Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother novel Chapter 268

Chapter 268: Chapter 268

Elara’s POV

"Come back to me."

The words fell from my lips like a prayer to a god who wasn’t listening. Touching his freezing skin, I pressed my trembling fingers desperately against his neck to search for a pulse, but found absolutely nothing. He was truly gone. I pulled back and stared at his face. Gray. Still. The sharp angles of his jaw, the dark lashes resting against hollowed cheeks—he looked like a sculpture of the man I’d loved. Beautiful and utterly lifeless.

Inside me, the place where the mate bond had lived was a gaping wound. Raw. Bleeding. For years that thread had been stretched thin, frayed by distance and silence and my own stubborn fury. But it had been there. A faint warmth I’d refused to acknowledge during all those cold nights in the fighting pits.

Now it was gone.

And the wolf—my newly awakened white winter wolf, who had slumbered for years before erupting from my bones only moments ago—felt the mate bond snap.

She threw back her head inside my mind and screamed.

Not the gentle keening of Moonlight, my old wolf spirit. Not a mournful howl carried softly on the wind. This was something else entirely. An Alpha’s death cry for losing her mate. Primordial. Devastating. It ripped through my skull and burst from my throat in a sound I didn’t recognize as my own voice. Half-human shriek. Half-wolf roar. The trees around us shuddered. Birds exploded from branches in panicked clouds.

The sound went on and on until my lungs were empty. Until my throat was raw and bleeding. Until the forest itself seemed to flinch.

Then silence.

I desperately locked my hands together, pressing down hard on his chest to perform CPR, vainly trying to force his heart to beat again. I breathed air into his still lips with frantic, futile motions, but he remained stubbornly unmoving. Shattered, I collapsed forward onto his gray, lifeless face and chest, sobbing loudly. My fingers clawed at his ruined armor. My tears soaked into the blood-crusted fabric of his tunic. I could feel every wound beneath my hands. The gashes across his ribs. The deep puncture in his shoulder. And the worst one—the terrible, blackened wound directly over his heart where Malakor’s poisoned blade had found its mark. The skin around it had gone dark, the veins beneath spreading outward like cracks in shattered glass.

"You promised them," I choked against his chest, reminding him. "You promised Valerius you’d teach him to ride before the frost came. He told me. In his letters—the ones I never answered because I was too stupid and too proud—" A sob broke the sentence apart. I pressed harder against him, as if I could push my own warmth into his frozen body. "And Lyra. She drew you a picture. A wolf with golden eyes standing next to a smaller wolf with silver fur. She asked me if her daddy’s eyes really looked like that, and I—I couldn’t even answer her because it hurt too much to say your name."

His hand lay open beside him. I grabbed it, lacing my fingers tightly through his stiff, unyielding ones.

I squeezed anyway.

"I was wrong," I whispered, tears streaming down my face. "I was so wrong, Kaelen. I should have stayed. I should have fought for us instead of running. I should have trusted—"

The crash of boots through undergrowth. Voices. Shouts.

"Over here! I see her—Goddess above—"

Cassian burst through the tree line first. His armor was dented. Blood caked the left side of his face from a wound above his brow. Behind him came multiple warriors, swords drawn, torches casting wild shadows through the dark forest.

Cassian’s eyes swept the clearing. Found Isolde’s dead body nearby. Found me—blood-soaked, crouched over Kaelen’s still form. His face drained of all remaining color.

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