“Then why won’t you give up?” he finally exploded one night, caught in a downpour outside her windmill door. He was soaked, shivering, and he’d lost his expensive umbrella somewhere. He looked less like a romantic killer and more like a drowned accountant.
“That’s my thing,” she replied. “Romance isn’t blindness, Julian. It’s hyper-awareness. I see the crack in your teacup, the way you breathe only through your left nostril when you lie, and the fact that you have a concealed tape recorder in your jacket pocket. Let me guess – you’re here to prove my love is a delusion?”
She pointed at the sky. Rain lashed her face, and she didn’t flinch. “You showed up on a Tuesday with a script and a lie. But right now? You’re just Julian. No act. No angle. Just wet socks and a bruised ego.”
His method was simple: find the fantasy, kill it.
Luna just stared at him. Then she laughed. It was a sound like wind chimes falling down stairs.
The campaign lasted two weeks. Julian deconstructed fate, chance, soulmates, and even the chemical reaction of oxytocin. Luna listened, munched on her sourdough, and agreed with every logical point. “You’re absolutely right,” she’d say, wiping a crumb from her lip. “Love is statistically improbable and biologically irrational.”
He never sent the final report. The consortium’s desperate parents got a single, hand-delivered black dahlia and a note that said: Case closed. The killer is dead. Long live the fool.
He arrived on a Tuesday, the sky the color of dishwater. He’d rented the cottage next to her windmill, posing as a visiting ornithologist. His opening gambit was flawless: accidental meeting by the fence, a dropped book of Sylvia Plath poems (she’d love the tortured aesthetic), a self-deprecating joke about his “soulless spreadsheet of a life.”
And somewhere in a converted windmill, a former realist learned that the only thing harder than killing a romance was surviving one.
“I can’t stay,” he whispered. “I’m the Romantic Killer.”
For the first time in his career, Julian had nothing to say.
He introduced a charming, handsome “old friend” (a professional actor) to flirt with her. Luna looked the actor up and down, yawned, and asked if he knew the difference between a raven and a crow. The actor did not. She turned back to Julian and whispered, “Your friend’s a dummy. You, however, are a very smart dummy.”
So when a consortium of desperate parents pooled their considerable wealth to hire him for the case of Luna Vesper, Julian almost laughed. The brief was thick with clichés. Luna, 22. Lives in a converted windmill. Believes she’s waiting for her “fated mate” – a man who will arrive on the back of a storm, carrying a single black dahlia. Has rejected twelve “perfectly logical” suitors.
The world knew him as the Romantic Killer . Not because he left a trail of broken hearts, but because he left a trail of perfectly intact, utterly bored hearts. Julian Cole was a professional “realist” for hire. A wealthy heiress swooning over a fortune-hunting poet? Julian would arrive, dismantle the illusion with surgical precision, and present the smoldering wreckage as a receipt. He was expensive, emotionless, and never failed.