Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother novel Chapter 192

Chapter 192: Chapter 192

Elara’s POV

Blood and rust. That was all I could taste.

My tongue found the split in my lower lip. The copper flooded fresh and warm across my teeth. Somewhere beneath my left arm, something ground against something else—bone on bone, a white-hot wire of agony threading through my ribs every time I inhaled.

The sand was red beneath my boots. Some of it his. Most of it mine.

The warehouse crowd roared like a living thing, countless throats fused into one relentless, hungry scream. They wanted more. They always wanted more.

My opponent circled to my left. Massive. Shoulders like a bull. His knuckles were split and dark with my blood. He was grinning—a wide, cruel grin that said he already knew how this ended. Little woman on the sand. Broken little woman who couldn’t stay down.

He looked at me the way they all looked at me.

Like I was already dead.

Years.

The thought came unbidden. Not a memory. A weight. A black, suffocating mass that lived behind my sternum and never, ever let me breathe.

Years of silence. Years of swallowing every scream, every sob, every howl that clawed at the inside of my throat and found no exit. Years of turning it all inward until the pressure cracked me from the inside out. Years of feeding myself to the dark just to keep standing.

I was not going to die here. Not for this crowd. Not on this sand. Not for anyone.

He swung.

A wide, arcing hook aimed at my temple. Predictable. He telegraphed everything—weight shifting to his front foot, shoulder dropping, elbow flaring out.

I ducked.

His fist whistled over my head. I came up inside his guard and drove my right hand into his jaw with everything I had. The impact shuddered up through my wrist, my forearm, my shoulder. His head snapped sideways. Spit and blood flew from his mouth in a thin red arc.

Before he could recover, I pivoted and slammed my left fist into his ribs. I felt it—the give. Cartilage buckling. Maybe bone. A wet, muffled crunch that vibrated through my knuckles.

He staggered. Dropped his guard for a moment.

I brought my knee up into his face.

His nose exploded. A fountain of red sprayed across the sand, across my leg, across the front rows of screaming spectators. He lurched backward, hands rising too late to protect what was already broken.

I didn’t stop.

Three shots to his exposed ribs. Left-right-left. Fast. Hard. Each one landing with a sound like a mallet hitting wet wood. Then I wound up and drove my fist into the underside of his chin. His teeth cracked together. His eyes rolled.

Pain detonated through my left side. He’d caught me—a desperate, swinging blow to my shoulder that drove straight through to the fracture in my ribs. My vision whited out. For one terrible second, the world was nothing but agony and the roar of the crowd and the taste of blood in my mouth.

Years of shattering in silence.

I breathed through it. Found him through the blur.

I aimed for the solar plexus. My fist sank deep into the soft space below his sternum. All the air left his body in a single, wretched gasp. He folded forward.

Left hook to the liver. He buckled sideways.

Right straight to the jaw. His head whipped back.

Elbow across his temple. The crack was obscene.

Knee into his thigh. His leg gave out beneath him.

He stumbled. Caught himself. Swayed on his feet like a drunk man trying to find the horizon.

The referee stepped between us, one arm out. He crouched slightly, peering into my opponent’s swollen, bloodied face.

"Can you continue?"

A nod. Barely perceptible. Stupid. Brave and stupid.

The referee stepped back.

My opponent came at me with everything he had left—a lumbering, desperate charge, both fists swinging wild. The crowd screamed. The lanterns swayed overhead, casting lurching shadows across the sand.

I sidestepped. Easy. Like breathing. Like dying.

He stumbled past me, momentum carrying him forward. I planted my feet and drove both fists into his kidneys. One. Two. Each punch carrying the full rotation of my hips, the full weight of my broken, burning body.

He went down.

Face-first into the sand. Arms splayed. Still.

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