Beep. Beep. Beep.
If Hell has a soundtrack, it is undoubtedly the iPhone marimba ringtone set for seven in the morning on a Monday.
Eliot let out a pitiful groan and buried his face in his pillow.
He tried to raise his arm to turn off the alarm, but his entire body protested with the virulence of a railway workers' union on full strike.
A dull, deep, and throbbing pain radiated from his lower back to the base of his neck. His shoulders felt like they had been cast in lead during the night, and his pecs pulled with every breath. Grimacing, he finally managed to slide his finger across his phone screen to silence the ringing.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the yellowed ceiling of his tiny studio apartment.
"Damn Swedish design..." he croaked with the raspy voice of a lifelong smoker.
To Eliot, the culprit was obvious: it was the metal frame of his old, second-hand Ikea sofa bed bought on Leboncoin. The slats must have given way during the night, permanently ruining his spine.
He didn't suspect for a single second that his mattress had nothing to do with it. He was completely unaware that at three in the morning, while his conscious mind was fast asleep, his eyes had opened in the dark. "He" had taken control, silent and implacable, to bang out two hundred military push-ups and a hundred pull-ups hanging from the bathroom doorframe.
The "machine" had decided it was time to prepare for survival, and it hadn't asked the primary tenant for his opinion.
An hour later, Eliot dragged his misery through the crowded halls of the law faculty.
The atmosphere was electric. The final year of the Master's program felt like an academic death row. The bar exam—the mandatory golden ticket to becoming a lawyer—was fast approaching, and the air smelled of cold sweat, cheap coffee, and burnout.
Eliot painfully settled into one of the wooden chairs in the lecture hall, next to Thomas, who was frantically scrolling on TikTok instead of reviewing his flashcards.
Eliot was wearing his favorite shirt, a light blue size Small, perfectly tailored for his usual build of an anxious weakling. But as he leaned forward to grab his blood-red Code from the bottom of his backpack, a strange phenomenon occurred.
The cotton fabric pulled taut. Violently.
Eliot froze. He felt the seams around his shoulder blades groan under an unprecedented pressure. Worse still, as he bent his arm to place the heavy red tome on the table, the sleeves of his shirt instantly turned into tourniquets, literally strangling his biceps.
He gasped, unable to raise his arms higher than his own shoulders without risking a catastrophic tear in the garment.
"Well now," Thomas murmured, putting down his phone with a raised eyebrow. "Did you put your shirt in the dryer on high heat or what?"
"No..." Eliot replied, discreetly trying to tug at his collar, which was suddenly much too tight. "It's the same shirt as last week."
Thomas leaned in a bit closer, observing him with a mocking curiosity. He noticed the way the fabric molded to his friend's suddenly broader shoulders, and the newfound firmness of his arms beneath the stretched cotton.
"Dude, what are you hiding in there?" Thomas snickered with a quiet, incredulous laugh. "Have you been secretly lifting at Basic-Fit instead of studying? What is up with that back?"
Eliot frowned. Seized by doubt, he squeezed his own left arm with his right hand. His eyes widened slightly. The mass under the fabric was nothing like his usual flab. It was dense. Hard.
But Eliot's brain, programmed for the absolute denial of any anomaly, did what it did best: it rationalized the situation with the worst possible explanation.
He pushed his Penal Code away, adjusted his imaginary glasses, and looked at Thomas with the tragic stoicism of a condemned man.
"Probably the effect of my sixty-five-cent canned ravioli," he stated in a deadpan, monotone voice. "I knew it."
"What are you talking about?"
"I knew they were cut with horse meat stuffed with bovine growth hormones. There is no other logical explanation. Faced with such chemical toxicity, my body is swelling. I'm developing a muscular edema. This is probably phase 1 before cardiac arrest."
Thomas burst out laughing, drawing a glaring look from the professor who had just entered the lecture hall.
"You're completely nuts," Thomas whispered, opening his notebook. "But if your discount ravioli have that effect, give me the brand. I could save money on my gym membership."
Eliot sighed, tugged one last time at his now-too-tight sleeve, and tried to focus on the lecture, ignoring the increasingly powerful predator sleeping soundly beneath his own pumped-up muscles.
