Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Chapter 197

Elara’s POV

"You’re trying to run again, aren’t you?"

The words landed like a blade between my ribs. Not a question. An accusation. A verdict already rendered.

Kaelen stood between me and the door. He hadn’t moved to block it—he didn’t need to. His body filled the space the way a wall fills a doorway. Shoulders squared. Arms loose at his sides. Perfectly still. The kind of stillness that predators wore right before they lunged.

My raised leg lowered slowly. I stepped back. One step. Two.

His dark gold eyes tracked every inch of the retreat.

"Kaelen—"

"Don’t."

The single word cut through the air with the precision of a scalpel. No shouting. No raised voice. That was worse. Shouting I could handle. Shouting meant emotion was leaking out, uncontrolled, messy. This—this was contained. Pressurized. A furnace with the door welded shut.

"Sit down," he said.

I didn’t sit. My spine found the wall behind me and I pressed against it, using the cold plaster to hold myself upright. My ribs pulsed with every heartbeat. The swelling around my left eye throbbed.

He looked at me. Really looked. His gaze moved over the bandages visible at the collar of my borrowed shirt. The bruises climbing my jaw. The split lip. The swollen eye. His jaw tightened so hard I could see the muscle jumping beneath the skin.

"Three years," he said quietly. "Three years, Ela."

The nickname hit me like a physical blow. No one called me that anymore. I hadn’t let anyone. Hearing it in his voice—low, rough, scraped raw by something I didn’t want to name—made my chest cave inward.

"I can explain—"

"Explain what?" He stepped forward. One step. The room shrank. "Explain why you vanished in the middle of the night without a word? Explain why you left a letter—a letter—instead of looking me in the face? Explain why I’ve spent three years tearing this empire apart trying to find you while you’ve been—"

He stopped. His eyes dropped to my bandaged knuckles. My split lip. The ugly yellow-green bruise disappearing beneath the collar of my shirt.

"While you’ve been doing this."

His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. Somehow that was louder than screaming.

"Getting beaten bloody in underground fighting pits." He took another step. "Getting your ribs cracked by strangers." Another. "Choosing that over coming home."

"It wasn’t—"

"Over your children."

The word detonated in the space between us. I flinched. Actually flinched, like he’d struck me.

He saw it. He didn’t stop.

"Do you know what Valerius said to me recently?" His voice was steady. Terribly steady. "He said he hates you."

The room tilted. I pressed harder against the wall.

"He’s eight years old, Ela. Eight. And he looked me in the eye and said, ’I hate her. She left us. She doesn’t love us.’ Those exact words. From our son."

"Stop," I whispered.

He didn’t stop.

"I held him while he cried afterward. Because he didn’t mean it. He’s a child. He doesn’t understand why his mother disappeared. He doesn’t understand why she never came back. He doesn’t understand why every other child has a mother who picks them up at the gate, and he has—nothing."

My knees were shaking. I could feel them buckling, the damaged left one threatening to give way entirely.

"And Lyra—" His voice cracked. Just barely. A fracture in the concrete. He sealed it immediately. "Lyra doesn’t even remember you."

Something inside my chest broke. Not cracked. Not fractured. Broke. Clean through.

"She’s three. She has no memory of your face. None. She sees other children with their mothers and she doesn’t understand what she’s missing. She just knows something is wrong. Something is absent."

He paused. The silence was worse than the words.

"Recently, a woman stopped to help her in the market when she tripped and scraped her knee. A complete stranger. Lyra grabbed her hand and said—" He swallowed. The muscle in his jaw convulsed. "’Are you my mommy?’"

I slid down the wall.

My legs simply stopped working. I went down against the cold plaster, my back scraping along it until I hit the marble floor. The impact jolted my ribs. I barely felt it. There was a sound coming from somewhere—a thin, high, broken sound—and it took me a moment to realize it was coming from me.

"Stop," I begged. "Please. Please stop."

Tears blurred the vision in my one functioning eye. They spilled hot down my cheeks—over the bruises, into the split of my lip, stinging salt against raw flesh. I couldn’t breathe. My chest was collapsing. The guilt was a physical weight, a boulder sitting on my sternum, crushing the air from my lungs.

My baby asked a stranger to be her mother.

My son says he hates me.

I pressed both hands over my face and sobbed. Ugly, wrecked sobs that tore through my broken ribs like serrated wire. Each one sent a spike of agony through my left side but I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t control it. The wall I’d built—three years of silence and distance and deliberate, methodical numbness—collapsed in under a minute.

Kaelen stood over me. I could feel his presence like heat from a furnace. He didn’t touch me. Not yet. He just stood there, watching me fall apart on the cold marble floor of the massive hotel suite, and let the silence do its work.

Then he crouched.

Slowly. Deliberately. The way you’d lower yourself to meet the eyes of something cornered.

His face came level with mine. I dropped my hands. Looked up at him through the blur of tears and swelling.

Those eyes. Dark gold, flecked with gold near the pupils. I’d seen them soft once, a long time ago. Warm. Almost tender. There was nothing soft in them now. They burned. Not with simple anger—anger I could’ve understood. This was something else. Something tangled and savage and half-mad. Fury braided with grief braided with a possessiveness so absolute it bordered on derangement.

"I looked for you," he said. Low. Measured. Every syllable placed with terrible precision. "Every single day. I sent scouts to every province. I hired trackers. I bribed informants. I interrogated anyone who might have seen a woman matching your description. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t stop."

His hand moved. Fingers closed around my wrist. Not gently. His grip was iron—unyielding, bruising, the kind of hold you used on something you refused to let go of even if it tore your hand apart to keep it.

"And the whole time, you were underground. Fighting. Bleeding. Getting your bones broken by animals in a cage." His thumb pressed into my pulse point. "You chose that over me."

"I didn’t—you don’t understand—"

"You’re right." His other hand came up. It circled my throat. Not squeezing. Not choking. Just—there. A collar of warm, calloused fingers wrapped around the column of my neck, his palm resting against my racing pulse. His thumb traced the line of my jaw. The gesture was almost tender. Almost. But the pressure was unmistakable. Ownership. Territory. A claim staked not in words but in the ancient, primal language of skin against skin.

"I don’t understand," he said. "I don’t understand how someone walks away from their children. I don’t understand how someone leaves their mate without a word. I don’t understand any of it."

His face was inches from mine. I could see the dark circles carved beneath his eyes. The new lines etched around his mouth. The faint silver threading his temples that hadn’t been there before. Three years had carved themselves into him too.

"But I understand this."

His grip on my wrist tightened. His fingers around my throat flexed—once—a pulse of controlled pressure that made my breath stutter.

"You are mine, Ela. You have been mine since the night I first touched you. You will be mine when every star in this sky burns out. And I will hunt you across every dark corner of this earth if you try to disappear again."

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. His body caged me against the wall, his heat radiating through the thin cotton between us. My pulse hammered against his palm. His eyes held mine—unblinking, unhinged, stripped of every civilized restraint.

"Do you understand what I’m saying?" His gaze was wild now, completely out of control. "You. Will. Absolutely. Never. Leave. Me. Again."