Archive of Our Own ^beta

I watch his every movement from across the bar. He smiles at the pretty girl sitting next to him. She laughs, and he laughs, and i want nothing more than to watch her die he says something to her that I can’t hear from where I’m sitting. It doesn’t matter; I already know he’s asking if he can buy her a drink. I watch her say yes. I watch him order her a drink— glitter dances in my veins when I notice it’s the same thing I’m drinking— and I watch her take it from him.

Her lips wrap around the straw, blissfully unaware of the powder dissolving between the ice cubes in her glass.

He glances at me for the first time all night. His eyes burn with an intensity only found in the predacious. I’m convinced that touching the reflection of his irises on the glass countertop would burn my fingertips. A chill runs down my spine and curls up in the furnace of my guts. The eye contact doesn’t last for longer than a few seconds, but it tells me everything I need to know. He looks away again. i feel the absence of his attention like a black hole. The light, although dim, catches off the side of his watchface and tosses itself between us as he takes a sip of his whiskey. I take the straw out of my own untampered-with drink before downing the rest of it in one gulp.

Finally.

I ask for a water and my check. I stare after the bartender and pretend he’s my entire universe at that moment; in my peripheral vision, I watch her. She drinks more. He says something undoubtedly flirtatious, and she laughs at his words again. She moves closer and places her hand on his arm. i imagine the way she’d scream if i were to break each of her fingers. maybe i will. He leans into her closeness. I pretend I don’t notice it. I pretend I don’t notice them. I thank the waiter for the drink and assure him there’s no rush for the receipt. I have fifteen minutes to kill anyway.

She starts swaying in her seat a little bit. She says something, and I can only assume that her speech is starting to slip from her grasp, because he has to lean in close to hear her. He feigns concern. He asks the bartender for a water— I don’t need to be able to hear him or even read his lips to know he’s assuring her that she’s just dehydrated. I smile to myself. He always says that.

She drinks the water, but it doesn’t matter. The damage is done. She’s got maybe ten minutes tops until she’s passed out in the car.

She stands up. Her movements are clunky, awkward, like a puppy trying to learn how to use paws too big for its body. The bartender hands me my change while she excuses herself. She walks in the direction of the bathroom, her hand weakly gripping the back of each and every barstool she passes. I don’t look, but I can feel his eyes on me. They don’t linger, though. And neither do I.

I stand up next. I toss a few bills extra on the countertop for the barkeep before gathering my satchel in one hand and adjusting my hat with the other, and then I head her direction. I do not look at him. He doesn’t look at me again. The lack of acknowledgement lifts the hairs on my forearms. When I walk by him, I feel the tension between us like a film over my skin, tugging me both towards and away from him. It’s almost like foreplay.

In fact, that’s exactly what it is.

I find her with her hand on the bathroom door, trying and failing to pull it open. Her strength is fading fast. I place my hands over hers. “Here, let me,” I say with a clipped, vaguely Spanish accent as I open the door for her.

She looks at me but misses. There’s a faraway-ness in her gaze that I’ve seen more times than I can count. An imitation of my face sparkles in the depths of her eyes. No recognition as to who I am flickers next to it. The drugs are working faster than I thought— not that I’m complaining, nor is that a bad thing.

“Thank you,” she mumbles. Even such a simple sentence appears difficult in her dope-addled state. The syllables stick together and she can’t pull them apart no matter how hard she tries. “Got stuck.”

I follow his lead from earlier, and I feign concern, just like him. “Amoreco,” I coo, honeythick, just how he says it to me, “you don’t look so good.” My body acts as a barricade between her and the interior of the restroom. I reach out and touch her neck. Her skin is flush. Her pulse beats slowly under my fingers. “You okay?”

She slowly shakes her head. Her hair falls in her eyes, and I notice the whispers of confusion slowly fighting through the haze devouring her brain and senses. Something else lingers there, too. Something slimy when it goes down. Something that tastes like formaldehyde and pot liquor when it hits the bottom of the stomach. Fear. i hope she's fucking terrified. “I feel… really sick,” she says. The distance in her eyes shrinks a little, and I follow her gaze to his back. His muscles strain against the white button up he’s wearing and i feel my pelvic floor catch fire as he takes another drink from his glass. His jaw, and only his jaw, turns towards us. Almost as if he heard us talking about him. Like he knew he was being called upon.

good dog.

