Eliot's POV
My life was an absolute disaster.
I'd spent the whole night staring at the ceiling of my tiny studio, haunted by the image of Victoria's (well, Sofie's) blank stare as she plunged to her death in Prague.
I was exhausted, running on cheap caffeine, and that morning—in pouring rain—I'd almost hit a suicidal cyclist who blew through a red light just as I slammed the brakes on my Twingo with worn-out brake pads.
My heart was still pounding.
And to top it all off, I had just received an official summons. A glacial email: "Report to my office at 5:00 p.m. A. Valmont."
I knew exactly why he was calling me in.
My Master's thesis topic.
I'd chosen to work on "Procedural loopholes in white-collar crime"—a goldmine of a subject. But rumor had it Charles, the class suck-up and Valmont's golden boy, wanted that exact same topic. Valmont was going to pressure me into giving it up.
I pushed open the heavy oak door to his office, dragging my feet, dark circles hanging down to my knees.
The atmosphere inside was suffocating.
The shutters were half-closed, and Valmont sat behind his enormous desk, fingers steepled, lit by a single reading lamp.
He stared at me like I was an insect pinned to a microscope slide.
"Close the door, Eliot," he ordered in that dark velvet voice. "And sit down."
I obeyed, swallowing wrong.
Adrien Valmont's POV
The monster had just entered my lair.
I watched him sit across from me. He played his role to perfection. Hunched back. Bloodshot eyes from what looked like lack of sleep (doubtless the meticulous preparation of a new murder). Hair soaked by the rain.
A masterpiece of deception.
But I was not fooled.
I decided to strike hard—to show him I could read him like an open book.
"I'll be direct with you, Eliot," I began, leaning slightly forward and locking my gaze onto his to assert dominance. "I know what you're doing. I see straight through your little game."
He recoiled almost imperceptibly.
A hit.
"Your... methods are sloppy," I continued in a cutting tone. "You leave far too much to chance. Understand one thing: this territory is mine. Step onto my turf—encroach on it one more time—and I will erase you. There is no room for two of us here. Is that clear?"
I waited for his response.
A plea? A mocking smile? A negotiation?
Eliot's POV
I could not believe what I was hearing.
"Your methods are sloppy"? "My turf"? "I'll erase you"?!
He was talking about my thesis draft!
This guy was completely unhinged. He was ready to destroy me academically just so his favorite student could steal my research topic.
Anger rose in me. Slow, heavy anger—fueled by exhaustion, Prague stress, and that damn cyclist who had nearly dented my car that morning. My skull throbbed. The little "social anxiety" compartment in my brain tripped a breaker and went dark, leaving total emptiness.
Absolute cold.
I slowly straightened in my chair. I stopped blinking.
I looked him dead in the eye. My voice—usually hesitant—came out flat as a flatline.
"I'm tired, sir."
I saw his shoulders stiffen slightly, but I kept going.
"Honestly, if you keep pushing me on this, I can't guarantee anything. I already nearly killed someone this morning."
(It was not a metaphor. If the road had been a little more slippery, that cyclist was ending up under my wheels. Just thinking about it made me want to go back to bed for the rest of the year.)
"So keep the topic if that's what you want. I don't care anymore."
I stood, grabbed my battered backpack, and walked out without even saying goodbye, slamming the door behind me.
Adrien Valmont's POV
The silence after his departure was oppressively heavy.
A bead of icy sweat formed at the base of my neck and slid slowly down my spine. I sat frozen in my leather chair, incapable of moving.
My God.
His eyes.
For a fraction of a second, the mask of the anxious student had cracked. I had seen the abyss. Absolute nothingness. Black and bottomless. The gaze of a pure sociopath.
And that sentence—spoken with the indifference of a man ordering coffee:
"I already nearly killed someone this morning."
My heart hammered against my ribs.
He had just threatened to kill me in my own office.
Worse—he had revealed that he had started his day with an attempted murder, casually, as a warm-up before class.
And his "topic" he was letting me "keep"? A macabre metaphor for my next prey.
I had tried to dominate him.
I had thrown myself straight into the wolf's mouth.
The murderous aura he'd radiated had literally crushed me.
I ran a trembling hand over my damp forehead.
I had to reevaluate the situation. This boy wasn't merely dangerous.
He was terrifying.
My pride could not tolerate that defeat.
