“It took my mother months to save up the money to buy me that phone, and it was my only way of contacting her when she was at work. And he took it, just like that. I hadn’t got a good look at him. He could have been seven feet tall with a machine gun in his hand—I didn’t care. The anger was blazing, the rage taking over the controls.”
The room stills as if everyone else has faded into the background and only Valdemar and I remain with his memories.
“So, I ran after him. Down Locke Lane, onto Hunter Grove, and then right through the Blackwood estate until I caught upwith him on Fay Road. I was seventeen, lean, and in shape. He was a thirtysomething slob who couldn’t keep the pace, but even so, I only caught up with him because someone had got to him before me.” Valdemar’s eyes have lost their focus, as if he’s looking into his past rather than at me.
“By the time I rounded onto Fay Road, the guy was being held aloft by a tall man all dressed in black with light hair and large hungry eyes. He held the thief like he was a sack of rubbish. ‘Does this belong to you?’ he asked, eyeing me as the guy dangled in midair, his high tops scraping the ground and his hands grappling with the chokehold the other guy had on him. I told him that he’d stolen my phone, and I just wanted it back. The man eyed the thief and then dropped him. And before the thief could run, the man stepped on his forearm, pinning him to the pavement.
“He searched the thief, pulling my phone from an inside pocket and asking me whether it was mine. I nodded. He told me to come and get it. I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t. I stepped closer, reached out to take the phone, and the man said to me, ‘You gonna let him get away with this?’ I wasn’t sure how to answer, and he carried on. ‘He took what was yours. He had no right. He’ll do it again unless you teach him a lesson.’ I thought he meant for me to beat the guy up and send him away with a black eye and a fat lip, but when he pulled the knife out of his pocket, I knew he meant more of a permanent lesson.”
Valdemar presses his lips together before he continues.
“I’d been in fights at school, so I was no stranger to a bit of violence, but I’d never handled a weapon before. He handed me the knife, telling me it was my lesson to deliver and to make sure it was one the guy would heed. The thief was now squealing, tears swelling in his eyes, pleading with me not to hurt him. But as he did, all I could think about was how easily he snatched myphone from my hand, how hard my mother had worked to buy it, and how he’d taken it from me without a second’s hesitation.”
Valdemar pauses as if savouring the memory. “I don’t think I drew a breath as I cut off two fingers from his right hand.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Valdemar is a monster;this isn’t news to me. So why am I so shocked by the revelation that he cut two fingers from some guy who tried to steal his phone from him?
“You were seventeen?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And you just met this strange guy on a street, and he told you to cut off a thief’s fingers, so you did?” I clarify.
“He told me to teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget. I had to interpret the punishment myself.” Valdemar’s voice is husky now, as if the story he’s just told has scratched at his throat.
“And this led to you being a Raven Hand?” I’m mentally writing a piece on this, constructing the sentences, delivering the lines.
“I’d heard of the Raven Hands, but I had no idea who Victor Rue was. After I’d cut the thief’s fingers off, he looked at me and laughed, then told me I was fucking nuts and that he could use a guy like me.”
“A boy. You were a boy.” I lean forwards, emphasising my point.
“Have you lived in Amontillado all your life?” Valdemar arches an eyebrow.
“Yes.”
“Then you know as well as I do that you become an adult a lot younger living here than anywhere else.”
I sit back as Ed comes to life in my head, the nights he would come home in the early hours smelling of strange scents, a haunted look in his eye like he’d seen things he shouldn’t have. And he was just a boy. Just like Valdemar had been.
Ed wasn’t the only one who’d been corrupted by this city.
“So, Victor Rue takes you under his wing”—I smirk at my unintended pun—“and you became a Raven Hand.”
Valdemar doesn’t answer me, and the journalist in me senses there’s more to this.
He swallows hard before glancing down at his hands. “It was a couple of months after I met Victor that I became a full-fledged Raven Hand.”
He’s gearing himself up for something, and I’m poised, waiting until he opens his mouth.
“My mother was attacked one night on her way home from work. It was late, she was alone, and someone jumped her, stole her purse, her phone, the cheap gold ring that belonged to my grandma.” He pauses, readying himself, his eyes lost. “They hit her on the side of the head and again on her cheek—not enough to kill her, but enough to knock her out.” He looks up at me before continuing. “She was left unconscious. When she didn’t come home on time, I took to the streets looking for her. Anyone else would have survived—they would have been traumatised, needed a few stitches and some rest, but they would have lived. Unfortunately, my mother was a haemophiliac. When she was left unconscious, her blood didn’t clot, and she bled to death. By the time I found her, it was too late.”
Something unravels inside me, and I don’t want it to be sympathy. I don’t want to feel sorry for this man—he doesn’t deserve it. But I am only human, and somewhere, under thosetattoos, so is he. I’m also aware that this all could be a ruse, a lie, laying the foundation of the sob story so that I feel sorry for him and his poor start in life that led to him being a killer.
But he isn’t the only one who started life as a killer.
“I’m sorry for your loss” is the best I can come up with, but Valdemar bats this away as if it’s inconsequential.