I turn back to her as if I’m connecting the dots for the first time and not the millionth. “Did that man hurt you?” I ask.

She doesn’t nod, but she doesn’t say no either. She doesn’t respond at all. Her body trembles. Saying it out loud must have unlocked some deeper, more primal fear lying dormant inside of her. Despite this, she still doesn’t know who I am. Tears speckle the corners of her round doe eyes, and she grabs my free hand in both of hers. Up close, it’s easier to read her face. She looks much younger than I originally thought. better quality meat.

“Help me.” No sound leaves her throat as she mouths the phrase to me. She squeezes my hand tighter in hers. She tilts forward, as if she’s about to fall over, and I put my arm under hers to keep her upright. She leans into me, much like he leaned into her ten minutes ago. Again, she mouths her silent plea at me. “Help me.”

Poor girl. If only someone actually could help her.

I nod at her and take my jacket off to drape over her shuddering shoulders. She wraps her arm loosely around my middle. I hold her up by supporting her other arm at the elbow, and I slowly lead her out of the bar through the side entrance. She walks slow and clumsy, feet tying themselves together until she can’t figure out which one comes first and goes last. I slow my pace even more to match hers.

As we walk, I take the extra time afforded to me to study her. She’s a few inches shorter than me, and her body is longer in the trunk than any other part of her. Her head is small. Her hair is pulled back from her oval face with a silken headband tied into a bow at the top of her head. Thin lips find themselves too close to her snub nose, and they’re painted a dark brown colour that doesn’t suit her complexion. Her cognac eyes are almost symmetrical. Her hair is somewhere between straight and wavy, cut short to her shoulders, and the ruddy colour reminds me of the rabbits I used to see in Wolf Trap, running around the backyard before they hid under the porch, hoping the foxes and other predators wouldn't sniff them out. they always did. she has more in common with the bloody vermin rot than she could ever dream of knowing. The longer I look at her, the more I realise that she looks just like her children.

She follows me to the parking lot. The lamps overhead are gaunt and yellowish, with the mist of rain drizzling from overhead distorting the light and shadows even more in the dark. Her car is parked towards the back of the lot, closer to the road than the bar. I count down every second that passes while crossing the asphalt to get to the grey Ford Mustang. By the time we get there, I’ve determined that he’s already paid for his tab and has probably made his way outside to catch a cab. I smile, but only on the inside. Outside, I fix my face to something more appropriate for the situation at hand.

“You have keys?” I ask. I watch her rest her back against the passenger side of her own car. Her hand fumbles around in her pockets for a few more seconds before she produces a silver key with a square shaped head; there’s a keychain dangling off the loop. It’s made of wood. Her name is burned in loose cursive into the tan surface. Clarice. “License, too, please. I’ll take you home now, make sure you’re safe.”

She passes it to me without hesitation. Her ID now in hand, I unlock the car doors and wait for her to get in before tucking my own body into the vehicle, away from the rain. She— Clarice Starling, so I’ve ‘learned’— slumps in her seat with her eyes closed. One hand circles the seat belt bracket beside her seat. The other weakly pulls the buckle down, and I watch her struggle with the metal tongue. The sound irritates me, so if she doesn’t fucking stop it i swear to god i’ll kill her right fucking now i don’t care if it pisses him off I place my hands over hers to guide the pieces together. Her hands are cold; I feel it like a quick shock, even through the white cotton gloves I’m wearing.

I make a spectacle of looking intently at her license and repeating her address out loud to her. A soft, feeble sound escapes her parted lips, and her head falls to the side. Her eyes close completely. The drugs, whatever it was he’d given her, had finally knocked her out. Either that, or she’s well on her way to comatose, but I doubt he’d misdose her. It doesn’t entirely matter either way. I was growing incredibly tired of pretending to be nice to her.

