Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother novel Chapter 260

Chapter 260: Chapter 260

Kaelen’s POV

My jaw tightened. Every fiber of muscle in my body contracted, ready to end it. The satisfying crunch of cartilage was a heartbeat away. Malakor’s pulse fluttered against my fangs like a trapped bird.

Then the arrow hit.

It punched through my right shoulder with a sound like tearing silk—a wet, precise thwip that I felt before I understood. Black feathers. I caught a flash of them, sprouting from the shaft buried deep in the meat between bone and joint.

Pain came second.

The pain came like liquid fire poured directly into my veins.

Silver.

The recognition was instant. Every wolf knew that burn. But this was worse—far worse than any silver wound I’d ever taken. The toxin didn’t just sting. It moved. It raced through my bloodstream like something alive, something hungry, spreading outward from the puncture in a wave of searing paralysis.

My jaw went slack.

Malakor dropped from my teeth and crumpled into the snow, gasping, clutching his ravaged throat. I tried to lunge after him—finish the kill—but my right foreleg buckled. Then my left. The ground rushed up to meet me.

I crashed onto my side. Hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs. The frozen earth jarred every wound, sent white-hot spikes through the stitched-up gash along my flank. The exact spot that had taken forty-three stitches to close. The impact tore something inside. Fresh blood, hot and dark, seeped through the sutured skin.

Get up.

My wolf roared the command through every nerve. I tried. My legs trembled. My claws dug furrows in the ice. But the muscles wouldn’t answer. The toxin had reached my spine. Everything below my shoulders felt distant. Numb. Like my body belonged to someone else.

A sound drifted through the clearing. Light. Musical. Completely wrong.

Laughter.

"Surprise, Your Majesty."

The voice came from the tree line. Female. Sweet as honeyed wine and twice as poisonous. Boots crunched through the snow—unhurried, deliberate—and a figure emerged from the shadows between the pines.

Isolde.

She carried a longbow. Elegant. Dark wood, polished to a gleam. Her gloved fingers still rested on the string. She wore the furs of the Rogue tribe, but beneath them, her posture was pure aristocracy. Straight spine. Chin lifted. Eyes bright with a pleasure that made my stomach turn.

"Did you like my gift?" She gestured at the arrow in my shoulder. The black feathers swayed with each ragged breath I took. "Custom-made. Silver-powdered tips with a little something extra."

Malakor was dragging himself upright. Blood poured freely from the wound at his throat. But he was smiling. That same horrible smile.

"Excellent timing," he rasped at Isolde. Then he turned to me with a wicked glint in his eyes. "Isn’t that right, Nightfire?"

"The dose in that single arrow," he said, circling slowly, "would kill three emperors in five minutes." He crouched beside me. Close enough that I could smell the iron on his breath. "Wolfsbane. Silver powder. And my father’s personal recipe—the same compound he used on your golden-eyed sire."

My father.

Killed with this same poison. And now his son would follow.

I tried to shift. Tried to force my body back into human form—sometimes the transformation could purge toxins, reset the damage. But the change wouldn’t come. The poison had locked me in place. Wolf-shaped. Paralyzed. Trapped inside my own body like a prisoner in a cage made of fur and muscle.

Move. MOVE.

Nothing. My hind legs were dead weight. I could still feel my heartbeat—rapid, irregular, stuttering—but I couldn’t command a single limb to obey.

Malakor’s boot slammed into my flank.

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