I had backed down. I—the supreme predator—had yielded my own office to a badly groomed student. The humiliation burned my insides like acid. But my morbid curiosity was just as strong.
I had to understand how he worked.
I had to observe the Master in action, uncover his rituals, analyze how he wove his invisible web around future victims.
So I decided to tail him.
For three days, I canceled all nonessential appointments, put on a dark cashmere overcoat—my idea of discretion—and became his shadow.
I was prepared to witness nocturnal training sessions, furtive meetings with poison suppliers in filthy alleys, or at the very least the careful observation of a new target.
What I discovered nearly made me lose my mind.
On the first day, I followed him into a grim neighborhood convenience store. Hidden behind a display of canned goods, I watched with absolute concentration.
He stopped in the fruit juice aisle.
I narrowed my eyes.
What was he preparing? Some improvised chemical cocktail? A homemade citric-acid bomb?
No.
He was simply buying a cheap carton of orange juice.
But the worst came outside the store.
I watched from behind a bus shelter as he tried to open it. He pulled the little foil tab.
It came off in his fingers.
I waited for him to use some sophisticated survival technique to pierce the seal. Instead, he spent a full five minutes stabbing at it with his apartment key, eventually spraying his face and miserable coat with a sticky jet of orange juice.
"A feint," I thought, forcing myself to rationalize. "He is testing his own patience. A zen control exercise worthy of Shaolin monks, designed to master his homicidal impulses. Brilliant."
On the second day, I shadowed him on campus.
He walked quickly, nose buried in his class notes.
I waited for the moment he would sweep his surroundings with that signature retinal scan used by professional killers assessing potential threats.
Suddenly, he tripped.
Not a tactical slip. Not an expert evasion.
A pure, heavy, humiliatingly ordinary fall.
He had caught himself on his own shoelaces—those infamous untied laces I had taken for a deliberate camouflage choice.
He sprawled full-length into a muddy puddle, civil law flashcards scattering in the wind.
"It's theater," I muttered through clenched teeth, feeling the first crack of doubt appear in my analytical mind. "He knows I'm watching. He's mocking me. Playing the clown to insult me."
But on the third day, the veil tore completely.
It was 4:30 p.m.
I was positioned twenty meters away, behind a pillar in Building C at the university. Eliot stood in front of a coffee vending machine, shoulders slumped under a fatigue I was beginning to understand—with horror—was not a disguise.
He dug through his worn pockets for a long moment and pulled out a fifty-cent coin. He inserted it into the slot.
The machine swallowed it.
No cup dropped.
No liquid came out.
The little digital screen blinked with electronic insolence:
OUT OF ORDER
And then... the "evil genius" cracked.
He did not pull out hacking tools. He did not smash the machine with a superhuman punch.
No.
Eliot leaned his forehead against the plexiglass window of the dispenser. His shoulders started to shake. A small, pitiful whimper—the sound of a man broken by the loss of fifty cents—escaped his lips.
He was crying.
Literally crying with frustration in front of a coffee machine.
The shock was so violent I had to brace myself against the concrete pillar.
A monumental dizziness seized me. The gears of my brain—usually perfectly oiled—jammed in a deafening grind. All my theories, all my psychological analyses, all my projections exploded into dust.
He didn't try to kill me that morning...
He didn't kill the Black Widow in Prague as a territorial calculation... He really got drugged like an idiot, and she must have slipped trying to drag him, or some other absurdity...
My God.
There was no criminal genius.
No master of the elements.
There was only an idiot.
An absolute idiot. A bad-luck magnet on such a colossal, statistically impossible scale that it looked like divine premeditation.
And I...
I had been afraid of that.
The realization hit me like a cannonball to the chest.
I had trembled.
Me. Adrien Valmont. The brightest and deadliest mind in Paris.
I had broken into cold sweats and yielded my territory to a spineless crybaby who couldn't open a carton of fruit juice without ruining his clothes.
Confusion gave way instantly to incandescent rage.
A fury of blinding purity, fed by total humiliation.
My narcissism was hemorrhaging. My ego had just been trampled by a clown who didn't even know he was a clown.
I stepped away from the pillar, fists clenched so hard my nails bit into my palms through my leather gloves. My blood boiled. The air felt thin.
This was no longer about rivalry.
No longer about marking territory.
This colossal insult to my intelligence had to be washed away.
