Five seconds. That's how long the silence stretched after MacLeod's devastating admission, but in those five seconds, my mind raced through a dozen different scenarios, calculations, and desperate strategies.
MacLeod had betrayed me. That much was clear. The question was why.
There were only two possibilities I could think of. Either he'd been working with someone like Valeska or Volkov all along. Some kind of elaborate setup to discredit me at the crucial moment or his Event Quest had given him an objective that required betraying me. The System's quests could be cruel that way, forcing people into impossible positions for reasons that wouldn't become clear until later.