At two in the afternoon, the university law library resembled a sanctuary where silence was king and anxiety floated in the air like a toxic mist. Hundreds of final-year students were crammed inside, hunched over their study sheets with the despair of castaways clinging to lifebuoys.
Eliot, Sarah, and Thomas had managed to commandeer a large oak table near the massive bay windows.
While Thomas frantically highlighted every other page of his administrative law notes, Sarah had gotten up to look for a reference. Eliot watched her out of the corner of his eye. She was standing in front of the large shelf of jurisprudence texts. More precisely, she was staring at the very top shelf, where the majestic Dalloz annotated Civil Code sat enthroned. A bright, blood-red brick weighing at least three kilos, wedged between two other equally massive volumes.
Sarah stood on her tiptoes. She stretched her arm as high as she could, her fingers barely brushing the spine of the book. She let out a small sigh of frustration, tried a little jump on the spot, but the heavy manual stubbornly refused to budge.
Normally, the cowardly Eliot would have stayed seated, petrified by the idea of dropping the book on someone's skull, or would have gone looking for an impossible-to-find step stool.
But this time, his body reacted before his brain.
He stood up from his chair. Without even realizing it, he didn't slouch. His spine, "straightened out" by his nocturnal stowaway's intensive training sessions, unfurled perfectly. His shoulders rolled back, expanding his chest in his suddenly very fitted shirt.
He approached Sarah from behind. With a fluid and surprisingly silent movement, he positioned himself right behind her. He reached his arm over her right shoulder, almost brushing her hair. His hand clamped down on the heavy red brick.
Where he normally would have needed both of his trembling arms, his fingers closed around the spine with an iron grip.
He pulled the three-kilo manual out with one hand, effortlessly, and gently placed it on the table next to her.
"Here," he murmured simply.
Sarah jumped slightly and turned around.
The distance between them was almost non-existent. She had to tilt her chin up slightly to meet his eyes. For a second, the silence of the library seemed to thicken. The young woman's invisible radar activated instantly.
She blinked, flustered. The fragile weakling she had always wanted to overprotect had just evaporated. In his place stood this tall, dark-haired guy standing incredibly straight, whose build suddenly seemed to take up far too much space, and who had just lifted a paper cinderblock with one hand without even blinking.
A faint pink rose to Sarah's cheeks. She looked down at Eliot's blue shirt, the stretched fabric leaving no doubt as to the evolution of his anatomy, then raised a hesitant hand.
Her fingers gently brushed Eliot's forearm. Through the cotton, she felt the unexpected firmness of the muscle.
"Thank you..." she murmured with a small, charming, and irresistibly genuine smile. "Say, your shoulders have gotten broader, haven't they?"
Eliot's heart skipped a beat. For the first time in a very long time, his brain didn't scream about a fulminant sarcoma or a bone tumor.
The warmth of Sarah's fingers on his arm completely short-circuited his hypochondria. He locked his gaze with hers. The air crackled with a new, electric, almost dizzying tension.
He was flattered. He felt good. He parted his lips, his brain spinning at top speed to formulate a surprisingly charming response, something subtle about how carrying the weight of his studies was finally building character...
"SARAH!"
The yell, though whispered, echoed like a cannon shot down the silent aisle.
A student from their class, hair a mess, eyes frantic, and arms full of folders, had just barged in behind them, almost skidding on the linoleum.
"Sarah!" she whispered with the intensity of a woman announcing the end of the world. "Were you able to print the Litigation notes? The second-floor printer just died and the library closes in two hours! It's panic downstairs!"
The spell shattered with all the delicacy of a windshield hitting a pigeon at eighty miles an hour.
Sarah took a step back, suddenly blushing to her hairline, and looked down, crossing her arms over her chest.
"Uh... yes, yes, Justine, I have everything on my flash drive, I'll come help you..." she stammered, avoiding Eliot's gaze.
Eliot, meanwhile, stood rooted to the spot. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second and let out a long, discreet sigh, heavy with monumental frustration. The perfect moment had just been murdered by a defective printer.
