Chapter Six

I couldn’t speak.

I didn’t understand either.

But Owen grabbed me anyway, voice flat as ice.

“Get up. You’re coming with me.”

I hadn’t even fully pushed myself up when his hand wrapped around my arm. He hauled me off the bed and half dragged, half pulled me down one corridor after another.

Then he shoved me into another ward.

Chaya was half reclined on the bed, face a little pale, hand wrapped in bandages, looking tragically fragile.

“Al—” She started to call him Alpha and caught herself. Her voice went thin and soft. “Owen.”

He went to her at once, his tone gentling. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay.” She shook her head.

He nodded, then lifted his eyes to me.

“Tell me what you saw.”

The room went very quiet.

Chaya stiffened for a second, then followed his gaze to me. Our eyes met. Her voice trembled when she spoke.

“That day, in the church, I saw… she… she took something from under her robe right before the ceremony started, when no one was watching.”

My fingers tightened. I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“You’re sure?” Owen stared at her. “You saw clearly?”

“I…” Chaya’s shoulders flinched like his question frightened her.

“I thought I must have been mistaken.”

She scrubbed at her eyes, crying carefully.

“I thought she was so loyal to you, there’s no way she’d do something like that. I didn’t dare say anything. I didn’t want to accuse her wrongly.”

Owen’s face darkened.

“But I saw it,” she repeated. “Owen, I really saw it.”

My throat knotted.

Not because her story sounded convincing, but because I knew what Owen hated most.

—Betrayal.

A man in his forties, standing by the bed, spoke up. Dimitri, Chaya’s uncle and Ahsoka’s representative here.

“We also captured a few alive,” he said, his hawk-like eyes sharp. “Interestingly enough, the maps and defense layouts they had were all the latest versions.”

He let that hang.

“The kind of version,” he went on, “that only core Coyote personnel have access to.”

Owen’s fingers flexed. “Internal?”

“Very,” Dimitri spread his hands. “Our enemy clearly knew the church’s internal structure, your security routes, even where the convoy would be parked.”

His look was pointed.

“Clearly, the leak came from someone close.”

I sucked in a breath. My chest burned. I couldn’t speak.

—I’d been in the hospital before the ceremony, nowhere near any defense plans.

—If they wanted a traitor, they needed to look at the people who actually handled the defenses.

—If there was an internal mole, it sure as hell wasn’t me.

I opened my mouth.

“…Kh—”

Only a torn rasp came out, like someone was grinding my throat with sandpaper. Pain rippled all the way down my spine. I couldn’t form a single full word.

I shook my head hard, trying to say it wasn’t me, trying to tell him I couldn’t even talk, let alone stage anything. All that came was another string of broken, ugly breaths.

“…No… not…”

And then Owen’s gaze cut to me.

One look.

That was all it took to know the truth: the trust I was silently begging for was never coming. I’d seen that look before, pointed at others—traitor, disloyal, suspicious.

Never, until now, at me.

“Enough,” Owen said suddenly.

He looked at Dimitri, then at Chaya curled in the blankets, and finally back at my face, his voice cold enough to frost steel.

“Until this is cleared up, I can’t pretend nothing happened.”

He paused for two seconds.

Then he said:

“From this moment on, Heloise Valerian is to be treated as a potential traitor.”

He pronounced each word like a military order.

“Freeze all her Northern resources, accounts, and access. If she makes any move—eliminate her on sight.”

My heart clenched in that instant like a hand closed around it.

No questions. No investigation. Not even a chance to defend myself.

Seven years of taking blades for him, of walking into bullets for him—reduced to four words:

“Potential traitor.”

That was when the gray, frayed chain in my chest finally, completely snapped.