CHAPTER 170: PAST BETRAYAL

Ephyra woke again — for real this time — with another gasp, violent and sudden. She bolted upright in bed, heart racing like it was trying to escape her chest.

She was drenched in sweat. Her sheets were twisted around her legs, and her pillow was soaked.

She looked at her hand, then touched her face.

Another tear slid down. Then another. And another.

She hadn’t realized she was crying until the tears became quiet sobs.

"Mom... Dad... Brother..." she whispered, voice cracking. "Mom..."

The room was silent.

It had been a long time since she’d had a nightmare like this.

After her parents’ deaths, she had nightmares every night for almost two years — relentless, crushing, inescapable — until one day, they just stopped. And with them, her dreams stopped altogether. For years, it was silent. Nothingness.

And now suddenly, she had dreamed of them. Of her family. Of warmth.

She didn’t know why, after all this time, the pain still carved its way through her like it had happened yesterday. Maybe it was the memory of that morning — so real, so close, she could smell the tortillas. Or maybe it was the laughter. Her brother’s laugh. Her mother’s voice.

The kind of happiness that made the grief sharper.

She couldn’t stop the tears from falling. She sat there, quietly soaking her pillow, biting her lip to keep from sobbing too loud. The weight on her chest was unbearable.

Even after finding out that she wasn’t the real Eira and that her true mother was someone else entirely, it didn’t matter.

The family she’d known and lost were still hers. That woman who cooked breakfast and hummed in the kitchen — she was Mom. That man with the weary smile and gentle eyes — he was Dad. The boy who laughed and flicked water at her — he was her brother.

And that love? It was still real.

She didn’t even know who her real biological mother was. And frankly, she didn’t care. A dead mother she had loved her whole life meant more to her than a living stranger she’d never met. That in itself was strange — almost cruel — but that’s how it was.

The grief had never dulled. She had avenged them — every single person connected to their deaths had died by her hand. She had hunted them down one by one, and not a soul was spared.

But revenge hadn’t brought her peace. Only fury. The kind that grew colder the more she fed it.

That rage — the raw, endless storm inside her — it never left. That was why, anytime she killed someone guilty of the same evils — someone who had wiped out an innocent family, kidnapped or trafficked the vulnerable — she let the fury consume her. The fire in her, the cruelty, the mercilessness... That was what made her the most feared assassin in the Pyramid. The deadliest.

After their parents were murdered, she and Elmira were left alone — orphans. Homeless.

Elmira had refused the orphanage. Said she’d heard too many horror stories of children being abused and disappearing. Ephyra had agreed. They’d slept wherever they could — under stairwells, in alleys, rooftops. Ate what they could find. Fought for scraps. Survived hell.

By fifteen, Ephyra had killed her first man.

That was the moment everything changed.

The Pyramid found them. Took them in. Trained them. Molded them.

Half private security corporation, half deadly network of elite assassins and experts-for-hire, the Pyramid was a fortress built on shadows. Governments used them when things got too dirty. Billionaires paid them for the kind of protection no law enforcement could guarantee. Whispers of them circled in black-market circles and power broker meetings alike. To the world, they didn’t exist.

To Ephyra and Elmira, they became everything.

They were no longer prey. They became hunters.

But it was also when Elmira started to change.

She began to drift away — quiet at first, subtle. Then faster. Colder. No matter how much Ephyra tried to stay close, Elmira kept pulling back. They were always busy, always training. From dawn to nightfall, their schedules were packed. There was little time for sisterhood.

And over time, Elmira became... someone else.

Things reached a breaking point when Ephyra learned the truth — that the guy Elmira had fallen for, a fellow trainee from their batch named Shuenis, was actually in love with her. Not Elmira. Ephyra.

She had no idea.

When she found out, she immediately went to Elmira, heartbroken, trying to explain, to apologize. She told her she understood now why Elmira had been distant — and that she was so sorry. She never meant to get between them. She didn’t even like the guy.

But Elmira... laughed.

Not a happy laugh. A bitter, broken, maniacal one.

Then she looked at Ephyra, eyes shining with something wild, and said — in a voice too sweet to be real — "Of course it’s you."

Ephyra froze.

Elmira kept talking.

"You get everything I want. Always. Even when you don’t try. Even when I give everything, you get it. And I’m tired. I’m so tired of it."

Ephyra opened her mouth to speak, but Elmira kept going, pacing like a madwoman, pulling at her hair.

"Why? Why can’t I have one thing? Just one thing? Why is it always you?"

Ephyra reached out. Elmira slapped her hand away.

"Don’t touch me," she snapped. "Don’t come near me. I hate you. You’ve taken everything from me. And now this too? The one person I actually liked?"

Her voice cracked.

"That was the first time I ever felt something like that. And before I could even dream about it, he went to you. You, who didn’t even want him!"

Tears filled Ephyra’s eyes. "I didn’t know..."

