Chapter 139: Traitor Or Friend

Torin Pov

I paced back and forth across the hard floor of my room, my hands jammed deep into my pockets, my heavy boots leaving faint scuff marks on the rug. The silence in the room was suffocating, my mind a chaotic, roaring blur of everything that had just unfolded downstairs.

Lorali had ignored me completely. Not even a single glance. But what rubbed me the wrong way, what truly sent a cold spike of unease twisting through my gut, was how close she seemed to Oracle.

It felt like a sick rerun of the past playing out directly in front of my face. I used to be the one closest to Lorali. Now it was Oracle. Why on earth would she want to be close to Oracle of all people? It made no sense.

And why was Oracle allowing her to treat him like that?

Oracle was a prideful man. Every single Spade man possessed a ferocious, stubborn pride—even if the rest of them didn’t like to admit it as openly as I did. So why would Oracle walk out of prison at Lorali’s behest? I was the one who had been working overtime trying to get him out.

Yes, I was the one who had put him in there in the first place, but he looked guilty as hell at the time. Yet when I tried to pull strings to get him released, he fought his own lawyers. He insisted on staying in that cell, spewing all that nonsense about needing to pay for his crimes and rot for what he did.

What happened to all that talk about paying for his crimes? Now, all of a sudden, he was out just because Lorali said so?

How did she even manage to get him out so fast? Getting someone out of jail was a long, tedious legal process. It should have taken at least a week of back-and-forth negotiations before anything was finalized.

Wait.

That didn’t add up. Lorali was in the hospital. When on earth did she get out?

I stopped dead in the middle of the room, my chest heaving as I scrambled to make sense of the timeline. I didn’t understand when she had been discharged. As far as I knew, the last time we met before I went down that slippery, spiraling slope of depression, she was still recovering at New Hope.

When did she come back?

I hated this feeling. I hated not knowing what was happening around me. I refused to let the mistakes of the past repeat themselves; I needed to be on top of information. I needed to know what was going on right now.

I rushed to the dresser, snatched my phone off the wooden surface, and aggressively dialed Dr. Quid’s direct line.

The phone barely finished its second ring before the physician picked up. "Dr. Quid speaking—"

"Quid! How on earth was Lorali released?!" I barked out, the words tumbling over each other in a desperate, erratic flood before he could even greet me properly. "When was she discharged?! What is going on over there?!"

"Hold on, hold on, pause, Mr. Spade!" Dr. Quid interrupted, his raspy voice stern through the receiver. "I can barely hear what you’re saying. You need to calm down."

Calm down? How could I calm down when the cold, lethal look Lorali gave me downstairs was still burned into the back of my eyelids? She hadn’t forgiven me. Not even close. I still had a long, agonizing way to go if I ever wanted to fix this, and being kept in the dark was driving me insane.

I squeezed my eyes shut, taking a harsh, shuddering breath to force my racing pulse to slow. "I’m sorry," I gritted out, forcing my voice into a lower, clearer register. "Lorali is back at the penthouse. She just walked through the front door, and I had no idea she had even left your care. I just need to know when she was discharged."

Dr. Quid sighed, the rustle of paper charts echoing through the speaker as he registered the situation. "Well, Mr. Spade... she was discharged a week ago. I tried calling you on all of your cell numbers—all seven of them—and every single call went unanswered. I even tried calling your packmates, and none of them answered either. Bed space is strictly limited at New Hope; patients cannot overstay once they’ve physically healed. We had no choice but to finalize her clearance."

My stomach dropped into a hollow pit. "A week ago?"

"Yes," Dr. Quid continued smoothly. "She took the hospital shuttle back home. And if I’m being frank, Mr. Spade, she was not the happiest person when she realized none of you were coming to fetch her." The words hit me like a physical blow. Agitation flushed hot through my veins as my brain desperately tried to link the timelines together.

She thinks I purposely abandoned her. She thinks I didn’t care enough to come pick her up. No wonder, she’s angrier than before.

"I didn’t know!" I groaned, resting my forehead against the cool glass of the windowpane. "You didn’t try hard enough to reach me, Dr. Quid!"

"Now, see here, Mr. Spade, I must defend myself," Dr. Quid countered, his tone hardening with a sharp edge of reproof. "This is largely your own doing. If you had visited her even once during that final week, you would have seen that she was looking healthy and preparing for discharge. I naturally assumed you would drop by to see your fated Omega. When you didn’t show up after her release, I figured you had already seen her at home and were fully aware she was back."

The weight of my own failures as an Alpha settled heavily on my shoulders, crushing the air from my lungs. He was right, and I hated it. I had been a terrible Alpha, buried so deep in my own stress, that I had completely neglected her.

"I... I was out of the city," I lied hastily, trying to shield what little pride I had left. "Emergency business in the northern territories. That’s why I couldn’t visit."

"Be that as it may," Dr. Quid murmured, though he clearly didn’t care for my excuse. "I still assumed someone in your inner circle would have kept you informed. Erin visited her all the time while she was here. This is his medical facility, he could have checked the records at any moment and seen she was gone. Since those two are so close, I figured he would have passed the message along."

My brain short-circuited. "What?" I asked, my voice dropping into a stunned, breathless whisper. "Erin... visited her?"

"Oh, continuously," Dr. Quid chuckled, entirely oblivious to the ground crumbling beneath my feet. "Goodness, seeing those two together brought back memories. It feels like just yesterday I was treating you and Erin in the isolation ward when you both caught that terrible strain of smallpox years ago."

My grip tightened around the phone until my knuckles turned stark white, my mind wildly trying to pull itself out of the sudden fog. "Smallpox... right," I mumbled absently.

"Erin cried for nights back then, remember?" Dr. Quid said with a light laugh. "He was convinced he was going to die, and he was so furious with you for giving it to him!"

"I remember," I muttered mechanically, memory briefly flashing to a young, feverish Erin sobbing in a hospital bed while I tried to break out of quarantine to get ice.

"Yes, well, he certainly grew out of that dramatic phase," Dr. Quid added smoothly. "He’s grown into a fine young man. That’s precisely why I thought he would have told you about Lorali. Those two were so close during her stay here, he even threw a whole market just to brighten her mood."

The room seemed to tilt on its axis.

"Repeat that," I demanded, my breath hitching in my throat. "Repeat what you just said."

"I said Erin threw a whole market just to brighten her mood," Dr. Quid repeated, sounding slightly bewildered by my reaction. "It was quite the gesture."

I couldn’t process it. My mind began to spiral into a dangerous, chaotic storm of questions. Why on earth would Erin ever visit my sugarplum in the hospital? And why wouldn’t he tell me?!

The last time I checked, those two didn’t even know each other! Erin had stood right in my room, looking me dead in the eye, acting as if he had no idea who Lorali was! Why would he lie to me? Why would he pretend she was a complete stranger when he was actively throwing markets for her in a hospital?!

Paranoia clawed at my chest, threatening to rip me apart from the inside out, but I forced myself to stop. I gripped the edge of the dresser and took a deep, harsh breath, forcing my frantic thoughts into some semblance of rational order.

No. Think, Torin. Think rationally.

This had to be a terrible misunderstanding. It had to be.

Erin was a gentle, empathetic person by nature. He made it a personal habit to get to know patients whenever he came in for his own medical checks. It made total sense that he would cross paths with Lorali while walking the halls. He probably didn’t even realize she was my Omega at first. He just saw a wounded girl with a severe stab injury and felt sorry for her. Erin had a crazy soft spot for Omegas in general. He was just being nice.

That was it. That had to be the case. Erin was my brother, my closest friend, he would never betray me.