The Unrivalled Return Of Lord Valerian

CHAPTER 1 - THE GATE THAT LEAD NOWHERE

Hellvane was not a prison in any sense the outside world understood. Its name alone was enough to drain the color from a stranger's face — and it lived up to it.

It held no small-time offenders, only men and women who had once commanded fortunes, syndicates, and cross-border operations. The most dangerous criminals alive.

"Lodge." The voice was gruff, unceremonious — Warden Cole, keys already finding the lock. "Congratulations. Today's your day."

Valerian stood, grabbing the single photograph of his wife, Keeya — the only thing that had kept him sane for three years.

He stopped just beyond the threshold, closed his eyes, and let the late afternoon sun wash over his face.

Then he raised both hands to the sky, fingers spread wide, and breathed in deep, as though he could swallow the whole free world in a single gulp.

"Finally," he murmured, the word cracking, half-laugh, half-prayer, with everything he had swallowed for three years.

The humiliation, the beatings, the nights he had lain awake wondering if he would die inside those walls before ever seeing his wife's face again.

Hellvane was an anomaly. It belonged to no nation and bowed to no law but its own — a pressure cooker meant to crush an ordinary man to dust.

What made it truly feared wasn't the walls. It was the fact that every person locked behind them still, somehow, held the world outside in the palm of their hand.

But Valerian had walked in as just an ordinary man.

Three years ago, he'd found Neil McIntyre — heir to the McIntyre Textile Corporation — cornering Keeya against a wall.

"Do you really think that useless husband of yours can protect you from me?" Neil had sneered, fingers digging into her wrist. "In this city, my family owns everything. Including you."

Valerian tore him away. Neil struck first; in defending himself, Valerian broke his wrist.

As punishment for "harassing" his son, the elder McIntyre pulled every string he had to bury Valerian in the most feared prison in the country — certain he wouldn't survive it.

He hadn't regretted it. Not even as Hellvane taught him exactly what regret was supposed to feel like.

They came for him nightly, at first, beating him whenever he made eye contact, laughing while they did it, until his own reflection became a stranger's.

There came a night he sat alone in the corner of his cell, face throbbing, one eye swollen shut, and something in him had finally gone very quiet and very still.

He was doing the arithmetic of his own death, calculating which of the men who'd hurt him he could take down with him before the end.

It was in that stillness a voice jolted him off his thoughts.

"You don't wanna do that, boy." The old man's voice cracked.

Valerian looked up and saw the old man leaning against his cell gate.

He hadn't heard the man approach. Few ever did.

They called him Alaric. He kept to himself, spoke to no one, and in the years Valerian had been on there, he'd never once heard the man's voice—until now. No one knew he could talk.

"I'm already dead in here," Valerian finally said. "Might as well take a few of them with me."

"You're not dead," Alaric said, studying his face. "I have seen how much they tried to break you, but you remained unbroken. You're on fire. There's a difference. The question is whether that fire consumes you — or you learn to aim it."

No one imagined that the frail, silent old prisoner was in truth a legendary master of the martial arts.

A man whose true name could still make hardened killers flinch, a man who had walked into Hellvane of his own free will simply to escape a world too loud with blood and vengeance.

For two and a half years, under the old man's brutal tutelage, Valerian was broken down and rebuilt into someone else entirely: hand-to-hand combat, blades, reading a man's intentions before he knew them himself, understanding money and power as weapons sharper than any knife.

Before Alaric vanished as mysteriously as he'd lived, he pressed an obsidian-black ring into Valerian's palm.

"A surprise awaits you when you walk free," the old man had said. "Wear this, and remember what I taught you.”

Valerian had turned the ring over in his fingers a hundred times since, but standing now at the gates with the sun on his face, he found he could not think about mysteries or rings or old men who spoke in riddles.

All he could think of was Keeya. His wife. His mother. Home.

He didn't get long to sit with that.

A car pulled up — sleek, black, obscenely expensive for a woman who three years ago could barely make payroll. And for a moment Valerian let himself believe it was a good sign.

Keeya had always dreamed big. Maybe, finally, the company had turned a corner.

The door opened, and Keeya stepped out, more beautiful than he remembered: tailored coat, red lips, glossy skin. Valerian's chapped lips curved into the first real smile he'd worn in three years.

"Keeya—" Her name left him like a prayer. He stepped forward, arms lifting. “You came.”

He took a step forward, arms already lifting to hold her.

Then the other door opened.

A man stepped out, adjusting his cufflinks with lazy confidence, and Valerian's entire body went cold. He knew that face. He would know it even in his nightmares.

Neil McIntyre.

Neil's arm slid around Keeya's waist. She didn't pull away. She leaned into him, and something in Valerian's chest dropped.

"Been a while, jailbird," Neil said, smiling as they strolled forward together.