The Unrivalled Return Of Lord Valerian

CHAPTER 4 - MOTHER

The moment Minerva's car pulled away from the curb, Valerian was already moving.

He didn't wait for a taxi. He flagged down the first vehicle willing to stop — a battered delivery van whose driver took one look at the fistful of cash Valerian shoved through the window and didn't ask a single question before driving ahead.

By the time the van screeched to a stop outside the sprawling white-stone villa Keeya had obviously renovated lavishly, Valerian was already halfway out the door before the wheels had fully stopped turning.

He didn't knock.

The gates opened without resistance.

Someone had left them unlocked, either careless or certain that no one remaining inside needed protection.

The moment he crossed the threshold, the smell hit him — thick, rotten.

It clawed its way up his throat and for one disoriented second, standing in that marble foyer, he genuinely wondered how anyone living in this house could breathe that smell every day and not go looking for its source.

He followed it. Down a hallway, past a kitchen larger than most apartments, to a narrow door tucked behind the staircase — a storage room.

He threw it open.

For a moment, his mind simply refused to process what his eyes were showing him.

It was his mother, lying curled in the corner, half-buried beneath a moth-eaten blanket, surrounded by dusty wooden boxes, metal parts and cleaning supplies. And he could see rats squeaking and running around his mother.

Her skin, once warm and full of the colour he remembered, had gone a sickly grey. Sweat plastered thin strands of white hair to her forehead.

Her breathing came in shallow, rattling pulls, each one sounding like it might be her last.

He knelt beside her and pulled the blanket back, and he gasped, his eyes dilating in terror.

Her legs. Dear God, her legs.

Bedsores had eaten through the skin at her hips and heels, the flesh around them blackened and weeping, the smell of infection so thick it seemed to hang physically in the air.

This must have been happening for days, maybe longer.

"Mom." His voice cracked on the single syllable. He pressed two fingers to her throat. Her pulse was there — faint, thready, but there. "Mom, I'm here. Your son is back."

She didn't stir. He looked up, warm liquid coursing down his cheeks.

Something in Valerian went very quiet.

He stood and walked back toward the living room on legs that no longer felt entirely his own.

He found them exactly where he expected — Nirvana, Keeya's mother, reclined across a leather sofa, a small mountain of imported supplement bottles arranged on the glass table before her like trophies.

Across the room, sprawled sideways in an armchair with a game controller in hand, was Whistle, Keeya's younger brother, his eyes fixed on the enormous television screen, completely unaware of what's happening in the outside world.

They both looked up when he entered, their eyes flaring up like they just saw a ghost. But it didn't last.

"Jailbird's back," Whistle said, grinning at his own joke as he dropped the controller in his hand on the centre table. "Took you long enough. We were starting to think you'd rot in there."

"Well, well, well—" Nirvana set down the small gold spoon she'd been using to measure out her supplement powder, her lips curling with distaste. "Look who finally crawled out of his hole. How did you even get in here?"

"Why is my mother left in the storage room? In that condition!" Valerian's voice cracked, pointing towards the storage room.

Nirvana waved a manicured hand dismissively. "The old hag was dirtying up the villa. Bedsores, that smell — do you have any idea what it does to the air quality in here? I had her moved somewhere so she couldn't ruin the furniture."

"She's been rotting in a storage closet. For how long?"

"A week? Ten days?" Nirvana shrugged as though he'd asked her the time. "I stopped counting."

Valerian took one step closer. “My mother is dying... how can you be so heartless?"

Nirvana let out a short laugh, munching on something. “Everything dies, Valerian. Some of us just do it slower and in better clothes. That woman has been a burden since the day you went away. We fed her. We kept a roof over her. What more do you want?”

“A hospital?” he said, his voice laced with disbelief. "You could have taken her to a hospital and gotten her treated."

Whistle snorted and paused the game he had just resumed. “Hospital? For what? So she can die somewhere expensive, like she deserves it? That's a waste of money. Hospital or no hospital, she's gonna die. So, just wait. Nature will finish the job. Then we throw the body out with the rest of the trash.”

For a single, suspended moment, the room went perfectly silent, Valerian glancing between the mother and the son. Still unable to properly process what his ears were hearing.

Something inside Valerian broke loose.

It wasn't rage in the way most people understood rage — It was colder than that.

As he stared at the duo, a killing intent that seemed to drop the temperature of the entire room by several degrees, pressing down on Nirvana and Whistle both like an invisible hand at their throats.

His blood boiled in his vein as he clenched his fist by his sides, his mind calculating the next move or word to utter.

Valerian said nothing more.

He turned and walked back to the storage room.

He knelt beside his mother who was still unconscious, and his hands went suddenly, perfectly still.

He pressed three fingers to the base of her throat, then to the inside of her wrist, then along a precise line beneath her ribs, his eyes half-closed, reading her body like he could see the biochemical reactions in her body.

Alaric's voice echoed somewhere in his memory.

His fingers began to move with precision, striking a rapid sequence of pressure points down the column of her spine.

Baihui, Renzhong, Neiguan, Zusanli — each strike measured to the width of a hair, each designed to shock a dying body back from the edge it teetered on.

A faint warmth seemed to gather beneath his palms, coaxing her stagnant blood back into motion, forcing her failing lungs to remember how to pull air.

His mother's chest, which had been rising in shallow, desperate sips, suddenly expanded in one long, full breath.

Color began creeping back into lips that had gone nearly blue.

"That's it," Valerian murmured, his voice filled with relief. "Stay with me, Mom. I am here now."

He immediately shrugged out of his coat, the only decent layer he had, and wrapped it carefully around her body, lifting her as though she weighed nothing. Her head rested against his shoulder.

She smelled of sickness and rotten meat, and still he held her like a gem.

When he stepped back into the living room, Whistle was already on his feet.

“Where do you think you’re going with that?” Whistle demanded, blocking the path to the front door.