Chapter 100 Equally Hurt
"My… my father?" Orion’s tongue felt thick, trembling against the roof of his mouth as he struggled to form the word. It was a word he had orphaned long ago, a title that had no place in his world of shadows and chains.
"You are… alive… Orion," his father whispered from the darkness of the adjacent cell. The voice was a ghost, a rattling echo of a life Orion thought had been extinguished decades ago. Hearing it sparked a fresh, frantic desperation in Orion’s limbs; he thrashed against the iron, the shackles biting into his skin as he tried to reach through the stone toward the sound of his own blood.
A vibrant, almost manic smile broke across his face as the realization settled in. "He is my son…" he breathed.
"Yes, Orion… he is your father," Esperanza said softly. As the confirmation left her lips, Orion’s vision blurred. The hot, stinging pressure behind his eyelids finally broke, and his eyes were flooded with tears that tracked silver paths through the grime on his face.
Ezra watched the reunion with the cold, detached interest. "So, the two of you are finally united," he said, his voice dripping with a mischievous, dark glee. "How touching. But I’m afraid I cannot allow a happy ending just yet."
"Ezra, stop this!" Esperanza cried out. She turned to Orion and felt her heart physically crush in her chest. Seeing him the man who usually radiated power and defiance now weeping and dejected was more than she could bear.
Orion was drowning in a surge of emotions he couldn't control; he remembered every story, every scrap of pain associated with the man in the next cell, yet the primal pull of "father" was overwhelming.
Ezra stepped forward, his eyes gleaming. "You have to do exactly what I want. Only then will I allow you to live out your days with your father," he proposed.
Esperanza’s brow furrowed in a deep, suspicious frown. "You aren't giving them a real chance to reunite here, are you?"
"I am not," Ezra retorted sharply, his gaze snapping to her with a chilling finality. "Stop all this, Ezra! Let him go!" Esperanza demanded, her voice rising with a rage that finally matched Orion's.
"Orion... my son... please," the old man choked out, the words fighting their way through a throat tight with decades of regret. "I am so sorry. I have carried the weight of that day every second I’ve been breathing. In the heat of that last battle, when the world was screaming and the sky was falling... I failed you. I couldn't reach you. I couldn't save your mother."
Orion froze, the mention of his mother hitting him like a physical blow to the chest. He stopped straining against his shackles, his forehead coming to rest against the cold, unforgiving floor as he listened to the man he had once called a hero crumble into a broken shell.
"I watched the flames take everything," his father continued, his voice quivering with a raw, bleeding honesty. "I tried to break through the line, I swear to you... but they were too many. I spent every night in this hole wishing it had been me instead of her. I am sorry I let you grow up in a world of shadows, thinking you were alone. I am so, so sorry."
Esperanza watched Orion, her own heart shattering at the sight of his slumped shoulders. The raw power he usually carried had vanished, replaced by the small, wounded boy who had lost his mother in the fire. Even Ezra’s cruel smirk faltered for a fleeting second, the sheer gravity of the apology silencing his mockery.
Orion didn't look up, but a fresh wave of tears hit the stone floor. The pain of the past was surging through him, a tidal wave of memory and loss that no amount of anger could drown out. He was no longer just a prisoner of Ezra; he was a prisoner of a history that was finally being told.
"I cannot," Ezra replied simply.
"What is it?" Orion rasped, cutting through their argument. He didn't care about the cost anymore; he wanted to jump into whatever deal would bridge the gap between him and the father he had just found. He was willing to sell his soul if it meant holding onto this fragment of his past.
"I did not expect this from you, Ezra," Esperanza whispered, her voice trembling with a deep, cutting disappointment. She looked at him as if seeing a stranger, her eyes searching his face for any trace of the man she thought she knew. Seeing his cruel, detached enjoyment of Orion’s pain had broken something inside her. "How can you be so heartless? How can you stand there and mock a son finding his father in a place like this?"
For the first time since they had entered the light of the torches, Ezra’s smile faded. It didn't just drop; it vanished, leaving behind a face that looked suddenly older, hollowed out by a bitterness that ran deeper than anyone had realized.
"Heartless?" Ezra repeated, the word coming out as a low, dangerous hiss. He took a slow step toward the bars, his gaze fixed on nothingness as a dark memory clawed its way to the surface.
"You think this is cruelty, Esperanza? You think you know what a monster looks like?"
He turned his eyes toward Orion’s father, but there was no pity in them only a cold, burning resentment.
"I have seen that stage too," Ezra said, his voice dropping to a chilling, hollow tone that made the hair on Orion's neck stand up. "I stood in the shadows of a room just like this.. he drain every drop of power from her soul. And then... he just let her die."
Esperanza felt as though the floor had vanished beneath her feet. The cold, stone walls of the dungeon seemed to pulse and contract, closing in on her as the air grew too thin to breathe. She was flabbergasted, her mind spinning in a chaotic whirlpool of conflicting truths.
She was caught in a devastating moral crossroads, a stage of emotional paralysis where every pillar of her reality had crumbled at once.
"Enough," Ezra snapped, his voice cutting through the sobbing like a whip crack.
He turned his back on the cells, his silhouette sharp and unyielding against the damp walls. He looked at Esperanza, his eyes now vacant of the humanity she had briefly glimpsed.
"The deal stands, Orion," Ezra said
Ezra leaned in close to the bars, his expression turning hungry. "You have been to the Arctic Flaming Descend. I know you have. And I want you to take us there."
To Ezra’s surprise, the tears in Orion’s eyes didn't stop, but his lips curled into a dark, knowing smirk. He knew that place. He knew the fire that burned beneath the ice—and he knew exactly what it did to men like Ezra.