Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Chapter 65

Kaelen’s POV

"What do you mean you’ve seen her before?"

The words left my mouth before I could shape them into something less urgent. I leaned forward, elbows braced on my knees, every nerve in my body suddenly pulled taut.

Finnian’s brow furrowed. He was staring at the carriage floor, fingers drumming slowly against his knee. Not performing. Not playing games. Genuinely searching through memory.

"Where?" I kept my voice controlled. Barely.

He raised one hand, palm out. "Give me a moment. It’s not—the face isn’t what I remember. It’s the smell."

"The smell."

"That perfume." He wrinkled his nose. "Sweet enough to strip paint. I’ve smelled it before. Exact same one. It’s not the kind of thing you forget."

My pulse thickened. I pressed my back into the seat and forced myself to wait. To not grab this man by the collar and shake the memory loose.

The carriage rocked gently over uneven cobblestones. A night patrol called out somewhere in the distance. Finnian closed his eyes, tilting his head back.

Then they opened.

"The Moonlight Inn," he said.

Every muscle in my body locked.

"What?" My voice came out hollow. Scraped clean.

"Years ago. I was passing through on a job—some wealthy lord’s ornamental carriage had thrown an axle, and his coachman couldn’t fix it. They hauled it into the underground stable at the Moonlight Inn and sent word to every smith in the area. I took the work." Finnian shifted in his seat, crossing his arms. "I was down there all night. Cold. Filthy. Hands deep in grease. The carriage was a disaster—gilded frame, decorative ironwork everywhere, completely impractical. Took me a long time."

I said nothing. I couldn’t. My throat had closed around something sharp and immovable.

The Moonlight Inn.

The name alone carved through me like a blade drawn slowly across bone. That place. That night. The masked woman with the silver hair and the scent of winter roses who had trembled beneath my hands and whispered words I still heard in dreams—

"It was around dawn when I finished," Finnian continued, oblivious to the tremor happening inside my chest. "I was packing up my tools in the stable when I heard footsteps on the servants’ staircase. The kind of stumbling, unsteady steps that make you look up."

He paused. His expression darkened.

"And there she was. Coming out of the servants’ passage. A woman in one of those hideous cleaning uniforms the inn gives to its overnight maids—you know the ones. Brown. Stained. Too big. But this one was especially bad. The hem was ripped. One sleeve was hanging off her shoulder. Her hair was a mess. Looked like she’d slept in a gutter."

My fingernails were cutting into my palms. I could feel the half-moon indentations forming, but the pain was distant. Irrelevant.

"And the perfume," Finnian said, his lip curling with genuine revulsion. "Moon above. It hit me from across the stable. That same smell—that thick, sweet, choking cloud. Like someone had emptied an entire bottle over themselves to cover up something else. My eyes actually watered."

"What was she doing?" The question scraped out of me like rust on iron.

"Trying to sell something."

Silence.

The carriage wheels groaned over a rough patch of road. The lantern on the interior hook swayed, casting shifting shadows across Finnian’s face.

"She had something in her hand," he said. "Clutching it like her life depended on it. A brooch. No—a badge. A pin." He uncrossed his arms and gestured with both hands, shaping something in the air. "Gold. Heavy-looking. Had a wolf on it. Detailed work—proper craftsmanship. Engraved lines, textured fur, the whole thing. Not something a cleaning maid would own."

The air left my lungs.

I knew that badge. I knew its weight. I knew its exact dimensions, because I had commissioned it myself from the imperial goldsmith. A personal token. Not a state seal, not a military insignia. Something private. Something I had left on the bedside table at the Moonlight Inn the morning I walked away from the woman I couldn’t forget.

For her. Only for her.

"Kaelen?" Finnian’s voice cut through the roaring in my ears. "You’ve gone pale."

"Keep talking." It came out as a command. Raw. Unfiltered. The emperor’s mask had slipped completely, and I couldn’t find the strength to pull it back into place.

Finnian studied me for a long moment. Whatever he saw made him sit up straighter.

"She approached me first," he said, his tone shifting to something more careful now. "Asked if I wanted to buy it. I told her I wasn’t interested. She didn’t take that well."

"What did she say?"

"She had a story ready. Rehearsed, even. Said her grandmother was sick. Needed medicine they couldn’t afford. Claimed the badge belonged to her late aunt—a family heirloom, very sentimental, but she was desperate enough to part with it."

Each word landed like a hammer strike against something hollow inside my chest.

"And before me," Finnian continued, "she’d already tried others. I watched her work the stable and the service corridor for a while before she got to me. Grooms. A merchant’s valet. A courier waiting for a horse change. Anyone with a coin purse. The same story every time—sick grandmother, dead aunt, tragic sacrifice." He shook his head slowly. "She must have approached at least six different people that I saw. Most just waved her off. One man laughed in her face."

The carriage turned a corner. The palace district’s torchlit gates flickered into view through the window. I didn’t see them.

All I saw was the golden wolf badge.

My wolf badge.

In the hands of a woman who had stolen it and was hawking it to stable boys for pocket change before the sun was fully up.

"Kaelen." Finnian leaned forward now, his blue eyes sharp with concern. "That badge meant something to you."

It wasn’t a question.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. My jaw worked silently, chewing on words that wouldn’t form.

"Yes," I finally managed. The single syllable felt like swallowing glass.

"How much?"

I stared at him. This man I’d spent the entire evening despising. This blacksmith who knew where Elara kept her serving spoons. He sat there with no pretense, no calculation, just steady patience and an unsettling capacity for reading the room.

"Everything," I said. "It meant everything."

Finnian exhaled slowly. He sat back and rubbed one hand across his jaw, processing.

"Well," he said after a moment. "Then I’m sorry to be the one telling you this. But that woman—the one who was just pressing herself against your carriage window and purring at me like a cat in heat—she was in that stable, dressed like a scullery maid, trying to sell your badge to anyone who’d give her a few coins."

The world tilted.

Not visibly. Not physically. But something fundamental shifted inside me—some load-bearing wall of belief that had held up years of searching and wondering and aching—cracked straight down the center.

For years, I had imagined the woman who possessed that badge. I had built her in my mind with careful, reverent hands. She was the one from that night. She carried my token close to her heart. She remembered what we shared. She kept it because it mattered.

And now this.

Seraphine. Stumbling out of a servants’ passage at dawn. Reeking of cheap perfume. Peddling my badge with a fabricated sob story about a sick grandmother.

If Seraphine had the badge—if she was selling the badge at dawn—then she had taken it. From the room. From the bedside table where I’d left it for—

For someone else.

The thought cracked open like lightning splitting a winter sky. If Seraphine stole the badge, it meant she was never the woman from that night.

"She was lying," I said. Not to him. To myself. To the dark, collapsing architecture of everything I thought I knew.

Finnian snorted, his lip curling in utter disgust. "Kaelen, maybe I was young and broke back then, but I wasn’t stupid. Everything about that situation screamed that it was ’stolen goods’ or a ’scam,’ or both."