisses. This was a claim. A punishment. A desperate, aching attempt to overwrite a memory. It was rough, possessive, all teeth and consuming need. He kissed her like a drowning man, and she tasted the salt of his sweat and the bitter tang of his jealousy.
A sound, half-protest, half-surrender, escaped her throat. Her hands came up, not to push him away, but to clutch at the front of his sweat-damp tunic. He walked her back until her shoulder blades hit the cold, unyielding edge of a weapons rack. A row of polished daggers rattled in their sheaths above her head.
He broke the kiss, his lips trailing to her throat, to the very marks he’d resented. He didn’t kiss them. He pressed his mouth beside them, a new claim on unmarked skin, his teeth grazing the delicate tendons.
“He was not first,” Chaol growled against her pulse, the words vibrating into her bones. “I was. Remember that.”
His hands were rough, demanding, as they fumbled with the fastenings of her leathers. There was no seduction here, no slow exploration. This was a raw, urgent need to connect, to prove something, to reclaim a space inside her he feared he’d lost. He yanked the leathers down over her shoulders, trapping her arms, baring her to the waist. The cool air raised goosebumps on her skin.
He stared at her, his eyes blazing. “Tell me you remember.”
“I remember,” she whispered, and it was true. In this moment, with his hands on her and his pain in the air, she remembered the boy in Rifthold who had looked at her as if she were the only light in a dark world.
It was all the permission he needed.
He kissed her again, swallowing her gasp as his hands found her breasts, his thumbs circling her nipples with a touch that was more urgent than tender. His hips pinned her against the rack, and she could feel the hard evidence of his want through his training pants. The contrast was dizzying: the cold metal at her back, the heat of him pressed against her front.
He fumbled with the laces of his own pants, then hers, his fingers clumsy with haste. When he freed himself, he didn’t wait. He hooked a hand behind her knee, hiking her leg up around his hip, and drove into her in one deep, claiming thrust.
She cried out, her head thumping back against the weapon rack. There was no slow build, no searching for the right angle. He was just there, filling her, stretching her differently than Dorian had. It was shallower, somehow, but more focused, a fierce, desperate joining. The soreness from the night before flared into a bright, shocking pleasure-pain.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice ragged.
She forced her eyes open. His face was so close she could see the gold flecks in his brown eyes, the sheen of sweat on his upper lip, the absolute, wrecked intensity of his gaze. He wasn’t a prince in a library. He was a soldier in an armory, and this was a battle for something neither of them could name.
He began to move, a hard, driving rhythm that rocked her body against the unyielding rack. Each thrust was a punctuation to his unspoken words. Mine. First. Remember.
She clutched at him, her nails digging into the hard muscles of his back through his tunic. Her moans were swallowed by his mouth, by the quiet, tense grunts that escaped him with every movement. The sound of their bodies meeting was softer than it had been with Dorian, dampened by their clothes, but somehow more intimate, more secret. This wasn’t a performance for the mirrors. This was a hidden, guilty thing, stolen in a room of silent weapons.
Her climax built not as a spreading wildfire, but as a tight, focused coil deep in her belly, winding tighter with each of his desperate, possessive thrusts. It was tied to the look in his eyes, to the hurt she had caused, to the overwhelming need to give him this, to bridge the chasm she’d opened.
“Chaol,” she gasped, his name a broken plea.
He heard the change in her voice. His rhythm fractured, grew more frantic. “Look at me,” he begged again, his own control fraying. “Aelin, please.”
She held his gaze as the coil snapped. Her release was a silent, shuddering implosion, a wave of sensation that locked her muscles and stole her breath. She bit down on her own lip to keep from screaming, her body clenching around him in rhythmic pulses.
It undid him completely. With a choked, agonized sound that was her name, he buried his face in her neck and spilled into her, his own body shuddering through the release. He held her there, pinned between his weight and the cold metal, for a long minute, both of them breathing in shattered, synced gasps.
Slowly, the world filtered back. The smell of iron and oil. The chill of the stone beneath her boots. The uncomfortable dig of a dagger hilt into her spine.
He softened and slipped out of her. The sudden emptiness felt more profound than physical. He didn’t let her go, though. He kept his forehead pressed against her shoulder, his breath hot on her skin. His hands, which had been so rough, now trembled as they came up to gently pull her leathers back over her shoulders.
The tenderness of the gesture, after the fierceness of the act, was what finally broke her. A hot tear escaped, tracing a path through the sweat on her temple. She hoped he didn’t see it.
He straightened, his movements stiff. He fastened his own pants, not looking at her. His face was a mask of conflicted torment—satisfaction, shame, lingering pain.
“I shouldn’t have—” he began, his voice hoarse.
“Don’t.” She echoed his earlier word, cutting him off. She pushed away from the rack, her legs unsteady. She adjusted her clothes, her fingers fumbling. “Just… don’t.”
She couldn’t bear his apology. It would make this a mistake. And she didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt like a necessary collision, two planets breaking apart in a shower of painful, beautiful debris.
He finally looked at her. The anger was gone. Only a deep, weary sorrow remained. “Where does this leave us?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? She had a crown to reclaim from a tyrant king—Chaol’s king. She had a prince’s taste still on her tongue and his marks on her