His very existence—and the fact that he had made me doubt my own supremacy—was an offense only blood could erase.
Eliot was going to die.
Tonight.
And I was not going to use subtle poison or poetic staging.
I was going to crush his skull with my own hands.
I returned home with a rigid, military stride, consumed by a cold rage that threatened to crack my legendary composure.
The image of that idiot whimpering against the coffee machine glass looped in my mind.
This had to end.
Immediately.
The moment I stepped through the double doors of my Haussmann apartment, I went straight to my mahogany desk.
I sat down, opened my laptop, and logged into my university email. The plan had to be childishly simple. A mind as primitive and anxious as his required no elaborate scheme.
You only had to dangle the one carrot that obsessed his miserable existence:
his degree.
My fingers struck the keys with surgical precision.
From:
To:
Subject: Essential book for your thesis
Eliot,
Following our conversation this afternoon, I have taken time to reflect. Your tenacity regarding your thesis topic is... unexpected. To ensure you are equal to the task, I have decided to lend you a rare personal volume, absolutely essential to your research. I never bring it to the university.
Come to my home tonight at exactly 8:00 p.m. to collect it. The address is attached.
Do not be late.
Adrien Valmont
I clicked Send.
A cruel smile, devoid of all warmth, pulled at my lips.
He would come running.
Like a stray dog offered a meaty bone.
And once he was inside my sanctuary, away from eyes and cameras, I would make him pay for every second of doubt he had forced on me.
Eliot's POV
I was sitting cross-legged on my creaky bed, scraping the bottom of a pot of slightly overcooked shell pasta, when my phone vibrated on the nightstand.
I sighed.
Probably a notification telling me my bank account was flirting with overdraft again.
I grabbed the phone with a limp hand.
New email: A. Valmont
My heart jumped painfully in my chest. I swallowed my pasta wrong and started coughing so hard I nearly lost a lung. Anxiety flooded me. He was going to announce my expulsion. Or a formal reprimand. Or the cancellation of my thesis topic.
I opened the message squinting, like the screen might explode in my face.
I read the first line.
Then the second.
I blinked, incredulous, and reread the whole email.
"I have decided to lend you a rare personal volume... absolutely essential..."
I dropped my spoon into the pot with a dull clink.
An enormous, stupid grin spread across my tired face.
He caved.
My "pressure move" from earlier—when I'd told him I couldn't guarantee anything because I was exhausted and had nearly hit a cyclist—had actually worked!
Not only was Valmont letting me keep my thesis topic, he respected me enough to invite me to his place and lend me a book from his personal collection.
That was the academic Holy Grail.
That kind of attention was basically a guaranteed highest honors—maybe even a golden recommendation for an internship at a law firm.
I was going to pass my year.
I might even become a lawyer.
I jumped off the bed, suddenly reanimated by desperate energy. It was 6:30 p.m. I had only an hour and a half to get to the rich part of town.
I opened my wobbly wardrobe, looking for something decent.
I put on my least wrinkled shirt (the one I saved for oral exams), tried to tame my hair with a little water, and scrubbed my sneakers with a frantic sponge.
I was not going to miss this chance.
This was the turning point of my life.
I took the metro, lighthearted, lulled by the illusion that karma had finally decided to leave me alone.
At 7:55 p.m., I stood in front of the address.
A majestic Haussmann building in the 8th arrondissement, with wrought-iron balconies and a massive carriage gate. Even the doormat looked like it cost more than my car.
I entered the code with fingers trembling slightly from excitement. The heavy door opened with a soft click.
I crossed the paved inner courtyard, took the elevator lined in red velvet, and reached the top floor.
In front of the double solid-wood doors to my professor's apartment, I took a deep breath, smoothed my shirt, and rang the brass bell.
I was ready to collect my bonus points.
I had absolutely no idea I was about to walk into the personal slaughterhouse of one of the worst serial killers in the country.
Adrien Valmont's POV
I opened the door wearing my warmest smile—the perfect mask of the devoted professor.
Eliot stood on the landing like a frightened puppy who had just been handed an unexpected treat. His cheap ready-to-wear shirt was badly ironed, and his worn sneakers clashed obscenely with the solid oak parquet in my vestibule. He smelled of rain, crowded metro cars, and overcooked pasta.
The mere fact that he breathed the same air as I did made me nauseous.
