Murder, when practiced by a superior mind, is neither a crime nor an impulse. It is a matter of hygiene. It is the delicate art of plucking a weed from a French garden to preserve its absolute symmetry.
I watched Chloé writhe on the silk rug of her luxurious apartment in Paris's 16th arrondissement. Her fingers, nails perfectly manicured, clawed at her own throat, desperately searching for air her lungs now refused to take in. Her face—usually so smooth, so artificially flawless for her millions of followers—was turning a fascinating shade of violet.
I felt neither pity nor vulgar excitement.
Only the quiet satisfaction of a job well done.
"Don't struggle, my dear," I murmured in a calm voice, almost paternal. "The aconitine is already in your bloodstream. Your heart muscle will stop beating in thirty seconds. The forensic pathologists will conclude it was a fulminant heart attack caused by cocaine abuse—a substance I took the precaution of slipping into your right nostril while you were convulsing."
She tried to lock her gaze onto mine, but death was already clouding her pupils.
I stood over her, majestic, dominating her from my full height. For the occasion, I wore my Tom Ford three-piece suit in midnight-blue tropical wool. But because I am a man who respects materials and detests unexpected splashes, I had pulled a full transparent polyethylene coverall over it—the kind used in BSL-4 laboratories. It gave me the look of a clinical specter, a modern god descended from Olympus vacuum-sealed.
Criminal justice—the version I teach every day to those mediocre minds at the university—is a crude farce. A net with such wide mesh that the worst predators swim straight through.
Chloé, for instance, had driven three of her young assistants to suicide to cover up her embezzlement of charitable funds. The law would never have touched her. The law is blind.
I see everything.
I am the scalpel that cuts out the tumor.
I am the ultimate judge.
Her body gave one final jerk, then went still forever.
I checked the time on my Rolex through the plastic at my sleeve. 11:14 p.m.
The timing was perfect.
An hour later, I was back in my penthouse.
The vast bay window in my living room offered me the whole city like a glittering game board. I had removed and incinerated my coverall in the ultra-high-temperature furnace in my cellar. I was now in shirtsleeves, my waistcoat fitted to perfection.
Mozart's Requiem in D minor drifted through the air, played through an invisible audio system that cost the price of a suburban apartment. Classical music has that gift of arranging the world's chaos into mathematical harmonies.
With a steady hand, I poured myself a glass of Château Margaux 2015. The ruby liquid slid into Baccarat crystal. I took a sip, letting the complex tannins coat my palate, while methodically cleaning—with a microfiber cloth—the fine insulin syringe I had used to inject the poison between my victim's toes.
I inhaled deeply.
My world was a masterpiece of control and purity.
I was its absolute master, the omniscient puppeteer.
Nothing escaped my intellect. Nothing disturbed my perfect score.
Nothing…
…except one detail.
One infinitesimal, irritating, and terrifying anomaly.
I set my now-empty glass of Margaux on a marble coaster. I crossed the immense living room to my workspace, dominated by a massive Empire-era mahogany desk.
At the center of the full-grain leather blotter, lit by the warm glow of a banker's lamp, lay a thick cardboard file. It bore no label, no name. That was unnecessary. I knew perfectly well what it contained, because it was the one subject that had obsessed my thoughts for weeks.
The Eliot File.
I opened it with the care of a watchmaker handling a complex mechanism. Inside, dozens of newspaper clippings were spread out, along with autopsy reports I had discreetly hacked from central precinct servers, and photographs taken from a distance.
I lined up the case sheets of his victims on the polished wood of my desk.
The kill board of this twenty-two-year-old student was… downright terrifying.
A symphony of destruction.
First target: Jean-Pierre, his father-in-law. The fall down the stairs. The idiots in forensics saw a tragic loss of balance, an afflictively banal domestic accident. I, with a professional eye, saw absolute mastery of kinetics. To send a man of that size into the void without leaving him time to attempt the slightest defensive movement, without a single trace of struggle on his clothes, then erase his own prints and play the traumatized son-in-law when the paramedics arrived… brilliant. Masterwork.
Second target: Dolores, the neighbor. Anaphylactic shock. Weaponizing the victim's own immune system with a simple peanut cake. It was cruel, refined poetry. A biological execution impossible to trace, disguised as neighborhood clumsiness.
Third target: Killian, the school brute. Struck by lightning on a rooftop. It was while reading this report that I understood I was dealing with a true master of the butterfly effect. Calculating atmospheric pressure, estimating the conductivity coefficient of a rusted iron bar, and luring his target to the highest point of a derelict building at the precise moment a cumulonimbus discharged… The man was no longer a simple murderer. He was a god of macabre meteorology.