I take the wig I’d been wearing off. Her eyelids flutter like moth wings in the recesses of my line of sight. I keep my hat on to obscure my face in the dark, but I’m not too worried about her knowing who I am based on the silhouette of my hair alone. Her ID thumps off the floorboard of the backseat. It’s useless to me at this point. We’re not going to her house, and even if we were, I wouldn’t need a piece of plastic to tell me where she lives. I already know where she lives. I’ve known for years. I’ve been inside her house. Many times, in fact. My husband and I go to her house every weekend for dinner with her and hers. We’re friends. Well, we were. We didn’t start out that way, but since our husbands are incredibly close— they work for the same university and often collaborate on projects together— we became friendly over time. Eventually, it reached a point where Clarice and I spoke on the phone every day.

We found comfort in one another. We both were born and raised in the southern United States, although from very different parts— her from West Virginia, myself from Louisiana. She studied at the Academy shortly before I was posted there as a lecturer. She knew Jack; he gave her her first and only field assignment. She left the field after that and moved to Brazil, where her boyfriend at the time lived. I told her that my husband and I had moved shortly after Abel Gideon escaped custody, fearing for our lives. We were confidants in a foreign land. I couldn’t reveal the truth to her, but I told her what I could. She was the closest thing I’d had to a friend since Alana. In fact, her parallels to Alana in behaviour and thought are what drew me to her in the first place. And I cherished her company deeply, which is what made finding out hurt so much worse.

Clarice’s sister-in-law is the one who told me. We had only spoken once or twice, probably at a holiday gathering where our families mingled and nothing more. I knew in my gut that it was something serious when she phoned me. The tone of her voice betrayed her just as much as her kin had me. Clarice had been planning, for quite some number of months now, to get my husband to fuck her. She’d fallen in love, she said. She’d been discussing it with her sister, who had a guilty enough conscience to tell me. Guilt is the only good thing Christianity has ever given the world.

Unfortunately for Clarice, my husband is as loyal as I am possessive.

Street lamps flash by in bursts of buzzing burnt yellow. There are very few other cars on the road. The radio plays quietly underneath the silence, some colourful pop song I’ve heard a few times in the shops while we’ve been out. Clarice’s shallow breath laces itself in between the drums and the guitar riff. I glance at her. Her chest rises and falls the way it should, just a few beats slower than it normally would. She’s fine. For now.

Halfway through our drive, the lights that line the street thin out before completely disappearing. The car’s headlights wash across the road, and I watch the trees and bushes shake from a combination of the wind and an assortment of animals in the underbrush. I catch sight of a few skunks darting into the safety of the trees with the edge of the headlight’s beam. I only see them for a couple seconds at a time when I do spot them, and then their fur blends them away into the night.

A rabbit darts into the road a handful of yards in front of me. It’s small and brown, with big ears that twitch as it hops across the pavement. The rabbit moves the way fluid does— effortlessly and all at once. Its body turns towards the car as I drive towards it. It makes no effort to move. I make no effort to stop. I don’t even attempt to slow down. Its statuesque glare is enough acceptance of fate for me. It wouldn’t change anything even if it wasn’t.

The rabbit’s body crunches underneath the front tires. Ivory bones snap like wet sticks and marrow seeps into the cracked road. The smell of blood and bile permeates the cabin of the car; it’s thick and rich and sticks to the back of my throat when I breathe in. The carcass barely counts as a speed bump. A thrill shoots through my body, buzzing in my fingers and toes. A faint clicking alerts me and any car that might happen to pass by that the Mustang’s hazard lights are on.

I stop the car and stare at the rabbit in the rear view mirror. It lays still, not that I expected anything different. A single white spot on its chest shines like a beacon in the dark. Red dances across its fur in a mixture of blood and the car's flashing tail light. The legs are bent outwards at awkward angles. One leg stretches out behind it, pointed backwards, but the other leg points in the right direction. The two front paws join together in front of the body— almost as if in the midst of a prayer. i wonder what he’s praying for? i hope his prayers are answered. What I can only assume to be brains connects the rabbit to my back tires. The torso doesn’t appear affected, but it’s outside of my line of sight. I wouldn’t know unless I got out to check. An idea swirls around my own head like heavy smoke. My hands grip the wheel tighter. No.

I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t, because I know how frustrated he’ll be if I end up taking too long. He demands punctuality in the tiniest of moments, no matter what. But all things considered, the stomach looks like it’s mostly intact… I steal a glance at Clarice in the passenger seat. She’s unconscious. I could have hit a deer and she would have been none the wiser. I hesitate. The wheel is cold under my palms, and the thought of the rabbit’s meat going to waste burns the back of my throat. I shouldn’t. He’ll be so fucking angry. But…

“Fuck it,” I whisper. My door is open before I even have my seatbelt off.

