Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother

Chapter 249

Gareth’s POV

ne as before. Fat. Gray. Bold enough to sit on the edge of the table and watch me eat. I flicked a bread crust at it and missed. It didn’t even flinch.

"Brave little bastard," I muttered. "Makes one of us."

I poured another measure from a half-empty bottle of strong liquor into one of the three crushed tin cups lined up beside the board. I drank from it and grimaced. Cheap. Burnt. The kind of liquor that tasted like lamp oil and regret.

The board game spread across the table was ancient. Carved bone pieces on a checkered leather mat. I’d been playing both sides for a while. White against black. Attacking myself. Defending against myself. Losing to myself.

Seemed about right.

I moved a piece. Took my own knight. Swore under my breath.

The room smelled like mildew and piss. Water dripped from a crack in the ceiling into a tin bucket in the corner. The bucket was nearly full. I’d stopped emptying it days ago.

I’d been here for three weeks. This rotting, leaking hole above a tanner’s shop in the lower city. The kind of place where nobody asked questions because nobody cared enough to ask. Paid in advance with meager coin. No name given.

Two boards I’d already destroyed this month. Smashed them against the wall on nights when the liquor hit wrong and the memories hit worse.

I picked up the cup again. Drank. Set it down too hard. Spirits sloshed over the rim.

Isolde.

My useless wife. That damn bitch. She’d lasted exactly three months before disappearing in the night. Three months of marriage to a prince—a prince—and she couldn’t even manage that. Just vanished. No note. No explanation. Gone, like smoke through a cracked window.

Not that I missed her. I missed what she represented. Status. Legitimacy. A wife on my arm at court functions. Something to prove I wasn’t just the bastard half-brother scraping for scraps at the edge of the royal table.

I laughed. It came out dry and cracked. The rat twitched its whiskers.

"Don’t look at me like that."

The rat cleaned its face with both paws.

I stood up. Crossed to the cracked mirror hanging by a single nail above the washbasin. The glass was warped, clouded with age. But it showed enough.

The man staring back at me was a greasy, tramp-like loser. Hair that had once been golden—princely, the ladies at court used to say—now hung in greasy, unwashed strings against my temples. Thinning at the crown. My jaw was buried under patchy stubble that grew in uneven directions. My skin had gone the color of old candle wax. Gray-white. Bloodless. The circles under my eyes were so dark they looked like bruises.

I looked like I’d aged ten years in a matter of months.

"The Chosen One Kaelen would never look like this," I told the mirror. "Would he?"

No. Of course not. Kaelen with his perfect jaw and his dark gold eyes and his shoulders like a war monument. Kaelen who got everything. The throne. The empire. The army. The loyalty of every sniveling courtier who’d ever looked right through me.

And perfect damn Elara.

My hand tightened on the edge of the basin.

Even she had somehow ended up in his bed. The girl I’d tossed aside—the orphan with the ice-blue eyes and silver hair—had landed directly in the arms of my brother, that Emperor. The man whose shadow I’d been drowning in since childhood.

I picked up the cup from the table and drained it. Poured another. Drained that too.

The only card I had left was Seraphine.

Beautiful, clever Seraphine. She was the architect. The one with the plan and the nerve and the connections to pull it off. The fake pregnancy. The drugged wine. The staged scene in the imperial bedchamber. All her design.

If it worked—when it worked—Kaelen’s marriage would crumble. His reputation would crack. And in the chaos, maybe—maybe—there’d be room for someone like me to claw back some fraction of what I deserved.

I had to believe that. It was the only thing keeping me upright.

I sat back down. Moved another piece on the board. Took my own queen this time. Stared at the captured piece in my palm.

Three knocks at the door.

Sharp. Rapid. Urgent.

I froze.

We had rules. Seraphine and I. No direct contact. No visits. Everything through dead drops and coded messages left at a specific tavern. She’d been insistent about that. If we’re seen together, it’s over, she’d said. They’ll trace you through me in a heartbeat.

Three more knocks. Harder.

I grabbed the knife from under the board—a short, rusted thing I’d bought from a street vendor—and crossed to the door. Pressed my eye to the crack between the warped frame and the wood.

A woman. Pale face. Dark hair clinging to damp cheeks. Trembling.

Seraphine.

I yanked the door open.

She stumbled in like something was chasing her. Her cloak was soaked. Her hands shook so badly she couldn’t unclasp the hood. Tears streaked her face in long, glistening lines, and her breathing came in ragged, hiccupping bursts.

"Gareth—"

"What the hell are you doing here?" I shut the door. Locked it. Pressed my back against it. "We said no contact. We agreed—"

"He knows."

Her words landed in my gut like stones dropped into still water.

"What?"

"Kaelen." She grabbed my arms. Her fingers dug into the fabric of my shirt. "He knows everything. The baby isn’t his—he knows it’s not his. He knows we set the whole thing up. He—"

Her voice broke into a sob. She pressed her face into my chest. Her whole body was shaking.

"How?" My mouth had gone dry. "How could he possibly—"

"I don’t know!" She looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. "Someone told him, or he figured it out, or—I don’t know, Gareth. I barely escaped with my life!"

"Why didn’t you just take the money and run?" I grabbed her shoulders. "That was the plan. If things went wrong, you run."

"And go where?" Her voice cracked. "He has eyes everywhere. Every gate, every port, every road out of the capital. I barely made it here."

"Then you’ve led them straight to me!"

"No." She shook her head. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. "I was careful. I doubled back through the market district. Changed cloaks twice. Nobody followed me."

I stared at her. Wanted to believe it. Needed to believe it.

"We’re in this together," she whispered. "You said that. You promised me that."

Something in my chest cracked. Not love—I wasn’t stupid enough for that. But something close. Solidarity. Shared doom. The bond of two people standing in the same sinking boat.

I pulled her close and kissed her.

Her lips tasted like salt. Her fingers twisted into my hair. For one brief, desperate moment, the fear receded. The walls of this rotting room shrank to nothing, and it was just us. Two people clinging to each other at the edge of the cliff.

Then I smelled it.

Something underneath her perfume. Underneath the rain and sweat and tears. A scent that didn’t belong to her. Didn’t belong to this room.

Woodsmoke. Iron. And something older. Deeper. The unmistakable musk of pure Alpha dominance.

My blood froze.

A shadow with flashing dark gold eyes detached itself from behind Seraphine. Kaelen. That Emperor had arrived.

"You damn bi—"

Before I could even finish cursing her as a damn bitch, Kaelen’s hand shot forward, tightly gripping my throat and squeezing.