Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother novel Chapter 113

Chapter 113: Chapter 113

Elara’s POV

Gray.

Everything was gray.

Not the soft gray of morning fog or the warm gray of chimney smoke. This was the gray of nothing. Of absence. The color the world became when everything that mattered had been stripped away.

I opened my eyes—or thought I did. There was no difference between open and closed. The same endless, featureless expanse stretched in every direction. No sky above. No ground below. Just a thick, still mist that seemed to breathe on its own, pressing against my skin like damp wool.

Silence.

Not quiet. Silence. The absolute, suffocating kind. No heartbeat thudding in my ears. No rush of blood through veins. No breath. I pressed my hand flat against my chest and felt nothing. No rise. No fall. No rhythm beneath my ribs.

I knew this place.

I’d been here before—once, when the fever had nearly taken me. When the Moon Goddess herself had appeared in this threshold between worlds, her silver hair cascading like liquid starlight, her ancient eyes holding the weight of every wolf who had ever lived and died under her gaze. She had spoken to me then. Guided me. Returned me.

But this time, the mist was empty.

"Hello?"

My voice didn’t echo. It didn’t carry. The word left my lips and was immediately swallowed, consumed by the gray as if sound itself was unwelcome here.

I turned in a slow circle. Nothing. No shimmer of divine light. No familiar presence waiting in the fog.

No warmth.

That was what hit me first. The absence of warmth. Because always—always—even in sleep, even in pain, even in the worst moments of my life, there had been a steady, golden heat curled at the base of my consciousness. A presence. A heartbeat beside my heartbeat. A second soul breathing in tandem with mine.

Moonlight.

"Moonlight?"

I reached inward. Not with my hands—with that deeper sense. The one I’d carried since I was barely more than a child. The invisible tether that connected me to the wolf spirit who shared my body, my blood, my very existence. I reached for her the way you’d reach for someone’s hand in the dark. Certain they’d be there. Certain your fingers would close around theirs.

My fingers closed around nothing.

The tether was gone.

Not frayed. Not stretched thin. Gone. As if the rope between us had been cut so cleanly that even the memory of its fibers had been erased. Where Moonlight had always lived—that warm golden corner of my soul—there was only a hollow. A cavity. Cold and smooth and utterly vacant, like a room that had been emptied of every piece of furniture, every scrap of fabric, every trace that anyone had ever lived there at all.

"Moonlight!"

Louder now. Desperate. I spun again, searching the mist for any flicker of gold. Any whisper of fur. Any sign that she was here, somewhere, hiding, hurt, waiting for me to find her.

Nothing answered.

I dropped to my knees. The impact should have hurt, but there was no ground to strike. I simply... sank. Settled. Knelt in the gray nothing with my hands pressed over the place where my heart should have been beating.

She was gone.

The understanding came slowly, like frost spreading across glass. Each crystalline tendril of comprehension worse than the last. The poison. That unnatural compound they’d forced into my blood—it hadn’t just weakened me. It hadn’t just stolen my strength or my healing or my ability to shift. It had reached deeper than that. Down into the marrow. Down into the bond itself. And it had severed it.

"No." The word was barely a breath. "No, no, no—"

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