Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

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.

Not just any part of my flank. The exact spot. The sutured wound. He kicked with deliberate, surgical cruelty, and the impact detonated through my torso like an explosion. I heard the stitches pop. Felt the flesh separate. A sound escaped me—raw, involuntary, torn from somewhere primal.

"There it is." Malakor stood over me. "The great Nightfire emperor. Helpless on the ground. Whimpering like a common dog."

I wasn’t whimpering. The sound had been pain, not submission. But I couldn’t form words to tell him that. The paralysis had reached my throat. My tongue felt thick. Useless.

Isolde circled to my other side. She knelt, tilting her head as if examining something mildly interesting.

"You know what I’m looking forward to most?" she said conversationally. "Finding my dear sister again. Elara." She pronounced the name with exaggerated sweetness. "She suffered so beautifully three years ago. I can’t wait to break her all over again, piece by piece."

Her fingers traced the arrow shaft protruding from my shoulder. She twisted it. Just slightly. The silver tip ground against bone, and my vision went white.

"But she won’t escape again," Isolde continued. "Not without you to protect her. Not without her wolf to warn her."

"We’ll take the capital first," Malakor said. He was pacing now. Animated. Energized by my suffering. "Your armies are fractured. Scattered across the border. By the time your generals realize their emperor is dead, we’ll already be inside the walls."

"And then—" Isolde’s eyes glittered. "Valerius. That pretty little boy with your gold eyes. And the girl. Lyra."

My children’s names in her mouth.

Something inside me cracked. Not bone. Something deeper. Something that lived in the space between rage and despair.

I surged.

Every molecule of will I possessed, every shred of strength the poison hadn’t yet consumed, I channeled into one desperate lunge toward Malakor’s legs. If I could reach him—one bite, one last—

His boot caught me full in the face.

The blow snapped my head sideways. I tasted blood. Felt a tooth crack. My skull rang like a struck bell, and I slid backward through the snow, leaving a dark smear behind me.

"Pathetic," Malakor said.

Isolde rose. She drew another arrow from her quiver—this one fletched with red feathers instead of black. She nocked it with practiced grace and drew the string back to her cheek.

"Wolfsbane," she said simply. "Straight to the heart. No silver this time. Just the killing dose."

She aimed at my chest.

My heart was already failing. I could feel it. The rhythm had gone wrong—skipping, lurching, stopping for terrifying intervals before stuttering back to life. Each beat sent less blood through my veins. Each breath came shallower. The cold was seeping in from the edges. Not winter cold. Something final.

Elara.

Her face surfaced through the darkening haze. Not the warrior. Not the fighter. The woman who had lain beside me in the pale hours before dawn, silver hair spread across the pillow, tracing the scars on my chest with gentle fingers. The mother who had laughed as Valerius climbed onto my shoulders. The girl in the mask who had looked at me with those impossible ice-blue eyes and made the world stop turning.

I should have told you every day.

My lungs seized. The air wouldn’t come. My heart clenched once—hard, agonizing—and then went still.

The clearing tilted. The gray sky bled into the white trees. Malakor’s voice came from very far away, saying something about borders, territories, an empire that was already his.

I couldn’t hear the words anymore.

There was only her face. Only the warmth of her. Only the thing I never said enough.

I love you.

The darkness swallowed everything.