"Save it," Elmira spat. "From now on, don’t talk to me. Don’t call me your sister. We’re strangers."

That night shattered everything.

Ephyra tried, after that. Tried harder than ever. But Elmira wouldn’t even look at her.

And then, nearly a year later, came the news.

Elmira had completed a mission — but at a terrible cost. She had used trafficked girls — children — as bait. Dozens of lives lost for a mission that could’ve gone another way.

When Ephyra confronted her, furious, Elmira didn’t flinch.

"It was my mission," she said coldly. "I did what I wanted."

"You sacrificed children," Ephyra shouted. "Human lives! Are you even listening to yourself? What the hell happened to you?"

Elmira laughed in her face.

"Don’t act so holy. You’re just soft. Weak. I’m not like you. I’ll do whatever it takes. And I will never let you take anything from me again."

Ephyra slapped her.

Then she said, voice low and shaking with finality:

"I held on for too long. To the idea of you. The version of you I grew up with. But that girl’s dead, and I can’t keep chasing her ghost. I don’t know what you’ve become, but I want no part of it. You’re right. We’re not sisters. Not anymore. And God, I wish it hadn’t come to this."

Elmira just smiled. "Good. Now we’re even."

And then — words that cut deeper than the strike:

"I stopped considering you my sister long ago. Honestly? Sometimes I wish you’d just die."

That was the last straw.

From that moment, they were no longer sisters. No longer family.

But Elmira did something else — something that crossed the final line.

Already seething with hatred and jealousy, she leaked classified mission intel... under Ephyra’s name.

The result was catastrophic.

A covert operation in Solace Ridge was ambushed. The convoy was destroyed. Three Pyramid agents died in the field. One of them had been Ephyra’s mentor. Another, a friend she’d known since her first year in the program.

The fallout was immediate. Internal security dragged Ephyra in. She was interrogated for seventy-two hours straight — tortured and isolated.

She had no idea what was going on.

She swore she was innocent.

But the system didn’t care.

To them, it was airtight: her clearance had been used, her record already flagged with instability from previous missions, and the enemy had been tipped off with alarming precision.

It took weeks for the truth to come out — too late to undo the damage.

Too late to bring back the dead.

After she was finally released, branded but cleared, Ephyra walked out of Pyramid HQ and never looked back.

She left it all behind — the organization, the blood, the history, the people. But not the betrayal. That clung to her like a second skin.

When she found Elmira again, it was on a rooftop in the rain. No guards. No mission. Just them.

⸻

"You’ve hated me for a long time," Ephyra said quietly, staring across the dimly lit rooftop. "But I still can’t figure out why it turned into this."

Elmira’s face was calm, almost bored. "You were always the golden one. Everyone admired you. No matter what I did, they looked past me and straight at you. I wanted something for myself. I was tired of being second."

"So you told them I hesitated during the Volos mission," Ephyra said. Her voice was low but steady. "You told command I almost compromised the entire extraction because I was unstable."

Elmira shrugged lightly. "You were acting unstable."

"I was grieving. For a teammate you left behind," Ephyra snapped. "You told them I broke protocol. You had them watching me."

"It worked, didn’t it?" Elmira said. "They questioned your loyalty. You fell right into it."

Ephyra took a deep breath, not to calm herself — but to stop her hands from shaking. "I could’ve lived with the false reports. I’ve had worse rumors. But what you did after that..." She looked at her sister like she didn’t recognize her. "You used my clearance codes. You leaked mission details under my name. That convoy in Solace Ridge—"

"Was a tragedy," Elmira said flatly.

"It was a setup," Ephyra cut in. Her voice broke, but not her resolve. "Three Pyramid agents died. One of them I trained with, the other was my mentor. And I got blamed for all of it. I was interrogated for seventy-two hours straight."

"You didn’t just lie," Ephyra growled. "You set me up. You got people I cared about killed. You painted a target on my back and watched them torture me — and you smiled."

Elmira didn’t deny it.

"You always survive," she said, voice low and bitter. "I needed to see what it would take to break you. Turns out... not even that was enough."

Ephyra stared at her, something tearing loose in her chest. "You could’ve just walked away. You could’ve left. But you chose to ruin me."

"You ruined me first," Elmira hissed. "Every moment I breathed next to you, I knew I would always be second. Always less. I just wanted—" her voice cracked, "I just wanted to be free of you."

"I wanted to be free of you," Elmira snapped again, her calm mask finally slipping. "I wanted to stop living in your damn shadow. You were perfect! You were untouchable. No matter what I did, I was never enough next to you!"

"So you tried to destroy me?" Ephyra asked, stunned. "You could’ve requested reassignment. Started over. But instead, you sold me out. You sold us out."

"I had nothing!" Elmira’s voice cracked. "Nothing that wasn’t handed to me second. I just needed one win. Just one."

Ephyra blinked slowly. Her voice came quiet but cold: "Then be free. I’m done trying. I’m done hoping."

She turned to leave without looking back.