Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother novel Chapter 111

Chapter 111: Chapter 111

Kaelen’s POV

My fingers opened.

Not deliberately. Not by choice. My hand simply stopped working, like a wire had been cut somewhere between my brain and my muscles. She slipped from my grip and crumpled downward.

I caught her before she hit the ground.

Both arms. Around her. Pulling her against my chest like she was made of glass and ash and everything breakable in the world. Her head fell against my collarbone. Her body weighed nothing. Absolutely nothing. Like holding a shadow.

"No."

The word tore out of me. Not a command. Not a roar. Something worse. Something small and cracked and human.

"No, no, no—"

I dropped to my knees. The frozen ground bit through my trousers, but I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything except the sharp angles of her ribs pressing against my forearms and the shallow, stuttering rattle of her breathing.

I held her back from me just enough to see.

Her face. Her face.

The elegant arch of her brow—the one I’d kissed countless times while she slept—was split open. And there, barely visible under the swollen skin, was the faint childhood scar on her left temple. Crusted with dried blood that had turned black. Her left eye was swollen completely shut, the skin around it a grotesque canvas of purple and yellow. Her lips—those lips that had whispered my name in the dark, that had smiled against my mouth—were cracked and caked in blood, the lower one torn nearly in two.

And her throat.

Purple fingerprints. My fingerprints. Overlapping older bruises that someone else had put there first.

I had been choking her. I had been killing her.

Elara. My inner wolf’s voice collapsed inside my skull. Not rage anymore. Something far more devastating. A howl that had no sound. Our mate. What have they done to our mate.

"Cassian." My voice didn’t sound like mine. Too quiet. Too controlled. The kind of control that comes right before total destruction.

Boots crunched through frost. Cassian appeared at my side. I didn’t look at him. Couldn’t take my eyes off her face.

"Your Majesty, is that—"

"It’s her."

Silence.

I heard his sharp intake of breath. Heard the way it caught and broke somewhere in the back of his throat.

"Moon Goddess," he whispered.

I leaned closer to her. Inhaled deeply, searching for it—that scent. Winter roses and parchment. The scent that was woven into my blood, that I could find across a battlefield, across an ocean.

Nothing.

Instead, something else flooded my senses. Sharp. Chemical. Like acid poured over silver and set on fire. The unmistakable burn of Sanctified Wolfsbane—but twisted, altered into some unknown, weaponized strain, distilled with dark alchemy to sever a wolf’s connection to their inner spirit.

And beneath that poisoned stench: death. The sweet, rotting smell of a body eating itself from the inside.

I reached for Moonlight. Elara’s wolf. In the bond between mates, I should have felt her—a distant pulse, a whisper of silver warmth threaded through the connection that tied our souls together.

There was nothing.

An empty space where Moonlight should have been. Like a room with the lights turned off and all the furniture removed. Hollow. Cold. Void.

She’s gone, my wolf whimpered. I can’t feel her wolf. I can’t feel Moonlight at all.

My chest caved in.

"...Kae...lan..."

Her voice. Barely a breath. Her cracked lips moved against my chest, forming syllables that cost her everything she had left.

"...Val...erius... where... is..."

She was looking for our son.

Something inside me shattered so completely I knew it would never fully reassemble. A sound ripped from my throat—half growl, half sob. I pressed my lips to her matted, blood-crusted hair and held her tighter.

"I’m here, baby," I whispered. "I’ve got you. You’re safe now."

Her fingers twitched against my arm. Not a grip. She didn’t have the strength for that. Just a flutter. Like a dying bird’s wing.

Multiple contusions across her arms and torso. At least several ribs visibly misaligned under the thin, torn fabric. Ligature marks on her wrists—deep ones, infected, oozing. The strangulation bruises, old and new, layered on her throat like a nightmare painted in violet. Severe dehydration had pulled her skin tight against the bones of her face, making her almost unrecognizable. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify