Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Chapter 67

Kaelen’s POV

I didn’t sleep.

After guiding Finnian to the guest chamber—second door on the left, up the main staircase—I locked myself in my study. The fire in the hearth had burned to embers. I didn’t bother relighting it.

I went straight for the crystal decanter on the sideboard. Poured three fingers of brandy. Drank it in one swallow. Poured another. This one I held, letting the burn settle into my chest while the pieces rearranged themselves behind my eyes.

Elara.

Silver hair that caught moonlight like water. Ice blue eyes—frozen lakes with sunlight trapped beneath the surface. A scent of winter roses and snow-dusted pine. Small. Slender. Stronger than she looked.

I had walked past her in the palace corridors. I had sat across from her in meetings. I had watched her work in the archives with quiet, fierce competence, and my wolf had clawed at my ribcage every single time, howling things I refused to hear.

You fool. You blind, arrogant fool.

And Valerius.

I set the glass down. My hand was shaking.

That boy. Those dark gold eyes—my eyes—staring up at me with a guarded intensity that no child his age should possess. The set of his jaw. The stubborn tilt of his chin when he was thinking. The way he positioned himself between his mother and any perceived threat, small fists clenched, shoulders squared.

My son.

The words detonated inside my skull. My son. He had been right there, living in a modest house on the edge of the city, eating simple meals, wearing patched clothes—while I sat on a throne surrounded by luxury, searching the entire empire for a woman who had been scrubbing palace floors beneath my feet.

Alex, my wolf, surged forward with a force that nearly buckled my knees.

She was ours. The boy is ours. And that thief—that lying, scheming thief stole them from us.

Seraphine.

I braced both hands on the desk and breathed through my nose. The brandy glass trembled where I’d set it. The amber liquid caught the faint light and threw distorted shadows across the wood.

I replayed it. All of it. From the moment Seraphine had appeared at the palace holding my badge—the badge I had placed on the pillow beside a sleeping woman whose face I couldn’t see in the dark—to every hollow, performative smile she had given me since. Every sugary endearment. Every fabricated memory of "that magical night we shared."

She had never been in that room with me. She had never worn an ice blue gown. She had never smelled like winter roses.

She smelled like cheap, cloying perfume and calculated ambition.

I should have trusted my wolf from the beginning.

I pulled a stack of sealed records from the locked cabinet behind my chair. Imperial archives. Personnel files. Intelligence reports from the household registry. I spread them across the desk and began reading by candlelight.

Elara Frostfang. I investigated all her records, from her time in the Valois barony to her arrival in the capital five years ago. Status at arrival: destitute. No family connections. No noble patron. She had taken work as a laundress, then a seamstress’s assistant, then a tutor for merchants’ children—all while raising Valerius alone. Every record painted the same portrait: a woman of extraordinary resilience surviving on the margins of society with nothing but her intellect and her refusal to break.

While I hosted banquets. While I reviewed military formations and signed trade agreements and allowed a fraud to sit at my table and call me "darling."

I shoved back from the desk. The chair scraped against stone. I stood and paced the length of the study. My wolf prowled beneath my skin, restless, furious, aching.

We abandoned her. We let her struggle alone. We let our son grow up without a father because we couldn’t see past a stolen piece of gold.

At dawn, the communication stone pulsed on the desk. I snatched it up before the first pulse faded.

"Kaelen." Cassian’s voice was ragged. Strained. The sound of a man who had been awake all night and was running on willpower and strong tea. "I have... something. It’s not much."

"Tell me."

"The Moonlight Inn preserved their magical recording crystals, but barely. Most of the recordings from that night are completely degraded—corrupted beyond recovery. I managed to salvage one fragment. A hallway recording. Duration: roughly two minutes."

Two minutes. Out of an entire night.

"What does it show?"

"The first thirty seconds are empty. Just an empty corridor. Nothing. Then, at exactly 6:23 in the morning—about two hours after you left the room—a woman enters the frame."

My grip on the stone tightened until my knuckles went white.

Cassian continued, his voice gaining a sharp, disbelieving edge. "She has distinctive blonde hair and a voluptuous figure. Wearing a cleaning maid’s uniform, gray linen with a white apron. She goes into your room."

The silence stretched. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

"And?"

"About twenty minutes later, she comes back out." Cassian paused. I heard him exhale. "She’s holding something in her right hand. Clutching it. I enhanced the image as much as the crystal would allow." Another pause. "It’s the badge, Kaelen. Your golden badge. She has it gripped so tight her knuckles are white."

The study tilted. The walls seemed to contract. I closed my eyes and saw it—clear as a painting—Seraphine slipping into the room where Elara still slept, searching through the tangled sheets, finding the badge on the nightstand where I had deliberately placed it for the woman I’d left behind. Picking it up. Closing her fist around it. Walking out with my promise clenched between her thieving fingers.

Five years.

Five years of Elara believing I had abandoned her. Five years of Valerius growing up fatherless. Five years of Seraphine wearing a stolen identity like a costume, playing a role she had no right to claim.

Alex roared inside me. The sound was not human. It was primal, ancient, a wolf’s fury that shook the very foundations of my self-control. My vision tinged red at the edges.

Blood. I want blood.

"Kaelen?" Cassian’s voice was careful now. Wary. "What do you want me to do?"

"Preserve that crystal. Protect it with every ward you have. It does not leave your sight."

"Done. Already done." A beat. "Kaelen. What are you going to do?"

I opened my eyes. The dawn light was creeping through the study windows—thin, gray, insufficient. My reflection stared back at me from the glass. The man I saw there was not the controlled emperor who had signed trade documents the night before. This man’s eyes were molten gold, his jaw locked like a trap, his shoulders rigid with barely leashed violence.

"I am going to dismantle her," I said.

The stone went dark.

I stood in the center of my study as morning light slowly filled the room. The brandy sat untouched on the desk—the second pour, the one I’d never finished. The candles had guttered out in their pools of wax. Papers covered every surface.

I did not sit.

I did not eat.

I simply waited.

Some time later, I heard the unmistakable staccato of heels on marble. Sharp. Confident. The sound of someone who believed the world was arranged for her convenience.

The door to my office swung open without a knock.

Seraphine swept in like she owned the room. She was wearing a gown the color of overripe roses—aggressively pink, eye-wateringly bright, and at least two sizes too small. The fabric strained across her chest and hips, the seams visibly protesting. She had piled her gold-streaked hair into an elaborate arrangement secured with jeweled pins that caught the light and scattered tiny rainbows across the walls.

She smiled. That wide, practiced, predatory smile I had seen a thousand times and never once believed.

"Good morning, darling!" She crossed the room toward my desk with swaying, deliberate strides. "I heard you were up all night working. You really must take better care of yourself, sweetheart. I brought you—"

"Stop."

The word left my mouth like the crack of a whip. Low. Quiet. Absolute.

Seraphine froze mid-step. The smile flickered but didn’t fall—not yet. She tilted her head, adjusting her expression to something she probably thought was endearing.

"Baby, what’s wrong? You look so tense. Let me—"

"Do not come any closer."

She blinked. The smile wavered. I watched her eyes dart across my face, searching for the usual cracks in my composure—the tired resignation, the reluctant tolerance she had mistaken for affection.

She found nothing.

I stood behind my desk. My hands were flat on the surface. My back was straight. My gaze was fixed on her with the same focus I brought to an enemy on the battlefield.

"What?" She laughed—a nervous, tinkling sound that scraped against my last nerve. "Kaelen, darling, what’s gotten into you? Is it because of last night? If it’s about that little scene at court, I was only trying to—"

"Seraphine."

Her mouth closed.

I stepped around the desk. Slowly. Each footfall deliberate. She instinctively took a half-step backward, her painted smile finally cracking at the edges.

"What? Kaelen, darling, what is it? Did I do something—"

"Get. Out."