Fourth target: Pierre, the guru. Neck broken clean during a spiritual retreat. The murder weapon? The hem of his own robe, skillfully pinned beneath a shoe. Using gravity and the sartorial narcissism of his prey to execute him in front of two hundred witnesses without a single person crying murder.
A short laugh escaped me, dry and sharp in the vast empty apartment.
It was absolute perfection.
Zero physical evidence.
Zero apparent motive.
Zero mistakes.
I picked up a photograph of Eliot, taken with a telephoto lens on the university campus. I studied his face. Those purplish dark circles hollowing his eye sockets. That permanently disheveled brown hair, defying all concept of a comb. That hunched posture, almost fearful, shoulders curled inward. And that pair of worn sneakers whose laces seemed systematically—almost methodically—untied.
"What exceptional camouflage," I murmured with sincere admiration, stroking the glossy paper with the tip of my index finger.
Where I hid behind arrogance, wealth, and the charisma of a respected professor, he had chosen the path of absolute invisibility. He had adopted the appearance of a depressed, clumsy, socially inept student to lull both his prey and the authorities.
That untied lace? A meticulously designed theatrical prop, meant to simulate vulnerability and incompetence.
Those deep circles under his eyes? Almost certainly the result of sleepless nights spent calculating the quantum probabilities and environmental variables of his next "accidents."
He played the harmless idiot with a conviction worthy of the greatest stage actors.
It was high art.
The art of killing while passing for the most pathetic person in the room.
A sociopathic genius hid behind that exhausted stare, and I was the only man in the world to see through the disguise.
I pushed the file across the leather blotter and closed my eyes, rubbing the bridge of my nose. I thought back to our very first true "encounter."
It was at the start of the year, during my inaugural lecture before the Master's students in Criminal Law. I was on the platform, towering over a hundred docile, admiring, desperately ordinary faces. I hovered above them, breathing my vision of justice into the room with the ease of a conductor leading a symphony.
I had reached the core of my speech. I was addressing the thorny question of the mental element of the offense. Criminal intent. The cold, deliberate will to take a life. I was pacing my silences, weighing each syllable to inject dramatic tension into the amphitheater.
At that precise instant—at the exact microsecond I pronounced the word murder—he struck.
A cough.
Loud. Gravelly. Scraping.
It rang through the hall's perfect acoustics, shattering the religious silence of my audience and slicing my rhetorical effect to pieces.
Any mediocre professor would have seen a simple throat irritation from a sickly student, or a slightly embarrassed clearing of the throat.
But I am not just any professor.
And I knew—with the lightning certainty of superior beings—that it was not chance.
It was a direct provocation. A glove thrown in my face.
I had stopped mid-sentence, let the silence drop heavily again, and turned my head toward the back of the room.
Toward him.
I remember that moment perfectly. My predatory gaze met his. I expected a blushing student, stammering an apology, lowering his eyes before my crushing authority.
Instead, I met a wall.
His deeply shadowed eyes held mine without blinking. There was no embarrassment in him. Only a flat, empty stare of bottomless fatigue.
The fatigue of those who have looked into the abyss too often, and grown tired of seeing corpses there.
My blood ran hot in an instant. The hidden message behind that cough struck me with the force of an uppercut.
It was a challenge issued by one predator to another. A territorial mark, in broad daylight. By coughing at the exact moment I spoke of murderous intent, he was saying to me—with insane audacity:
I know who you are, Valmont. I understand the mental element. I practice it. And I am far better than you.
Sitting now in the silence of my office, the memory of that exchange made me shiver.
For the very first time in my existence as an untouchable executioner, I had to admit the unthinkable.
That day, in that packed amphitheater, facing that badly dressed student with untied laces, I had felt a genuine sting of intimidation. A warning thrill. I had recognized one of my own kind—but gifted with a mastery of chaos that escaped me entirely.
He was not playing the same game as I was.
I used poisons and sterile suits.
He used lightning, allergies, and gravity.
I opened my eyes again, staring at Eliot's photo under the banker's lamp. My pride was wounded, but my mind was ablaze.
I was no longer the only wolf in the flock.
I pushed Eliot's photograph aside and pulled from the file a postmortem photo lifted from Czech police reports: the broken body of Sofie Arkia, alias "Victoria," lying on the cold paving stones of the Palais de Bohême's rear courtyard.
Prague.
That was supposed to be my European masterpiece.
I had hunted that Black Widow for months. Sofie was a vulgar creature, driven by greed rather than art, but she had one merit: she remained elusive to police forces across the continent.
She drove wealthy heirs to suicide to claim their life insurance. An insult to true justice.
So I had decided to attend the European law seminar to combine business with pleasure: study her, then eliminate her with the cruel poetry she deserved.