The ground freezes under my feet. The thin canvas shoes I’m wearing offer absolutely no protection from the wet pavement. Rain soaks through my socks, which sends a chill rocketing through the rest of my body with every step I take towards the rabbit. I crouch down for a closer look. The front end of the rabbit looks like red sludge. I must have caught the thing when it tried to hop away at the very last second. Which is fine by me. The abdomen is intact, and that’s what I was mostly concerned about. Just to be sure, though, I move around the corpse with the tip of my shoe just to make sure. I stare at the body blinking orange. No sign of intestinal leakage.

I trot back to the car and retrieve my satchel from the back seat. I keep plastic bags and gloves on me at all times, no matter what. I used to keep them around for my dogs, but life has been a little different lately. Never know when they’ll come in handy now. The last thing I grab from the car is a spare hunting knife. The only remnant I have of the old me. I make my way back to the animal’s remains. Usually I use better tools for this.

I slide my hands into a pair of rubber gloves before poking my fingers under its breast bone. I don’t feel any openings in the skin, so I grab my knife. My knife cuts from the sternum to the pelvis in one smooth action, and the entrails spill onto the pavement just a moment later. Blood dribbles from the new wounds. I dig through the innards for a moment or two before I find it. Still but warm, the heart severs from its host with a muffled squelch. I carefully wrap my prize up in the plastic bag I had been holding in my other hand. Once I’m back in the Ford, I check the clock on the dashboard. It’s been less than ten minutes— absolutely worth the pit stop.

Besides, I’m sure Clarice will be hungry when she eventually wakes up.

-

Gravel crunches under the tires as I pull into the parking lot. The building in front of me is run down; it likely hasn’t been used as anything other than a drug den in years. Empty syringes, pill bottles, and broken glass twinkle like the heavens at night when the headlights sweep over them. The building isn’t why I’m here. The addictions I feed are different from the ones found in the concave of a spoon.

He emerges from the shadows as if he were born inside of them. An orange pinprick glows in the dark for just a moment before flitting downwards and hastily disappearing. I watch him snub the ash of the cigarette under his boot just outside the range of the light. My stomach churns. A million little fires break out under my skin, inside of my veins, threatening to consume me as he strides up to my side of the car. As he comes closer, it’s more apparent who he is— he’s the guy from the bar.

His long coat stirs the dirt on the ground as he stalks towards the car. His hands are in his pockets, but I see the faintest hint of black latex on his wrists. He’s around my height and cleanshaven. He's older than me by about ten or so years. He wears each and every single one of them like a godking on earth. Handsome and refined. His hair is cut short to his skin, although I’ve always preferred it to be longer. A few loose strands hang in his face. He has a square face, with a tough jaw and piercing eyes. His name is Hannibal.

He’s my husband.

We’ve been married for a few years now. After killing Francis, we didn’t waste time. I couldn’t let him roam this planet any longer without his name tied to mine in every breath uttered about us. i couldn’t risk someone else changing him the way i have. i couldn’t risk them even trying. No one proposed. I just said it aloud one night, as if it were a fact, and he didn’t bother to correct me. He never referred to me as anything different after that. There wasn’t a wedding. We didn’t need one, and it’s not like we would have been able to have one in the current atmospheres of our lives. I wouldn’t want one without Abigail there, anyway. She deserved to see her fathers together as they were meant to be. We came to Buenos Aries for our makeshift honeymoon and never left the area after our several-month affair around the country. The locals are welcoming, the sights are beautiful, and we’ve begun to develop something of a social circle. We’ve got a place here. Even if we wanted to go back, what’s left for us in America to return to anyway?

I like to think we’ve built ourselves quite a life here.

I get out of the vehicle before he reaches the door. His arms circle my waist, and within the next few breaths, he’s left me without any— mint and smoke greet my teeth when he kisses me. I melt for him. I always melt for him. His fingers dig into the lowest section of my back, and mine thread themselves through the fabric of his jacket. I want him close, as close as I can possibly get him. i want to crawl inside of his skin and build a nest there. i want him to dig me out with a scalpel. Being around him is… good. It’s better than good, actually. It’s the only thing that can reduce the incessant buzzing inside of my skull to just silence. He makes the screaming stop.

