The Unrivalled Return Of Lord Valerian

CHAPTER 8 - BEASTMODE

Inside the clubhouse, the air had gone thick with anticipation.

Crystal still knelt at the mouth of the crystal cage, her hands white-knuckled around the bars, refusing — even now, to crawl out on Keeya's command.

Theron's patience, thin as it had been all evening, finally snapped.

He rose from his seat at the head table, the legs of his chair screeching against marble, and the sound alone silenced half the hall.

"If you don't crawl out and serve me right now," he said, voice gone cold and flat, "I can guarantee your ex-convict brother won't live to see tomorrow. I heard he's just returned."

Valerian is back?

Crystal's whole body flinched, her sightless eyes widening, glassy with fresh tears. Both in excitement and pain.

She could endure her own suffering — she had been enduring it for years, quietly, without complaint. But the thought of her brother, dying because of her hesitation, that was a weight she could not carry.

He had already given three years of his life to protect the people he loved. She would not be the reason he lost the rest of it.

Some last stubborn thread that had kept her spine straight through everything else, finally gave way.

Trembling, Crystal pressed her palms flat against the floor of the cage and began to lower herself, joint by aching joint, toward the small gap Keeya had left unlocked at the base of the bars as though she was a dog.

Every inch cost her.

The gash on her forearm split wider with the movement, fresh blood sliding warm down to her wrist, and still she kept moving, jaw clenched so hard her teeth ached, because the alternative was a world where Valerian died for a crime that had never once been his.

Theron watched with open hunger, his smile widening the more she poor girl wince in pain.

Keeya watched with the satisfied smile of a woman who had finally gotten her way. Anything to do to get into the partnership.

Just then the world exploded.

BOOM.

The heavy double doors at the far end of the hall didn't simply open — they detonated inward, torn clean off their hinges by a single powerful kick, wood splintering into the air like shrapnel.

Guests screamed and scattered, chairs toppling, wine glasses shattering against marble.

A voice followed the wreckage into the room, low and even and colder than anything the hall had heard all evening.

"WHERE IS MY SISTER!?" The voice growled.

The banquet hall, moments ago a churning sea of murmurs and clinking crystal, fell into a silence so total it felt like the room itself had stopped breathing.

Crystal's whole body went rigid. Her head snapped up, sightless eyes wide, lips parting around a single trembling breath.

She didn't need her eyes to recognize that presence — she'd know it anywhere, in any lifetime.

Her whole body began to shake, not from fear this time, but from something far more overwhelming.

"Val—?" The word barely escaped her before her voice broke entirely.

Valerian stood in the ruined doorway, dust still settling around his shoulders, his eyes moving across the hall until they found her, and everything else in the room simply ceased to exist.

He saw her pale, trembling face, the chains biting into her ankle.

And he saw the blood — on her arm, at her hairline, dried in streaks down her wrists.

For one terrible second, the crowd might have thought something behind Valerian's eyes would catch fire, fury so absolute it made the air around him feel heavier.

Then, just as quickly, it banked itself. His voice, when it came, was impossibly gentle.

"I'm here now," he said, crossing the shattered doorway. "It's okay, Crys. I've got you."

Near the head table, Keeya and Neil exchanged a look as they recognised who had caused the dramatic entrace and burst into laughter, the tension of the moment collapsing into mockery.

"Look who found the guts to show his face," Neil called out, grinning.

"You do realize you just kicked in a door at a private Vallencourt function, don't you? Security!" He raised his voice, gesturing lazily toward the guards stationed along the walls. "Get this vagrant out of here. Break his legs on the way if he struggles."

Keeya's laughter joined his, sharp and delighted. "Honestly, Val, even prison couldn't teach you when to stay down? What did you think you're trying to do? Play hero?"

Valerian didn't so much as glance at them. He kept walking, step by unhurried step, toward the cage.

Theron's expression darkened, seeing how arrogant Valerian was, and he snapped his fingers once. "You heard him. Remove this man, right away. Throw him into the suburbs and feed him to the dogs — I don't care which ones."

Almost immediately after the order, eight men peeled off from the perimeter of the hall, moving with the practiced coordination of former special forces — Theron had handpicked every one of them personally, paid premiums to ensure his own protection was beyond question.

He watched with absolute certainty as they closed in around the intruder, certain this would be over in seconds.

What happened next took less time than it took most of the room to blink.

There was a shift of weight, a turn of the shoulder too fast for the eye to properly track, and then a series of sounds — sharp, wet, mechanical cracks, one after another after another — followed by four bodies hitting the marble floor in near-perfect succession.

Valerian moved through them like something poured rather than thrown, no interest in making it a performance. A sweep took one man's legs out from under him before he'd finished raising his guard.

A short, brutal strike to the side of a knee dropped the next mid-stride, his scream cut short as he hit the ground.

The last two tried to retreat, boots scrabbling backward across the marble floor — but retreat had never been part of the plan they were paid for, and Valerian closed the gap before either of them found the door.

An electric baton skittered across the tile and came to rest against a table leg. Nobody in the hall had seen a single blow land clearly enough to describe it afterward.

Within twenty seconds, all eight men were on the ground. Not one of them rose again.

The hall had gone deathly silent once more, broken only by groans of pain and the ragged, disbelieving breathing of the guests still frozen in their seats.

Theron's wine glass stopped halfway to his mouth. His confident smile froze on his face, then slowly, slowly began to slide off entirely.

He stared at the fallen men, then at Valerian, recalculating everything he thought he understood about the evening.

Neil recovered first, some animal instinct for self-preservation kicking through the shock.

His hand shot out and closed around the chain at Crystal's ankle, yanking her half off her feet, his other arm looping brutally around her throat and hauling her against his chest like a shield.

"Not another step," Neil snarled, though the tremor in his voice betrayed him. "Or I'll snap her neck right here, in front of everyone."

Keeya, recovering her nerve alongside him, sneered from a safe distance.

"Don't think a little street fighting makes you untouchable, Valerian. This isn't some back-alley brawl. This is a place where trash like you gets buried and nobody ever asks questions."

Valerian didn't stop walking. His gaze, fixed on Neil's hand at his sister's throat, had gone past cold into something with no temperature at all.

"This is your last warning," Valerian said, his voice quiet, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "Let go of her."

"Or what?" Neil's grip tightened, and Crystal made a choked, terrified sound. "You'll—"

He never finished the sentence.

Valerian simply wasn't where he had been a heartbeat ago.

He appeared beside Neil so fast the movement blurred, one hand closing around Crystal's waist and pulling her free and safely into his arms in the same motion his other hand drove into Neil's chest, sending him airborne across the hall in a single brutal strike.