Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Kaelen’s POV

The knights lifted her like a broken porcelain doll.

Her head lolled backward. One arm dangled, fingers curled inward, nails split to the quick and caked with dried mud. The motion pulled a sound from her chest—not quite a moan, not quite a breath. Something between. Something that barely qualified as alive.

I watched them carry her and felt nothing.

That was a lie. I felt everything. But I had learned, in three days of searching, to build walls between what I felt and what I showed. An emperor does not crumble. An emperor directs.

"Careful with her," Cassian ordered, stepping closer to supervise. "If she dies before she talks, she’s worthless to us."

The knights adjusted their grip. The woman’s body shifted, and for one fleeting heartbeat, the angle of her jaw—the way her chin tilted toward her shoulder—

Elara.

The name exploded through me like a crack of lightning. I blinked. Looked again.

No. Just a starving woman. Just bones wrapped in pale, gaunt skin, covered in violent scratches and filthy rags. Dark bruises already marred her fragile throat. The shape of her face was wrong. Too hollowed. The resemblance was a trick of exhaustion, nothing more.

You’re seeing ghosts, Alex muttered. Even his voice sounded defeated. Flat. The fire that had burned in him since Elara’s disappearance was guttering down to embers. Every woman is her now. Every shadow. Every sound.

He was right. Recently, I’d stopped a supply wagon because I thought I heard her voice among the merchants. Before that, I’d nearly drawn my sword on a washerwoman whose silhouette had looked, for one agonizing instant, like hers.

Three days of searching. Three days of nothing. And now my mind was rotting from the inside out, conjuring her face on strangers.

"Move her to the carriage carefully," I commanded. "I want her alive for interrogation."

"Understood," Cassian responded.

The knights turned, carrying her limp form toward the vehicle.

Then, the woman made a sound.

So faint it shouldn’t have been audible over the rustling of the knights’ armor. So faint that no human ear could have caught it. But I was not human. And in the silence of those frozen woods, my ears caught it like a fishhook through flesh.

"...Val...erius..."

The world stopped.

Every thought in my mind went white. Then black. Then a red so dark and violent it obliterated everything else.

What did she say.

That was Alex. Not a question. A detonation. His presence erupted inside my skull like a bomb going off in a sealed room. My vision split. Human sight overlaid with wolf sight, the world going sharp and silver-edged, every detail carved in razor lines.

"...Val...erius..."

She whispered it again. My son’s name. The name I had kept hidden.

My protected son’s name, coming from the cracked, bloody lips of a Rogue prisoner. It was a sick psychological game. This trash was sent by the very tribe that had taken my mate, sent here to taunt me, to wage a twisted war on my mind.

I moved before conscious thought caught up. The air around me changed. Thickened. Became heavy and oppressive, pressing down like an invisible hand on the shoulders of every living thing within reach.

Alpha command. Not directed. Not controlled. Raw and unfiltered, pouring out of me in a violent eruption.

Every knight within fifty feet dropped to their knees in submission.

Not voluntarily. Their legs simply buckled under the absolute monarch’s aura. Cassian hit the ground on one knee, his jaw clenched so hard I could hear his teeth crack, shrinking back from the pure, blinding fury radiating from me.

"Drop her, right now!" I roared at the knights holding her.

They instantly released their hold, letting her slump to the ground as they bowed their heads, unable to look up under the crushing weight of my authority.

TEAR HER APART, Alex roared, driven completely by the instinct to protect our vulnerable pup. She’s a threat to him. She knows what they did to our mate. TEAR IT OUT OF HER!

Driven by the bloodlust of my inner wolf, I crossed the distance in quick, furious strides. I reached down and my hand found her throat.

Thin. So impossibly thin. My fingers wrapped around the bruised skin of her neck, and I hauled her half off the ground. Her head hung forward, that tangled, filthy mass of hair falling across her pale face like a curtain.

"You damn piece of trash," I snarled, my voice merging with Alex’s ancient, murderous growl. "What have you done to her? What have you done to my mate?"

No response. Her body hung limp in my grip. Dead weight.

I tightened my fingers. The intense, violent urge to snap her neck right then and there vibrated through my arms. I wanted to crush her windpipe. I wanted to end the sick game this Rogue tribe was playing.

But I needed to see the terror in her eyes first.

My free hand rose to her gaunt, bruised face. I grabbed a fistful of her dirty, blood-matted hair and roughly brushed it aside, sweeping away the grime and chaos to expose her skin.

And there, beneath the filth—a scar.

Thin. Pale. Curving along the hairline just above her left temple.

A scar I had traced with my fingertip in the dark. A scar I knew better than my own reflection.

The air violently punched out of my lungs.

My hand was still clamped around her throat, holding her broken body suspended. And the face staring sightlessly up at me through swollen eyelids—

Was Elara’s.

My heart completely stopped beating.