But as he walked back to sit in front of his Code, his heart pounding, he stole a quick glance at Sarah. She was talking to Justine, but she briefly turned her head to sneak a look at him. She gave him a tiny, shy smile before diving back into her notes.
The seed was definitely planted. The "fake" Eliot might have botched his exit, but for the first time, he was no longer just the good buddy.
Far, far away from student anxieties and defective printers, on the top floor of a hyper-secure private mansion in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, the mood was far from romantic.
In an office where the furniture probably cost the annual budget of the law faculty, a man was pacing.
Prince Yaz of Oslavia was the very embodiment of power and elegance. A three-piece suit tailored in Milan, sapphire cufflinks, and a face with aristocratic features framed by a short, neat beard.
To the general public and the tabloids, Yaz was a filthy-rich heir known for his noble philanthropic works.
To the intelligence agencies that had never managed to nail him, he was the ruthless leader of one of the largest human trafficking networks in Europe. An untouchable king of the shadows.
Except that for the past few months, the king of the shadows had been losing all his key pieces on the chessboard.
Yaz stopped in front of the massive flat screen covering one of the walls of his office. He held a glass of vintage cognac, but his hand trembled slightly with suppressed rage.
His flourishing empire was collapsing.
First, Senator Delacroix, his political cover in France, had taken a fatal "slip."
Then Stella, the international pop star whose world tours served as the perfect logistical cover for the trafficking, had perished in a pyrotechnic explosion of unheard-of violence.
Yaz clicked a silver remote. On the giant screen, the heavily-priced CCTV footage from Stella's infamous nightclub played on a loop.
The explosion. The flames. The chaos.
The Prince paused the video, zoomed in on the background of the image, and replayed it in slow motion. He stared at the silhouette of the young man with glasses, the only survivor in the immediate vicinity of the epicenter.
For the fiftieth time that day, Yaz observed Eliot Morel.
On the video, a fraction of a second before the fireball devastated the stage, Eliot could clearly be seen tripping miserably over a microphone cable, falling backward while pathetically flailing his arms, and crashing heavily behind an armored transport case.
The very next instant, the explosion leveled everything, passing barely an inch above the head of the young man miraculously protected by his fall.
Any police inspector would have seen the monumental, dumb luck of a clumsy weakling.
But Prince Yaz, blinded by his own paranoia and criminal mastermind ego, refused to believe in bad luck. You didn't destroy an international empire through "clumsiness."
"Admirable..." Yaz murmured, staring at Eliot's frozen face on the screen. "Simply admirable."
He took a sip of cognac, his eyes gleaming with respect tinged with hatred.
To the Prince, the truth was glaringly obvious: the pitiful posture, the shapeless wool cardigan, the crooked glasses... It was all a genius disguise. The perfect psychological cover.
This wasn't a panicked law student. This was "The Ghost."
"The ancestral drunken master technique," the Prince whispered, analyzing Eliot's fall as if it were a master-level karate kata. "He calculates the trajectory of the explosion, feigns tripping on that cable with millisecond-perfect timing to take cover from the shockwave, all while maintaining the look of a harmless idiot. And he used the exact same technique on the Senator..."
Yaz set his glass down on the marble desk with a sharp click. He was overestimating Eliot by 2000%, absolutely convinced he was dealing with a legendary secret agent, an elite assassin sent by a government or a rival secret organization to destroy him.
"You hide behind a mask to cover your tracks, Monsieur Morel. But you won't get me like the others."
The Prince smiled, the marble smile of a predator that has finally spotted blood in the water. He was going to flush out this shadow genius, draw him into the light, and offer him a death worthy of his rank.
He would have to set a trap befitting the supreme intelligence of this formidable adversary.
Since this mysterious Eliot was hiding in the guise of a brilliant law student, Prince Yaz was going to strike him exactly on that turf. You don't catch a shark with a plastic fishing rod; you lure it with bait worthy of its majesty.
Yaz activated his office intercom.
"Get me the board of my foundation," he ordered in an icy voice. "We are organizing a charity gala this weekend. The 'Dinner of Excellence for the Future Stars of the Bar.' Rent a private room at the Plaza Athénée. And prepare a very special invitation."
