Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Chapter 266

Elara’s POV

The liquid touched my tongue.

Bitter. Cold. Like swallowing liquid iron mixed with rot. It coated the back of my throat and I felt it begin to slide down—

Valerius. Lyra.

Their faces flashed behind my eyes. My son’s dark curls. His gold eyes—so much like his father’s. My daughter’s silver hair catching the sunlight as she ran through a meadow I’d never see again.

Orphans. He said he’d make them orphans.

No.

No.

Something deep inside me—deeper than bone, deeper than blood, deeper than the hollow space where Moonlight used to live—refused.

The sound that tore from my chest wasn’t human. Wasn’t wolf. It was something older. Something primal. A roar of pure denial that vibrated through my shattered ribs, through my torn arm, through every broken piece of me.

The glass vial still pressed against my lips exploded.

Not cracked. Not shattered. Exploded—into a thousand glittering fragments that sprayed outward like deadly shards of ice. Malakor stumbled backward, his hands flying to his face where glass shards had embedded in his skin. Blood dripped between his fingers.

"What—" he choked.

I spat the poison out. Most of it. The taste still burned my throat but my body was already rejecting it, heat flooding my veins like molten silver, burning the toxin away before it could take root.

The pain in my arm changed.

Not fading. Transforming. The torn flesh where Isolde’s wolf had shredded me began to knit together. I watched—detached, disbelieving—as muscle reattached to muscle. As skin crawled over exposed tissue like water flowing uphill. The cracked ribs in my chest popped back into alignment with sickening crunches, each one sending fire through my torso, but the fire wasn’t destructive.

It was rebuilding me.

"Impossible," Isolde breathed, clutching her injured knee, staring at me with wide yellow eyes. "She can’t—she doesn’t have a wolf. Her bloodline is nothing. Low-born. Adopted trash—"

Another wave of heat hit me. This one wasn’t gentle. This one brought agony.

My spine arched. My shoulders wrenched backward with a crack that echoed through the clearing. I screamed—or tried to. The sound that emerged was a howl. Deep. Resonant. Shaking the leaves from the branches above.

My bones were breaking.

No. Not breaking. Reshaping.

My fingers elongated. Joints popped and reformed. My skull shifted—jaw extending, teeth splitting my gums as something enormous fought its way out of me. Every cell in my body was on fire, rearranging itself into a shape I’d never worn before.

This wasn’t Moonlight.

Moonlight had been small. Delicate. A pale silver wolf barely larger than a natural one. She’d vanished three years ago, ripped away by the trauma and the silver-laced poison that had nearly killed us both.

This was something else entirely.

This was ancient.

My vision sharpened. Colors bled away, replaced by silver-white clarity. The world snapped into impossible focus—every blade of grass, every mote of dust, every terrified heartbeat from the two figures before me.

I rose.

And rose.

And rose.

My paws—massive, clawed, each one larger than Malakor’s head—pressed into the earth. The ground compressed beneath my weight. I towered over them. Over the trees around the clearing’s edge. My shoulders cleared the lowest branches. My silver-white fur rippled in the wind like a banner of war.

This is what I am.

The knowledge flooded me with absolute certainty. Not adopted. Not low-born. Not the unwanted orphan they’d told me I was. My parents—dead before I turned eight. Killed. Murdered. But their blood ran in my veins. Pure. Undiluted.

Alpha.

I was an Alpha.

Not a weak, diluted echo of one. A pure-blooded Alpha from the northern line. The same blood that had once commanded armies. The same blood that had turned winter itself into a weapon.

My father’s blood. My mother’s blood. Dormant all these years. Waiting. Waiting for a moment of absolute extremity to finally wake.

Malakor’s face had gone white.

"That’s—" His voice cracked. He took a step back. Then another. "That’s not possible. She was tested. Her bloodline showed nothing—"

I turned my head toward him. Slowly. Deliberately.

A growl built in my chest. Low. Subsonic. The kind of sound that bypassed the ears and went straight into the bones. I felt his terror through the vibrations in the air. Could smell it—sharp and acrid, flooding from his pores.

Good.

"Malakor!" Isolde’s voice was shrill. Panicked. "Malakor, we need to—"

I wasn’t listening to her.

My eyes had found Kaelen.

Still on the ground. Still motionless. Still that terrible ash-gray color. But—

There.

The mate bond. So faint I almost missed it. A flutter. The barest whisper of warmth in the vast silence where his presence should have been. Like a single ember buried beneath mountains of ash.

Not dead.

Not dead yet.

I moved. Not toward my enemies. Toward him. A few massive strides and I was standing over his body, my enormous form blocking him from view. From reach. My legs braced on either side of him, my belly fur brushing his chest, my head lowered and my teeth bared at the two figures who’d dared touch what was mine.

A sound ripped from my throat. Not a growl. A declaration. A warning written in the oldest language wolves possessed.

Mine. Touch him again and I will end you.

"She’s protecting him," Isolde whispered. Disbelief still colored her voice, but fear was winning. "Like a—like an Alpha guards a—"

"I can see what she’s doing!" Malakor snarled. But his confidence was crumbling. I could hear it in the tremor beneath his words. Could smell the sheer panic rolling off him in waves.

He was afraid of me.

They both were.

The ember beneath the ash pulsed again. Faint. Fragile. But alive. The bond hadn’t severed. It was damaged. Stretched so thin it might snap at any moment. But it held.

He could still be saved.

The certainty crystallized in my chest like diamond. He could be saved. And nothing—nothing—in this clearing or in this world would stop me from doing it.

But first, I had to survive.

Malakor’s fear was already hardening into resolve. I could see it in his eyes—the calculation returning. He was measuring me. Assessing. Deciding whether this new form changed the odds enough to retreat or whether he could still win with force.

He chose force.

Malakor finished his shift. His tawny-brown wolf faced mine. Bigger than before. Trying to intimidate me.

It didn’t work.

Isolde shifted too. Her gray wolf joined his. Both snarling. Circling.

Two against one.

I didn’t care.