"Eliot, come in, please," I welcomed, stepping aside to let him pass.
"Th-thank you, sir. This is really... wow, it's huge," he stammered, eyes wide, turning in circles like a tourist lost in a museum.
"Make yourself comfortable in the living room," I said, indicating the main room. "I'll fetch the book from my office. Make yourself at home."
I turned away, savoring the irony of my last sentence.
Once in my office, I did not look for any book.
I opened the bottom drawer of a chest and put on a pair of very fine black leather gloves. My gaze then fell on the bookshelf.
There it stood: a magnificent antique bronze statuette representing Themis, goddess of Justice—blindfolded, sword in hand.
The object weighed at least five kilos.
An instrument of perfect poetic irony for crushing the skull of this impostor.
I gripped it firmly by the base. The weight of the cold bronze in my gloved hand was exhilarating.
I was about to restore order.
I stepped out of the office on silent feet, the thick hallway carpet muffling every sound.
Eliot's POV
I didn't dare touch anything.
The living room looked like it belonged in an interior design magazine.
There was a huge Persian rug with complex patterns under my feet, old master paintings on the walls, and at the center of the room, a designer tempered-glass coffee table—so transparent, with such sharp geometric angles, it looked like a raw diamond hacked into shape.
I stood there in the middle of the room, hands politely clasped behind my back, waiting for my precious book.
I felt unbelievably lucky.
All the stress of the past few days seemed to be evaporating.
Life was finally smiling at me.
I lowered my gaze to the floor to admire the silk rug's patterns, worried I might have left mud marks.
Damn, I sighed internally.
My stupid right shoelace was untied. If I stepped on it and tripped into one of these million-dollar art pieces, I'd be in debt for twelve generations.
Adrien Valmont's POV
I was right behind him.
Less than a meter away.
He had his back to me, perfectly still, staring idiotically into nothing, arms hanging loose.
A pathetic target.
A joyless execution—but an absolutely necessary one.
I slowly raised the heavy bronze statuette above my head. My muscles tightened, storing every ounce of kinetic force I could generate. I was going to bring the goddess of Justice down directly onto the back of his skull.
One blow would be enough to shatter his cranium and kill him instantly, before his idiot brain even understood what was happening.
I took a deep breath.
I savored my victory.
Farewell, miserable anomaly, I thought.
I brought the statue down with the full power of my fury, slicing the air in a perfect, lethal arc.
At the exact millisecond Valmont launched his coup de grâce, propelled by the force of his own momentum, Eliot suddenly folded in half.
In one sharp, quick, and utterly unpredictable movement, the student dove toward the floor to grab the ends of his untied shoelace.
The heavy bronze cut through the air...
and struck nothing but empty space where, a quarter-second earlier, Eliot's head had been.
Physics is an unforgiving mistress.
Dragged forward by the colossal weight of the weapon and the inertia of his own massive swing, Adrien Valmont's center of gravity pitched violently ahead.
He tried to catch himself, tried to stop his momentum, but his left foot—wearing a luxurious Italian loafer with a slick sole—slid brutally on the slippery silk of the Persian rug.
Valmont lost his balance completely.
Carried by his own dead weight, he dove headfirst toward the floor. His eyes widened in terror, understanding in a fraction of a second the inevitability of his mistake.
The geometric edge of the designer coffee table rose up before him.
Valmont's forehead slammed full-force into the table's sharpest, most jutting corner of tempered glass.
But the disaster didn't stop there.
The heavy bronze statuette he still clutched convulsively in his gloved hand continued its implacable trajectory over him. Driven by rebound and gravitational momentum alone, the goddess of Justice came crashing down with monstrous violence directly onto the back of his own skull.
CRACK.
The double sound—the impact against glass followed by bone giving way beneath bronze—was dry, sickening, and final.
Professor Valmont, the supreme predator, the absolute master of the perfect crime, collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut, skull shattered by his own weapon—trapped by his own force and defeated by a worn-out shoelace.
Eliot's POV
"And there. Double knot. No risk now," I muttered to myself, tugging firmly on the loops.
I straightened up, brushing off my knees.
The silence in the living room had suddenly become deafening. I had heard a dull crash—a horrible smashing sound—a second earlier, but I'd assumed the professor had dropped a stack of old dictionaries in his office.
I turned around with my best model-student smile, ready to receive the academic Holy Grail.
