Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother novel Chapter 105

Chapter 105: Chapter 105

Elara’s POV

The first thing I felt was the cold.

Not the crisp bite of winter air or the cool brush of mountain wind. This cold was damp. Rotten. It seeped up through cracked concrete and burrowed into my bones like something alive, something feeding.

The second thing I felt was the absence.

I reached inward—an instinct as natural as breathing—searching for that warm, golden presence curled at the base of my consciousness. The place where Moonlight always waited.

Nothing.

Not silence. Silence implied something that could be broken. This was void. A black, gaping hole where my wolf had lived since the day I first shifted. Like reaching for a limb that had been severed.

Moonlight?

No answer. No flicker. No warmth.

The laced holy water. I remembered now—the burn of it sliding down my throat, the way it had detonated inside me like liquid fire, searing through every nerve that connected me to my wolf. I remembered screaming. I remembered Moonlight’s howl—distant, agonized, fading—

Gone.

I was alone in my own body.

My eyes opened to darkness. Not complete—a thin bar of sickly yellow light leaked from beneath a steel door, enough to make out shapes. Concrete walls, close and stained. A ceiling too low. A floor slick with something I didn’t want to identify.

And the smell.

Sweat. Urine. Old blood. Fear—sharp and acrid, the kind that saturates a space when it’s been soaked in terror for too long. It coated my tongue. Filled my lungs.

I pushed myself upright. My arms shook. Without my wolf’s healing, every bruise and cut throbbed with ordinary, human pain. My wrists were raw where ropes had been. My head pounded. A wave of nausea rolled through me, and I pressed my palm flat against the cold floor, breathing through it.

Don’t throw up. Don’t.

As my vision adjusted, I began to count.

Bodies. Huddled against every wall, crammed into corners, piled against each other like discarded things. At least twelve. Some sitting. Some lying flat. All of them radiating the same broken, hollow energy.

The dirty concrete cell was no more than twelve by eight feet. Concrete on every side. The door was solid steel—no window, no slot, just a heavy slab of metal bolted into a reinforced frame. The walls were close enough that I could almost touch both sides if I stretched my arms.

A woman sat to my left, knees drawn to her chest, rocking back and forth in a slow, mechanical rhythm. Her hair was grey. White, almost. But her face—her face was young. She couldn’t have been older than me. The grey had come from something else. Something that had reached inside her and burned the color out.

Her lips moved constantly. Whispering. I leaned closer and caught fragments.

"...blessed moon, protect your children... blessed moon, protect..."

A prayer. Over and over. A loop with no end.

Near the door, two men sat shoulder to shoulder. One had a bandage wrapped around his head—the cloth stiff and brown with old blood, crusted at the edges. His hands trembled in his lap. The other kept glancing at the steel door, then away, then back, like he couldn’t decide which was worse—watching for it to open or pretending it didn’t exist.

I swallowed hard. My throat was raw.

Think. Assess. There has to be a weakness. A crack in the wall. A loose bolt. Something.

I ran my fingers along the concrete behind me. Solid. Seamless. No give. The floor was the same—poured thick, no drain, no gap. The steel door might as well have been part of the mountain itself.

Nothing.

I was a wolf without her wolf, locked in a concrete box with no way out.

If Moonlight were here—

I crushed the thought. Moonlight wasn’t here. The poison had done its work.

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