ORION’S POV

The rain over London doesn’t feel like the rain back home.

It lacks a certain bite. It’s just heavy, gray, and endlessly damp, drumming a rhythmic beat against the tinted glass of the black sedan.

It feels shitty.

Orion sits in the backseat, a crystal glass of whiskey balanced perfectly between his fingers. He doesn’t drink from it, he just holds it because he likes the weight of it.

Back in the mansion, the halls are empty. The quiet is irritating. He’d sent his duckling away for forty-eight hours just to see if the sly fox would actually try to fly the coop, but the lack of noise in the grand rooms had begun to grate on his nerves within the first six hours.

Niko is back at the estate, keeping a distant, watchful eye on Adrien’s old neighborhood. Orion doesn’t need to be there for that. Instead, he is here, following a scent.

The car pulls up to an abandoned textile factory on the ragged eastern edges of London. The brickwork is black with soot and age, the windows smashed and boarded up with rotting wood.

It looks completely dead. It looks like the perfect place to hide a monster.

The rear door opens, and the damp chill of the British air bites at Orion’s skin. He steps out, his dark coat shifting around his ankles. He doesn’t carry an umbrella because he doesn’t care about the rain.

A figure melts out from the shadow of the building.

The man is wearing a facecap and a dirty jacket, his shoulders hunched, his face completely average—the kind of face you see a hundred times a day and forget every single time.

His voice, when he speaks, is a thick, gravelly British accent.

"Right on time, boss. They’re inside and they’re very quiet too."

Orion doesn’t smile, but his eyes darken with amusement. "Drop the accent, Pietro. It’s tiring."

He wonders if Adrien is thinking of him.

The man blinks, his shoulders straightening, his posture instantly shifting from a weary worker to something fluid and lethal.

When he speaks again, his voice is smooth, mid-Atlantic, and entirely devoid of anything British. "You have no appreciation for my art, Orion. Do you know that it took me three hours to get the vowels right?"

"Did you find the entry?" Orion asks, walking past him toward the rusted iron doors.

"Of course," Pietro says, falling into step half a pace behind. "Left it completely unguarded. Strange, isn’t it? A group like Masamune leaving a back door wide open in a foreign territory. It’s almost like they’re welcoming guests."

Orion stops before the door. It isn’t locked. In fact, the latch is freshly oiled. A normal man would smell a trap and hesitate. Orion simply pushes it open.

"They aren’t welcoming guests," Orion murmurs, his voice dropping into that soft, dangerous tone that usually precedes a bout of insanity. "They’re leaving a trail for us. It’d be rude not to see where it goes."

The interior of the factory is large and dark but the real structure lies beneath. A heavy concrete staircase leads underground, lit by cheap lightbulbs that flicker with a sickly white glare.

As they descend, the air changes. It loses the damp smell of the rain and takes on something heavy, chemical, and sweet. It’s a scent Orion recognizes instantly.

Euphoria.

But it’s wrong here. It smells thicker, more rancid, like burning sugar mixed with copper.

"They didn’t even bother wiping the servers on the upper level," Pietro says, his fingers dancing over a small knife he’s slipped from his sleeve.

His face is different now—older, sharper, his nose slightly hooked. He changes his skin the way other men change their shirts. "They left everything running. It’s too sloppy. Masamune is many things, but they aren’t sloppy."

"They want us to see," Orion says. His hands are in his pockets. He looks like a tourist visiting a museum, totally unbothered by the heavy silence of the underground facility. "They want me to find whatever is at the end of this hall."

The corridor opens up into a massive, sterile white laboratory. Rows of stainless-steel tables are covered in glass beakers, heavy plastic tubs, and automated pill-pressing machines.

Large, clear plastic parcels are stacked on pallets along the walls. Inside them are thousands of tiny, pale-yellow tablets.

Orion walks up to one of the stacks. He rips the plastic open with one sharp movement of his thumb and picks up a tablet. He crushes it between his fingers, smelling the powder.

"This isn’t the final product," Orion says, his voice flat. "It smells too sweet. This is a pure nerve inhibitor."

"The early batches," Pietro agrees, his voice dropping its playful edge as he looks around the room. "Before they turned it into a luxury drug for the high-end clubs. This stuff doesn’t just make you happy, Orion. It burns your brain straight out of your skull if it doesn’t kill you first."

A sound echoes from the back of the lab. A soft, wet scratching sound, followed by a giggle.

It’s eerie.

Orion turns his head toward a heavy steel door marked with a red biohazard symbol. The lock is electronic, but the green light is already blinking. It’s unlocked.

He pushes the door open.

The stench hits them first. It’s a mixture of waste, rot, and that terrible, sickeningly sweet chemical smell. The room beyond is filled with iron cages, stacked three feet high.

Inside the first row of cages are animals. Dogs, mostly. Their bodies are emaciated, their ribs pushing against their fur, but their mouths are peeled back into wide, unnatural grins.

Their facial muscles have locked into permanent, terrifying smiles, even as their eyes look dead and glassy. Some of them are scratching at the iron bars until their paws bleed, all while making a horrible, breathless panting noise that sounds exactly like a human laugh.

But it’s the lower cages that make Pietro stop moving. It’s like watching a horror story come to life.

It’s full of people— Dozens of them.

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.