Looking up past the blur in his watery eyes a dark figure looms, Mistress Veronica.

“Sick bitch, do you get some sexual kick out of making me relive my most painful moments?”

“And if I do?” She replies, returning his fiery stare with cool intensity.

“If it’s my pleasure to torture you by making you live the worst moments of your life over again what can you do to stop me?”

Draken opens his mouth but says nothing. The square is now eerily silent but for the sound of a dog barking. Strange, he thinks, I don’t remember a barking dog.

“But this wasn't the most painful moment of your life, was it?”

Judgement Square falls away, fading into a formless abyss. Draken, knowing what he’ll see grabs for Veronica but his hands go right through her.

“Dont!” He shouts and her smile is like a demon’s.

“What was the single most painful experience of your life?”

At first the alley starts to materialize but flickers away like smoke on the wind, there is something more horrible burning into focus. Draken knows what it is before it settles into reality and finds himself as a small boy walking up a rickety staircase at the back of a rat hole inn.

“No!” Draken shouts, rejecting the scene preparing to play out. Somewhere deep he finds a physical pain, a kind of suffering he’d never felt before or since and embraces it.

***

He runs through the streets but someone is hot on his heels. The young cavalier is as quick as his purse is fat and refuses to give up the chase. Draken had sensed a danger about the man but seeing the size of his purse took the risk. Now he’s closing the gap rather than falling away as most others had before.

The footsteps are right behind him, gaining quick and Draken is already pushing his limit.

A hand grips his arm and yanks him to a halt, before he can react he feels his footing crumble and the hard ground slam into his back as the weight of the cavalier pins him.

“Nobody steals from Franz Vincenzo Cornelius De La Cruz and lives, this knife has been in my family for six generations and has slain better thieves than you. ”

As the massive antique knife dives for his chest Draken desperately moves to defend himself. He blocks the deadly sharp blade with his forearm and it pierces clean through like a bolt of unholy pain. His body violently convulses in agony and he screams the desperate pain wracked scream of a man being murdered.

Somewhere between the waves of agony and his mindless pleas for help there is a place of detachment. A cold criminal mind calculating the time it will take for the guard to arrive and deciding how best to play the innocent victim. Even as he vomits and convulses his free hand slips the stolen purse into the Cavelier’s coat pocket along with his own.

“Stop squirming you little shit!” The Cavalier knees Draken in the groin and presses his weight into the knife, trying to drive the tip into the boy’s jugular. All ideas of rescue and plots for escape in that small pocket of rational thought wipe clean as his every level of consciousness panics with the certainty of imminent death. He vaguely hears himself begging for his life.

“Oh, gods please don't kill me like this, not like this. I’ll do anything, just let me go, I’m begging you please someone help me! ”

“What goes on here?” The loud commanding voice of the city guard is music to Draken’s ears. The Cavalier has no choice but to let up and address the guard.

“This young ruffian stole my purse and attacked me when I demanded it back, I had no choice but to defend myself.” He sneers, confident the guard will accept his version of events.

“He’s lying!” Draken shouts. “He waylaid me here and stole my purse, you can see it in his pocket next to his own.”

“What?” The cavalier feels the two lumps in his pocket, glances down at the pathetically bleeding boy quite a few years younger than himself and at the hard faced guardsman. “Wait a minute, you don’t actually think I’m the thief do you?”

The Guardsman is quick and has the Cavalier snagged by the coat, his cudgel ready to strike.

“I know your type, a privileged punk who gets a kick out of robbing the poor and thinks your family name gives you a right to do as you please. Well the law is the law and you’ll get twenty lashes just like anyone else, maybe even lose that hand you stabbed him with.”

“No! This is a big misunderstanding, my father is a very important -” The cudgel knocks him to the ground with a thunk and he lay motionless. The guard then bends to look at Draken’s wound.

He winces as his arm is pulled up into the light and the guard looks it over.

“Pretty clean wound, missed the artery. Can you wiggle your fingers?”

It’s feels like his arm is on fire but he manages to make his fingers move.

“Can you make a fist?” Draken grunts as his shaking fingers ball into a fist and then fall limp. The guard nods, satisfied.

“You won’t be crippled, you’re one lucky son of a bitch.”

“Very clever,” Veronica comments.

“Even with one hand I’ve always been quick,” Draken replies.

“Not your low cunning with the purses, I meant bringing me here. Supplementing physical pain for the emotional shows that you’re beginning to think. Of course it’s not enough to stop me from finding what you’re trying to hide, a memory that rends your soul just to think about. What painful memory are you hiding from?”

***

The pain of his wound works against him, he cannot think of a way to misdirect the question and instead finds himself again seven years old and walking up the rickety staircase at the back of the old Seaside Inn.

It isn’t uncommon for screams to come from the whore’s rooms but this time something feels wrong. He knows deep in his innards that the scream comes from his mother’s room.

He knows something terribly bad has happened but his most horrible imaginings could never match the sight before him when he opens the door.

The man is probably a mercenary, his hair is cut short and his arms each sport a bull tattoo. There is a distinct scar across his chest, big and jagged as if the wound that made it should have killed him. These details are etched like stone in Draken’s mind, the scene a permanent fixture in his memory. Blood is everywhere and his world turns red as he sees his mother laying nude, slashed from neck to belly button.

“Like my handiwork?” The man asks, hitching up his pants. “That your ma, was it? She gave me some lip so I cut her, felt right nice if you get my meaning.”

The adult part of Draken , the part buried under the terrified child does finally understand what the bastard means and it twists his stomach in disgust.

“I won’t say a thing,” Draken stammers.

“Why don’t I believe you?” The man picks up his knife, wiping the blood off on the side of his pants.

“Believe it, I won’t say a word because hanging is too good for you.” His body trembles and he can’t believe the words coming out of his mouth but they come just the same.

“You fucking piece of shit, I’m going to kill you with my own goddamn hands and I won’t be satisfied with anything else!”

The man grins, his gold tooth catching the light of the setting sun. “Fire, I like that. I really think you mean to try.” He laughs, a hefty, mocking, soldier’s laugh. “Go right ahead, killing self-righteous avengers is a hobby of mine.” As the man walks out a dog barks in the distance.

“What else could you have done?” Veronica asks, snapping him from the mind of a frightened child. The pity in her voice pisses him off.

“Oh, there was something I could have done, this time I’ll do it.”

Draken snatches a carving knife from the kitchen table and runs out the door, barreling down the wobbling steps with thunderous speed he tackles the killer. They both tumble down the steps to the hard ground, hitting with a body numbing impact.

Scrambling to his feet in spite of the world spinning around him Draken leaps at the murderer and plunges the knife into his midsection, relishing the man’s agonized scream. A fist impacts his head like a hammer and his face hits the ground, smacking a rock and busting his teeth.

Before he can move Draken feels something cold in his chest followed by an uncanny pain that ripples out from the wound to assail his whole body. Laughter reaches his ears and he opens his eyes to see a knife in his chest, the same one which killed his mother. His vision blurs and it all goes dark.

***

“How did you expect that to go?”

Draken is sitting on the cushion looking across at Madame Veronica Tamrin, she smiles. He doesn’t answer, not wanting to admit that in all these years of imagining what he might have done he never once considered that he’d die.

“You’ve made some progress, not afraid to experience death if you know it’s not real.”

She offers him a glass of wine, it’s really very good and for a brief instant gets him to relax. A mistake.

“What are you afraid of, then?” The questions strikes like an arrow, bypassing his defenses with pinpoint accuracy.