The Prince smiled at his reflection in the bay window. The Ghost was going to have to step out of the shadows to come sit at his table.
The next morning, across Paris, the atmosphere was distinctly less Machiavellian at the law university's Master's secretariat.
Eliot stood before the formica reception desk, his stomach tied in knots with anxiety. When the secretary had called him over the PA system, he had immediately reviewed all his recent academic crimes: A book returned late to the library? Non-regulation margins on his last essay?
But the usually grumpy secretary handed him the object with almost religious respect.
It was a thick, immaculate cream-white envelope, sealed with purple wax and calligraphed in gold leaf. In the center, in elegant cursive letters, it read: For the exclusive attention of Mr. Eliot Morel.
Eliot opened it with slightly sweaty hands. The heavy, textured invitation card invited him, as a prodigy student, to the prestigious Yaz of Oslavia Foundation Dinner at the Plaza Athénée, in the presence of the biggest international law firms. The words "Invitation + 2 guests" gleamed at the bottom of the page.
Eliot's brain, programmed to seek comforting rationality in a chaotic world, immediately sorted it out.
"My 16/20," he whispered, eyes wide with emotion.
"Excuse me?" the secretary asked.
"My 16/20 in International Maritime Law from last week!" Eliot exclaimed, his voice trembling with touching naïveté. "I knew the Professor had sent it to the headhunters! It's the alumni network! I've been scouted!"
Overjoyed, and convinced that his professional future had just cleared up in an instant, he practically ran to the cafeteria to find Thomas and Sarah.
When he slapped the golden envelope down on their sticky plastic table, the reaction was immediate. Thomas howled with joy at the thought of stuffing his face with free caviar hors d'oeuvres, while Sarah, sincerely impressed and touched that he had thought to invite her as a "+1", accepted with a radiant smile.
The trap had just snapped shut with the gentleness of a kiss.
Friday evening, just hours before the gala, the contrast between the two adversaries in this deadly chess match bordered on the absurd.
In the private suites of the Plaza Athénée...
The room was bathed in elegant gloom, lulled by a cello melody. Prince Yaz of Oslavia stood ramrod straight, buttoning his bespoke silk tuxedo. Before him, three behemoths with scar-crossed faces—former Eastern European special forces operatives—listened to their instructions in dead silence.
On the marble table, Yaz lined up three small crystal vials containing a perfectly transparent liquid.
"Odorless, colorless, and lethal," the Prince explained in a low, focused voice. "Do not underestimate our guest. He is the most dangerous man you will cross paths with in your miserable existence. Observe his every micro-movement. If he drops his fork, it is a diversion. If he sneezes, shoot him down. Failure is not an option tonight. The Ghost must die."
At that exact same moment, in a rental shop in the 13th arrondissement...
The crackling neon light of the "Suits & Magic" store bathed the fitting room in a pallid glow.
Eliot was sweating bullets. He stood in front of the scratched mirror, face tomato-red, currently strangling himself with a clip-on bow tie that stubbornly refused to stay straight.
The jacket of his budget rental tuxedo pulled furiously at his shoulders, but that wasn't what was terrifying the young student.
"Thomas..." Eliot gasped, eyes round with terror, looking at his friend through the partially open curtain. "What if I confuse the fish fork with the appetizer fork? They'll notice, for sure. They'll notify the Bar Council and blacklist me from the Paris Bar for life!"
"Breathe, Eliot. You'll handle it," Thomas sighed, eating a bag of chips on a stool.
"Handle it?!" Eliot yelped, wiping his forehead with the rough sleeve of his tuxedo, bordering on hyperventilation. "Dude, we're going to a luxury palace! What if I spill champagne on an authentic 18th-century rug? I'll have to sell a kidney on the dark web to pay the dry cleaning bill! Thomas, I'm going to ruin my life tonight, I can feel it!"
The greatest psychological duel of the year was about to begin. One was preparing for war; the other was praying he wouldn't spill his glass of champagne.
The dinner promised to be memorable.
End of Chapter 14.