Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Chapter 268

Elara’s POV

"Come back to me."

The words fell from my lips like a prayer to a god who wasn’t listening. Touching his freezing skin, I pressed my trembling fingers desperately against his neck to search for a pulse, but found absolutely nothing. He was truly gone. I pulled back and stared at his face. Gray. Still. The sharp angles of his jaw, the dark lashes resting against hollowed cheeks—he looked like a sculpture of the man I’d loved. Beautiful and utterly lifeless.

Inside me, the place where the mate bond had lived was a gaping wound. Raw. Bleeding. For years that thread had been stretched thin, frayed by distance and silence and my own stubborn fury. But it had been there. A faint warmth I’d refused to acknowledge during all those cold nights in the fighting pits.

Now it was gone.

And the wolf—my newly awakened white winter wolf, who had slumbered for years before erupting from my bones only moments ago—felt the mate bond snap.

She threw back her head inside my mind and screamed.

Not the gentle keening of Moonlight, my old wolf spirit. Not a mournful howl carried softly on the wind. This was something else entirely. An Alpha’s death cry for losing her mate. Primordial. Devastating. It ripped through my skull and burst from my throat in a sound I didn’t recognize as my own voice. Half-human shriek. Half-wolf roar. The trees around us shuddered. Birds exploded from branches in panicked clouds.

The sound went on and on until my lungs were empty. Until my throat was raw and bleeding. Until the forest itself seemed to flinch.

Then silence.

I desperately locked my hands together, pressing down hard on his chest to perform CPR, vainly trying to force his heart to beat again. I breathed air into his still lips with frantic, futile motions, but he remained stubbornly unmoving. Shattered, I collapsed forward onto his gray, lifeless face and chest, sobbing loudly. My fingers clawed at his ruined armor. My tears soaked into the blood-crusted fabric of his tunic. I could feel every wound beneath my hands. The gashes across his ribs. The deep puncture in his shoulder. And the worst one—the terrible, blackened wound directly over his heart where Malakor’s poisoned blade had found its mark. The skin around it had gone dark, the veins beneath spreading outward like cracks in shattered glass.

"You promised them," I choked against his chest, reminding him. "You promised Valerius you’d teach him to ride before the frost came. He told me. In his letters—the ones I never answered because I was too stupid and too proud—" A sob broke the sentence apart. I pressed harder against him, as if I could push my own warmth into his frozen body. "And Lyra. She drew you a picture. A wolf with golden eyes standing next to a smaller wolf with silver fur. She asked me if her daddy’s eyes really looked like that, and I—I couldn’t even answer her because it hurt too much to say your name."

His hand lay open beside him. I grabbed it, lacing my fingers tightly through his stiff, unyielding ones.

I squeezed anyway.

"I was wrong," I whispered, tears streaming down my face. "I was so wrong, Kaelen. I should have stayed. I should have fought for us instead of running. I should have trusted—"

The crash of boots through undergrowth. Voices. Shouts.

"Over here! I see her—Goddess above—"

Cassian burst through the tree line first. His armor was dented. Blood caked the left side of his face from a wound above his brow. Behind him came multiple warriors, swords drawn, torches casting wild shadows through the dark forest.

Cassian’s eyes swept the clearing. Found Isolde’s dead body nearby. Found me—blood-soaked, crouched over Kaelen’s still form. His face drained of all remaining color.

"No." The word fell from him like something dropped from a great height. He crossed the distance in a few strides and dropped to his knees on Kaelen’s other side. His hand went to Kaelen’s throat. Pressed. Waited.

I watched his face. Watched the hope die.

"Kaelen." Cassian’s voice was barely audible. His jaw worked. His eyes went bright and wet, and he blinked hard. "Kaelen, you stubborn bastard. No."

He looked at me. And for the first time since I’d known him—this unshakable, ironclad knight who’d survived countless battles—I saw Cassian break. A single tear carved a path through the blood on his cheek.

"Elara." His hand found my shoulder. Gentle. Trembling. "Elara, we need to move him. We need to bring him back to—"

"Don’t touch him."

My voice came out low. Lethal. A command wrapped in grief.

Cassian froze.

A young warrior stepped forward. His eyes were red. His chin trembled. "Your Majesty, please—we should bring His Majesty’s body back to camp so that—"

"I said don’t touch him." I turned on the warrior with such ferocity that he stumbled back. My eyes burned. My new wolf surged behind them, and I knew—from the way every warrior in that clearing flinched—that my gaze had shifted. Ice blue bleeding into something brighter. Something that carried the weight of an Alpha’s absolute authority. "No one moves him. No one touches my husband. Not until I say."

The warrior dropped his head. "Yes, Your Majesty."

Silence fell. Heavy as stone.

I turned back to Kaelen, keeping my fingers laced tightly with his.

"I watched the memory crystal," I confessed to him, my voice shattered but clear. "Gareth and Seraphine’s magic recording. I saw everything. The drug they put in your wine. How they arranged for her to be in your chamber. How they fabricated the entire thing." I pressed my forehead to his collarbone, crying over the horrible wound on his chest. "You were drugged. You never touched her. You never betrayed me. And I—" The tears came faster. Hotter. "I left you. I took our daughter and I left, and you spent years thinking I hated you, and now you’re—you’re—"

I couldn’t say the word.

Around me, the warriors had begun to kneel. One by one, like falling dominoes, they sank to the ground. Heads bowed. Shoulders shaking. Someone let out a broken sob. Then another. The sound of grief spread through them like a contagion, and my white wolf answered their mourning with a low, resonant keen that vibrated in my chest and hummed against Kaelen’s silent heart.

I brought his stiff hand to my lips, kissing his cold knuckles.

"I’m sorry," I breathed against his skin, crying for doubting him. "I’m so sorry. For every day. For every letter I didn’t open. For doubting you and running away. For every moment I wasted being afraid when I should have been here. With you."

My tears pooled directly in the fatal poison wound right over his heart.

Suddenly, the tears began to glow with a pure, golden light. It spread toward his skin, carrying a distinct warmth, pulsing steadily just like a heartbeat.