Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Chapter 261

Isolde’s POV

The great Kaelen Nightfire died in the dirt.

Not on a throne. Not on a battlefield surrounded by loyal soldiers singing his name. Not in the arms of his precious mate with her ridiculous silver hair and her pathetic ice-blue eyes.

In the dirt. Twitching. Bleeding. Choking on his own blood like a gutted animal.

And I watched every second of it.

"Is he—" Malakor started.

"Shut up." I held up one hand without looking away. "I want to see this."

The emperor’s massive wolf form had gone rigid. His dark fur was matted with blood and dirt. The jagged scratch Malakor had left across his flank was weeping dark, tainted blood. Just a single poisoned claw mark. That was all it took.

His legs jerked. Once. Twice. His claws scraped uselessly against the frozen ground, gouging shallow trenches that filled immediately with dark blood. A thick foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. Pink at first. Then red. Then almost black.

The wolfsbane was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

We had spent years perfecting it. Years. Living like rats in that crumbling fortress on the northern edge of nowhere, surrounded by the stench of failed experiments and dying test subjects. Rogues who had volunteered—or been volunteered—to let us inject them, poison them, record their deaths in careful detail. How long until the first tremor. How long until the lungs stopped. How long until the heart gave out completely.

Some died too fast. Some died too slow. Some didn’t die at all, just lost their wolves and wandered around like empty shells until Malakor put them down out of irritation.

But we kept refining. Kept adjusting. Silver powder for the initial paralysis. Wolfsbane extract for the organ failure. And Malakor’s father’s personal recipe—that ancient, forbidden compound that severed the connection between a wolf and its host, trapping the beast inside a body that was already dying. No shifting. No healing. No escape.

The perfect, slow-acting poison.

And now it was eating the most powerful Alpha on the eastern coast alive from the inside out.

"Kaelen." I stepped closer. Not too close. Even dying, an emperor’s jaws could still snap. I’d seen what those fangs had done before. "Can you hear me, my great king?" I mocked.

His dark gold eyes found me. Dimming. The light was going out of them like candles drowning in their own wax. But there was still something there. Still awareness. Still suffering.

Good.

"You could have had me," I said. I kept my voice pleasant. Conversational. The way I might discuss the weather with a lady at court. "Do you remember? I came to you. I knelt before the throne. I offered you everything—my bloodline, my loyalty, my body. I would have been the perfect empress. I would have given you heirs with pure blood, not the mongrel bastards that whore produced."

His mouth moved. The muscles of his jaw worked against the paralysis. A sound escaped. Barely a whisper. Broken. Wet.

"Ela—"

"Elara." I spat the name like rotten meat. "That’s what you want to say? With your last breath? Her name? That lowly bitch? That gutter trash? My parents’ charity case who couldn’t even keep her first betrothal?"

Something flickered in those dying dark gold eyes. Defiance. Even now. Even with his organs shutting down and his blood turning to poison.

Even now, he was thinking of her.

The rage came sudden and bright. I kicked dirt into his face. It stuck to the blood and foam around his muzzle. He didn’t flinch. Couldn’t flinch. His body had stopped obeying him entirely.

"She was nothing," I hissed. "A stray my father brought home out of pity. A weak, sniveling little thing who couldn’t even look people in the eye. And you chose her. The great king of the eastern coast chose a discarded orphan over me."

His paw twitched. Moved maybe half an inch in my direction. Those claws—still sharp, still deadly—scraped against frozen earth. He was trying to reach me, trying to protect her even as he perished.

I crouched down. Just out of range. Close enough to see the veins in his eyes bursting one by one. Close enough to smell the wolfsbane seeping through his pores.

"Reach for me, Kaelen. Try. I want to watch you fail."

His paw went still.

His chest heaved once. A terrible, rattling sound filled the clearing—the sound of lungs that had forgotten how to work. His ribs expanded. Contracted. Expanded again with visible effort.

Then stopped.

The gold in his eyes went flat. Like coins dropped into muddy water.

Silence.

I waited. The forest was quiet except for the wind through the pines and the distant call of a crow. Malakor’s breathing behind me was ragged, but even he had gone still.

A moment passed. Another.

Malakor moved first. He limped forward and crouched beside the enormous wolf body. His fingers—thick, scarred, still crusted with his own blood—pressed against the underside of Kaelen’s jaw. Feeling for a pulse.

He held the position for a few short minutes.

"Nothing," he said finally. He withdrew his hand and wiped it on his furs. "Heart’s stopped. He’s completely dead."

Gone.

The word should have tasted like victory. I had dreamed of this moment for years. Replayed it in my mind every night in that freezing, rat-infested fortress while Malakor snored beside me and the wind screamed through the broken walls. I had imagined the satisfaction would fill me to the brim. That it would be warm and sweet and complete, like the finest wine.

I stared at the cooling body.

It was just... a body. A large, dark-furred wolf lying motionless in a spreading pool of blood. The great emperor. Reduced to cooling meat.

I felt nothing.

No. That wasn’t right. I felt something. But it wasn’t triumph. It was hollow. A strange, aching emptiness, like biting into a beautiful fruit and finding it rotten at the center.

I shook it off. Sentiment was weakness. Sentiment was what had destroyed my parents, my prospects, my entire life. I would not indulge it.

"Leave him for the animals," Malakor said, already turning away. He casually checked his own weapon. "Let him rot. By morning there won’t be enough left to identify."

"No."

He stopped. Looked back at me.

"No," I repeated. My mind was already working. Already spinning forward to the next move. The emptiness was useful, actually. It cleared the fog of emotion and left only strategy. "We take him with us."

"Take—" Malakor’s brow furrowed. "Isolde, he weighs more than both of us combined. In wolf form—"

"She’ll come looking for him."

That silenced him.

"Elara," I continued, and the name felt like a blade between my teeth. "She’ll feel it. The mate bond. She’ll know something is wrong. And she’ll come running. Desperate. Stupid. With barely any guards because she won’t be able to wait for a proper escort. She’ll follow his scent. Follow the bond. Follow her pathetic, bleeding heart straight into whatever we put in her path."

I could see it. The way she would stumble through the trees. Wild-eyed. Calling his name. The way her face would crumble when she found his body. The way her legs would give out.

And I would be there. Watching.

"We drag his heavy body back to camp," I said. "Set him in the center as bait. Make it obvious. When she arrives—"

"An ambush." Malakor’s lips curled into a grotesque, excited smile. "I like it."

"Not just an ambush. We take our time with her. The way we took our time with him." I glanced back at the body. "Slowly. Piece by piece. I want her to beg."

"And the children?" Malakor asked. Practical as always. "The boy. The girl."

"Orphaned brats are easy to control." I shrugged. "If those little bastards behave, we keep them. Useful leverage against whatever’s left of the imperial court. If they cause problems, we dispose of them—"

I drew my finger across my throat.

"Malakor, help me move him."

He grunted but didn’t argue. We each grabbed a hind leg. The body was impossibly heavy—dense muscle and thick bone wrapped in dark fur that was already beginning to stiffen. My boots slid on the blood-slicked ground as I pulled.

We dragged him toward the tree line. Away from the clearing. Toward the narrow path that wound through the forest to our camp.

We managed maybe ten steps. Perhaps fewer. It was hard to tell in the dark.

Then I heard it.

A sound.

Soft at first. Almost nothing. Like wind brushing through leaves. Or a branch shifting under weight.

From the bushes to our left. Maybe twenty steps away.

I froze.