"Professor Valmont, did you find the—"
My smile froze.
My brain did an emergency reboot.
Adrien Valmont—the terror of lecture halls, the most elegant and intimidating man in the law faculty—lay face-down on his magnificent silk Persian rug. His skull was jammed against the sharp corner of the tempered-glass coffee table.
And as if the scene wasn't surreal enough, a huge bronze statue of the goddess of Justice was lodged in the back of his head, dark blood already spreading over the rug's intricate patterns.
I blinked.
Once.
Twice.
"...Seriously?" I said into the void, voice shaking.
I hadn't seen anything. Felt anything. I'd just retied my shoelace.
Had he been bringing me the statue to show off his collection and simply tripped by himself like a grown man?
Panic hit me like a tidal wave. My heart started hammering against my ribs like a jackhammer. I jumped backward, yanked out my cracked phone screen, and dialed the police with fingers shaking so hard I hit the wrong emergency number first.
Twenty minutes later, the luxurious bourgeois apartment was flooded with police lights and forensics personnel.
I was sitting on a white velvet sofa (praying I wouldn't sweat on it), wrapped in a thermal blanket.
That's when the double doors opened and a familiar silhouette walked in, looking profoundly exhausted.
Inspector Vasseur.
He wore his eternal wrinkled trench coat and held a cardboard cup of coffee. His gaze swept over the crime scene—the body, the glass, the statue—before landing on me.
His cup stopped halfway to his mouth. A deep line cut across his forehead.
"You again?!" he exclaimed, voice heavy with cosmic weariness. "Don't tell me you came to have tea with your professor and he decided to stone himself with a five-kilo antique?"
"I just came to get a book for my thesis, Inspector..." I stammered miserably. "I retied my shoelace, and when I stood up... bam."
Vasseur rubbed his temples. He was about to speak—probably to announce my immediate arrest—when a forensics officer came sprinting out of the hallway.
"Chief! You need to see this. Behind the big bookshelf in the office... there's a secret room."
Vasseur shot me a suspicious look, signaled for me not to move a millimeter, and followed the officer.
He came back ten minutes later.
He no longer had his coffee cup.
He was pale as a sheet.
The search of the "secret room" had revealed the unthinkable.
The monster's lair.
Valmont's hidden office was a meticulously organized museum of horrors. Police found rare poisons, sterile suits—and above all, dozens of files proudly documenting his unsolved murders. The famous "perfect suicides" of the last ten years.
The respected criminal law professor was the worst serial killer the capital had seen in decades.
And at the center of the office, displayed in plain view under a banker's lamp, sat a thick file labeled:
Eliot
Vasseur walked toward me slowly. He stared at me for a long moment, as if I were a scientific anomaly.
An alien.
In the investigators' minds, the scene was crystal clear: I had discovered my professor's secret.
I had come to confront him with suicidal courage.
Valmont had tried to execute me from behind, but thanks to unbelievable reflexes (or incredible martial arts mastery), I had dodged his fatal blow at the last millisecond, causing his deadly fall.
In the span of one hour, I had gone from murder suspect number one... to involuntary national hero who exposed a terrifying monster simply by coming to borrow a study book.
"You..." Vasseur began, voice strangled. "You have no idea what you just rid us of, do you?"
"My criminal law professor?" I ventured, terrified they were about to cancel my thesis.
Vasseur stared at me, speechless.
He shook his head, utterly lost, looking like a man who had just understood he would never understand anything about the universe. He didn't know whether to handcuff me, commit me to a psychiatric institution, or award me the Legion of Honor.
He settled for sighing and swallowing an aspirin dry.
"Go home, Eliot. And for God's sake... take the bus. Don't touch anything on the way out. Don't breathe too hard."
I nodded vigorously, tightened my backpack straps, and fled the apartment. Outside, the rain had stopped.
I felt incredibly relieved.
It was sad about Professor Valmont, of course, but on the other hand...
I wasn't going to have that horribly complicated thesis topic anymore.
Cause of death: Severe cranial trauma (self-inflicted skull crushing via gravitational momentum and bronze rebound).
Verdict: Accidental death of a disturbed serial killer during a failed attempted homicide.
Red Flag for a Crime Genius: Overthinking can cause a fatal headache—especially when that head meets the geometric corner of a glass table at high speed. Next time, choose round furniture.
End of Chapter 7.