I remember perfectly our first meeting in the hotel lobby. I was observing her, weighing her weaknesses, when Eliot suddenly entered my field of vision.
At the time, when our eyes met—his with the skittish look of a frightened poodle—I took it for a simple coincidence.
What naivety.
Geniuses do not believe in chance.
On the fateful night, I had taken position. I rented a maid's room in the building facing the Palais de Bohême, giving me a perfect firing and observation angle on suite 604—Sofie's suite. I was posted in darkness, eye pressed to the thermal scope of my precision rifle, ready to put a poisoned ice bullet through that schemer's skull (a bullet that would melt and leave no ballistic trace, naturally).
But the spectacle that unfolded before my eyes quite literally stole my breath.
I saw Eliot enter the suite. I saw Sofie hand him the champagne flute saturated with Rohypnol. I smiled, expecting that young upstart who had challenged me in my amphitheater to die at the hands of a second-rate killer. I watched his body collapse heavily onto the carpet, struck down by chemistry.
"Checkmate, my boy," I had murmured in the darkness of my hide.
And then…
…the black miracle occurred.
While Sofie turned her back on him on the balcony to smoke her cigarette, Eliot's silhouette rose.
Through the magnifying lens of my scope, I saw his face. My predator's heart skipped a beat. It was no longer the anxious student. It was a death mask. An entity of such absolute coldness that it radiated through glass. His gait—mechanically fluid—defied every law of human biology.
I held my breath as I watched him advance toward her.
With a single movement—surgical, without an ounce of wasted momentum—he pushed her into the void.
I did not even need to pull the trigger.
He had just taken down my target for me.
Fascinated, frozen, I watched him methodically erase his traces. Wiping the champagne glass. Repositioning the cushions… Everything was executed with chilling mastery, the work of a maniac of total control.
Seated at my mahogany desk now, the adrenaline of that memory made my hand tremble ever so slightly.
He had not been trapped.
He had let her drug him.
What audacity. What pure madness.
He had deliberately ingested a lethal dose of sedatives—not out of naivety, but to use that chemical drug as a catalyst. He used it to extinguish his parasitic consciousness and awaken his true potential, that pure and absolute darkness slumbering within him.
By taking down Sofie Arkia that night, he did not merely survive.
He taunted me.
He had spotted my game from the hotel lobby, identified my prey, and stolen her from under my nose.
It was a monumental demonstration of force. An unmistakable declaration of war. Through that fall from the Czech balcony, Eliot had sent me the most terrifying message of all:
This is my hunting ground, Valmont. And I take what is yours.
I closed the Eliot file with calculated slowness. The dry sound of cardboard striking the leather blotter echoed in the silence of my apartment like the fall of a guillotine blade.
I lowered my eyes.
My hands—usually of absolute steadiness—were trembling.
It was only the slightest vibration at my fingertips, imperceptible to ordinary mortals, but I saw it.
Was it fear, in the face of this monster of indirect destruction?
No.
It was excitement in its purest form. The vertiginous, unprecedented intoxication of finally—after all these years of solitary perfection—finding an adversary worthy of me.
And yet, nature's implacable logic had to prevail. Paris may be a sprawling city, but its streets are far too narrow to house two gods of death.
Two predators of our caliber, operating on the same hunting ground, could not coexist indefinitely without eventually devouring one another.
If Eliot thought he could steal my prey and mark his territory beneath my nose with his meteorological and chemical sleights of hand, he was gravely mistaken.
It was time to end this long-distance game of deception.
I had to face him.
A meeting face-to-face, as equals. A summit between two monsters, to establish the rules of our coexistence… or annihilate him outright if he refused to bend the knee before his elder.
I pulled a sheet of luxurious university letterhead toward me and uncapped my solid-gold Montblanc fountain pen. I would write him a formal summons. A perfect academic pretext to draw him to my office after class. An invitation the sociopath hidden beneath his miserable-student act would know how to decode—and one he could not refuse.
Once the letter was signed with an aristocratic flourish, I rose and returned to the vast bay window. My spectral reflection—still dressed in my elegant waistcoat—overlapped the glittering lights of the sleeping capital.
I smiled.
A cold, carnivorous smile that stretched my features in the Parisian night.
"Get ready, Eliot," I murmured into the void, my voice trembling with ferocious anticipation. "The real chess game is only just beginning. And I always play White."
Meanwhile, a few kilometers away, in a poorly insulated bedsit in the suburbs, the fearsome "evil genius" was curled up on his sticky linoleum floor, sobbing, frantically whacking a smoke detector with a broom handle because he had just burned his bargain-brand elbow pasta to the bottom of his only saucepan.
End of Chapter 6.