Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Chapter 21

Kaelen’s POV

“Mark her.”

Alex’s voice clawed through my skull time and again that morning. I gripped the edge of my desk until the wood groaned beneath my fingers.

No.

“She’s ours. You know it. I know it. Every nerve in this body knows it. Stop waiting for a piece of metal to tell you what your blood already screams.”

I slammed my palm flat against the desk. Papers scattered. A brass inkwell tipped sideways, dark liquid pooling across a supply report I hadn’t read.

I need proof.

“You need her.”

I shut him out. Or tried to. Alex prowled restlessly behind my ribs, pacing like a caged predator. He’d been relentless since yesterday. Since I’d held her wrist and felt her pulse race against my thumb. Since I’d watched her walk away with tears still wet on her pale face.

The sending stone on my desk pulsed.

I snatched it before it finished glowing. “Cassian. Report.”

A long pause. Then a sigh that carried the weight of a man stretched too thin.

“Your Majesty.” His voice was carefully measured. “I have completed searches of several pawnshops and jewelers since dawn. No match.”

“How many remain?”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“Twenty-three pawnshops. Forty-seven jewelers. Not counting the black-market dealers, who don’t exactly keep regular trading hours.”

“Work faster.”

“Kaelen.” The formality dropped. Cassian’s voice hardened with barely restrained frustration. “Asking me every hour does not make my legs move faster or the shopkeepers open their doors earlier. I have been doing this since before sunrise. I haven’t eaten. My horse threw a shoe on the way. And I still have to check the city guard’s evidence vaults, which require special signed permits that your steward is currently arguing about with the clerk’s office.”

Silence stretched between us.

“Every hour?” I repeated flatly.

“Every hour. On the hour. Like clockwork.” His exhale crackled through the stone. “I will contact you the moment I find something. Until then, with all due respect—let me work.”

The stone went dark.

I set it down carefully. Then I shoved my chair back and stood.

The morning light slanted through the tall windows of my private study. Golden dust motes drifted lazily through the air. Everything was quiet. Orderly. Controlled.

Everything except me.

I paced to the window. The palace courtyard stretched below—servants crossing with baskets, guards changing posts, a groom leading a mare toward the stables. Normal. Mundane. The world turning as it always did.

Meanwhile I was unraveling.

“Because you’re fighting what you already know,” Alex murmured. Softer now. Almost gentle.

I am fighting nothing. I am waiting for evidence.

“You’re afraid.”

The accusation landed like a slap. My jaw clenched until my teeth ached.

I am the Emperor of the Nightfire Empire. I am not afraid of anything.

“You’re afraid she’ll say no. You’re afraid she’s not the one. You’re afraid she IS the one and you’ll destroy it, just like—”

Enough.

He went silent. But the damage was done. His words settled into my chest like shards of ice, cold and precise.

I returned to my desk. Work. That was the answer. Mountains of correspondence requiring the imperial seal, territorial disputes between minor lords, trade agreements with the southern provinces. I pulled the nearest stack toward me and began reading.

The words blurred.

All I could see was silver-white hair catching the lamplight. All I could smell was winter roses and parchment.

She had been in this very room not long ago, organizing the archive shelves with mechanical precision. Her efficiency was almost insulting—she moved through my personal documents with the detached professionalism of someone cataloging grain shipments, not state secrets.

And that dress. That damned black dress.

It wasn’t revealing. That was the problem. It covered everything and suggested everything simultaneously. The fabric followed the line of her waist, the subtle curve of her hips. Every time she reached for a high shelf, the hem shifted just enough to remind me she had legs beneath it.

“Beautiful legs,” Alex added helpfully.

I threw a paperweight at the wall.

By midday, I had accomplished nothing. A few documents bore my signature, and I couldn’t remember what a single one of them said.

The sending stone pulsed again in the early afternoon.

“Cassian.”

“Several more shops cleared. Nothing.” His voice was hoarse now. “A black-market contact wants a meeting tonight. Says he might have seen a gold piece matching our description pass through some time ago.”

“Might have?”

“His exact words were ‘maybe, possibly, for the right price.’ These people deal in rumors, Kaelen.”

“Pay whatever he asks.”

“Already planned on it.” A beat. “You sound terrible, by the way.”

I ended the connection without responding.

The afternoon crawled. I attended a council briefing and spoke so sharply to my subordinates that they shrank back in fear. I rejected several petitions without reading them. When my steward brought tea, I told him if he knocked on my door again without news from Cassian, I would reassign him to the northern watchtower.

He left the tea and did not return.

By five o’clock, I was wound tighter than a bowstring. Having spent the entire day snapping at my officials, I suddenly left the palace.

The corridor outside my study was mercifully empty. I moved through the palace with long, rigid strides, jaw locked, eyes forward. I passed the west archive and did not look in.

I didn’t need to. Her scent drifted through the cracked door like an invitation—winter roses layered over old parchment, clean and intoxicating.

My boots slowed without permission. Two heartbeats. Three. I forced myself forward.

The main entrance loomed ahead. Almost free.

“Good evening, Your Majesty.”

Her voice. Soft. Polite. A gentle formality that cut deeper than any blade.

I did not turn around. If I turned around, I would see those ice-blue eyes and that black dress and the careful, professional distance she maintained like armor, and I would do something catastrophically unwise.

I completely ignored her gentle "Good evening, Your Majesty," walking straight through the door to prevent myself from losing all professional composure.

Twenty minutes later, I sat in a shadowed corner booth at the Moon & Shadow. The establishment catered to the supernatural aristocracy—warded walls, spelled privacy screens, and a strict no-questions policy that had kept my patronage for years.

The bartender appeared at my elbow without being summoned. He took one look at my face, set down a double brandy, and retreated in silence.

I drank it in two pulls. The liquor burned a trail from throat to stomach, temporarily drowning out Alex’s commentary.

The second glass arrived before I signaled for it. The bartender knew the rhythm.

I stared into the amber liquid. Somewhere across the city, Cassian was knocking on yet another shop door, flashing a sketch of a golden wolf-crest brooch to yet another suspicious merchant. And I was sitting in a tavern, drinking alone, because I couldn’t trust myself to remain in the same building as a woman in a black dress.

Pathetic.

“Accurate,” Alex agreed.

I was reaching for the glass, considering whether a third drink would silence him completely, when the noise erupted at the entrance.

Raised voices. A woman’s shrill, insistent tone cutting through the tavern’s low murmur. The hostess—calm, trained, professional—attempting to redirect.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but this is a private establishment. Without a proper invitation—”

“I don’t NEED an invitation!” The woman’s voice was loud, grating, desperate. “I need to see His Majesty Nightfire! I know he’s here!”

Every muscle in my body locked.

She shoved past the hostess and stumbled into the main room. Cheap, over-processed blonde hair that had been dyed and re-dyed until the strands looked brittle as straw. A tight red dress that clung to her frame in a way meant to be seductive but landed somewhere closer to frantic. And in her raised fist, catching the tavern’s firelight like a small sun—

A golden wolf-crest brooch.

She waved it wildly above her head, her voice rising to a scream directed at the hostess.

“I am His Majesty’s lover from five years ago, and I have the proof of our relationship right here!”

Hearing those desperate shrieks and seeing her brandish that token as a weapon sent a profound chill down my spine.