Chapter 72: The Wheels On The Bus
ORION’S POV
They are dressed in gray rags, their bodies thin and trembling. Men, women, and children. Some of them are sitting in the corners of their cells, rocking back and forth. Every single one of them has that same grotesque, unmoving smile stretched across their face.
A little girl, no older than ten, sits right against the bars of the nearest cage.
Her skin is translucent, her veins showing dark and blue beneath the surface. Her lips are pulled back so tightly they are bleeding at the corners, showing her teeth in a permanent, manic grin.
She looks up at Orion, her eyes wide with primal terror—but her mouth just twitches into a wider smile.
She lets out a high, broken giggle.
Pietro swears under his breath, his hand tightening on his weapon. "They’re testing the raw poison on them to find the lethal threshold."
Orion walks down the center aisle between the cages. His boots make a sharp, heavy clicking sound on the concrete. He stops in front of the little girl’s cage. He crouches down, his dark eyes level with hers.
"Can you hear me?" Orion asks softly.
The girl nods rapidly, a tear spilling over her eyelid and running down her pale cheek. But her smile doesn’t move. It remains locked, a horrible mask of forced joy.
"Try to stop smiling," Orion commands. His voice isn’t cruel, but it carries a heavy, absolute weight. "Look at me. Stop smiling for thirty seconds, and I will take you out of this cage."
The girl’s chest heaves. She tries. Orion watches the muscles in her jaw twitch violently. She puts her hands over her mouth, trying to physically force her lips down, but the moment she lets go, the muscles snap back like rubber bands into that terrifying, wide grin. She lets out another sob, which sounds like a joyous laugh.
Orion stands up. He looks down the row of cages.
"Pietro," he says calmly.
"Yeah?"
"Check the rest. Anyone who can control their face for thirty seconds, get them to the transport. Niko will have a medical team ready in the city. They can be rehabilitated."
Pietro moves down the line, his face unusually grim. He goes from cage to cage, speaking to the prisoners in a low, quiet voice.
He waits and watches.
After five minutes, Pietro walks back to Orion. He shakes his head. "Only three of the adults on the far side can do it. The rest... the drug has already fused with their nervous systems. It’s permanent, Basilsik. Their brains are already frying from the inside out."
Orion looks at the little girl. She is still looking at him, her eyes begging for help, her mouth split into that awful, bleeding smile.
"Go to the left side of the facility," Orion says, turning his back on the cages. "Check the data terminals and try to salvage anything you can. I’ll handle the right side."
"Orion," Pietro says, hesitating for a fraction of a second as he looks at the cages. "What about the ones who are left?"
"Kill them," Orion says. His voice has no emotion in it. It’s as cold as the rain outside. "They’re already dead. They just haven’t stopped breathing yet. If you’re feeling merciful, then you’ll do it quickly."
Orion walks out of the room without looking back. Behind him, the muffled, suppressed pops of Pietro’s weapon begin to echo through the concrete room, followed by the sudden, abrupt ending of those horrible, forced laughs.
A merciful killer. How amusing.
The right side of the facility houses the administrative offices. It’s cleaner here, away from the smell of the test subjects, but the air still feels heavy.
Orion enters a glass-walled office that overlooks the entire production floor. A large oak desk sits in the center of the room. On top of it, completely alone under a single desk lamp, sits a heavy, leather-bound ledger.
There are no computers on this side. No hard drives. Just the book. A trap or a poisoned apple?
Orion approaches the desk slowly. He knows what this is. Masamune didn’t leave a digital footprint because digital footprints can be erased or corrupted by outside hackers.
They wanted him to have the physical proof. They wanted his hands on this ledger.
He pulls out the chair and sits down, then opens the ledger.
The pages are filled with neat, handwritten columns. Dates, amounts, shipping codes, and names. It’s a record of the early-stage distribution of euphoria—back when it was still classified as a lethal, unstable poison rather than a hard drug.
Masamune hadn’t just been testing it on prisoners in London. They had been selling it to wealthy buyers across Europe and Asia as a discrete, untraceable method of murder.
A poison that kills you while making you look like you died of pure happiness.
Orion’s fingers turn the pages methodically. His eyes skim through the names of prominent politicians, rival syndicate members, and wealthy aristocrats who had suddenly dropped dead of "heart failure" over the last five years.
It’s a massive list of leverage.
A treasure trove of blackmail that could destroy half the ruling elite of the continent.
But Orion doesn’t care about the leverage. He keeps turning the pages, his instincts humming a low, vicious warning in the back of his mind.
Masamune didn’t bait him to London to give him a weapon against the rest of the world. They brought him here for something specific.
His hand stops on a page dated exactly seven years ago.
The ink is slightly darker here, as if the writer had paused before pressing the pen to the paper. The entry is small, hidden between two large shipments to a cartel in Argentina.
Item: Euphoria (Batch 02 - Non-curated/Lethal Threshold).
Quantity: 50ml (Liquid Concentrate).
Buyer: Henri Dubois.
Delivery Date: October 14th.
Orion stares at the name.
Henri Dubois. Adrien’s father.
The temperature in the room drops. Orion doesn’t move, he doesn’t even blink, he just stares at the elegant cursive of the dead man’s name.
He calculates the dates instantly in his head. October 14th. That was exactly three days before Henri Dubois was found dead in his study, his face frozen in a horrific, ecstatic grin that the local police had written off as a sudden stroke brought on by a lifetime of drinking and stress.
Three days of duckling acting off.
And it was exactly four days before Adrien Dubois fled with only the clothes on his back, and disappeared into the lower-class slums of the city, hiding from everything and everyone.
’Why would you do this to me, Orion?! He was my friend!’
The puzzle pieces don’t just fall into place, they slam together with a sickening crunch.
Henri Dubois hadn’t just been a victim of a random drug overdose. He had bought the poison himself.
Or rather, someone had forced him to buy it.
Someone had used Adrien’s father as a real-world test subject for Masamune’s new toy, and they had ensured the paper trail led directly back to the Dubois name. And that’s not all they did.
Orion leans back in the chair, his dark eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Masamune didn’t leave this base behind because they were being hunted. They left it as bait. They wanted Orion to find the ledger.
They wanted him to see the name of his little duckling’s father written in the blood of their experiments. They wanted his interest.
They wanted him to know that Adrien was tied to them, deeply and irreversibly, long before the little shit even betrayed him.
"You found it, then," a voice says from the doorway.
Pietro is leaning against the glass frame, his face back to its normal, slightly mischievous lines, though his eyes remain dark. He’s wiped his weapon clean.
"The left side was just shipping manifests to local street gangs," Pietro says, walking into the room and looking over Orion’s shoulder at the book. "Nothing important. But you look...weird."
Orion closes the ledger with a soft, heavy thud.
"We’re leaving," Orion says, standing up. He takes the ledger with him, gripping it tightly against his side. "Get the survivors to the transport and burn the rest of this place to the ground. Don’t leave a single brick standing."
"And Masamune?" Pietro asks, his voice shifting slightly, taking on a sharper, colder edge. "What do we do about them?"
Orion walks past him, his coat billowing behind him like shadows in the dim office light.
"They want a reaction," Orion whispers, his voice so quiet it’s barely audible over the sound of the distant rain. "They want to see what happens when they touch something that belongs to me."
He stops at the exit, his hand resting on the metal frame.
"I’m going to go home and see my fiancé. And then, Pietro...I’ll give them an appropriate reaction."
****
You can drop some character traits for your favorite characters, so I can add them for you to vote the ones you like, okay?
—TheLovePoet
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