“Hello, my lamb.”

All of my ice burns inside of his voice. “Hi,” I reply, almost shyly, as if we haven’t been together for several years now. it’s not my fault he makes me feel so special. “Sorry I’m late, I made a little pit stop for something before I got here.”

“You’re fine, darling,” Hannibal responds. I relax, unaware that I had even tensed up in the first place. He rubs my back, and it’s all I can do to focus on what he’s saying instead. His touch is disturbingly soothing. sometimes it makes clear sense why he was able to scramble my brains the way he did. He motions towards the car with a quick nod of his head. “Is she still awake?”

I shake my own. “She’s been out cold for the past half hour or so.” I smile at him. “Whatever you gave her was pretty strong, huh?”

“You’d know. It was what I gave you in treatment.” He separates himself from me the way a surgeon would remove a heart, and i bleed out behind his heels as he walks away. The passenger door opens, and he disappears from view. When I approach him from behind, he’s knelt down with rope and duct tape in hand. “Just in case she wakes up before we get there,” Hannibal says. I wince when he pulls the ropes so tight around her wrists I hear the skin burn underneath. lucky bitch doesn’t even know how envious i am of her. she has no idea she’s getting the treatment she’s yearned for. “I would hate for all of this planning and preparation to go to waste.”

I hum acknowledgment for his statement but otherwise do nothing. He says nothing else, and neither do I. We don’t need to. I wait for him to finish before opening the door to the backseat, hoping to preserve as much of the measly amount of heat left in the car as possible. He hoists her over his shoulder after duct taping her mouth shut. He folds her slender body easily into her own backseat. The door slams; specks of rain, fresh from the clouds, fly from the exterior and float to the ground in the dark.

Always a gentleman, he holds the passenger door open for me until I get in the car.

-

The house blinks at us when we pull in. Windowsills and doorframes droop from age and weather, giving the house a sunken down appearance, as if Hell were pulling the whole structure straight down into itself. That’s part of why I picked it. It’s not next to a main road. It’s visible, sure. we want someone to find the body, after all. But it doesn’t broadcast itself. Being off the beaten path lends to the house’s isolation. There are two neighbours within three miles of the place, and that’s it. no one to see. no one to hear.

The final and main reason I picked this place is because of how unkempt it is. Like I said, I’ve been to Clarice’s house before. I was her friend. I know how well she likes neat and orderly things, especially her home. If it doesn’t look magazine ready at all times, she’s on her hands and knees to ensure it is. bile boils like mercury in the back of my throat at the thought that she envisioned herself in similar positions for someone who belongs to me. She is the epitome of a housewife. The house we now stand in front of is everything opposite from her homely comforts. The outside of the house, as I mentioned, is falling into the ground. What’s above the mud is mottled with cracked and peeling paint, if there’s even paint on the wood at all. Bugs burrow into the timber; anything with metal attached to it in any capacity is more rust than anything else. Mold and mildew cover the surface area of the house like a winter day’s thickest snow. I’m almost certain that nothing had been cleaned before Hannibal and I came across the building. I know that if she ever came across the pathetic little shack I’ve come to call Hakeldama she would have a fucking conniption fit. That is by design, of course.

I don’t want her last moments on earth to be comfortable in any manner.

I unlock the door to Hakeldama while Hannibal sets about bringing Clarice’s body inside. We made a place for her months ago, a few weeks after I first started planning tonight. A rickety old chair that I think I found in the barn behind Hakeldama sits in the middle of the floor. Several light switches are scattered along the cracked and peeling walls, but there’s no point in fiddling with them, because electricity doesn’t work in this place. even if we hadn’t been doing this almost professionally for years now, we wouldn’t be stupid enough to connect our names to a place like this just for some electricity. candles are romantic anyway. The dark doesn’t bother me at the worst of times. At least, it hasn’t since the fall. Not being able to see Clarice’s face for the next several hours of our time together, however, does.

Behind me, Clarice’s body thumps into the chair, and the sound of Hannibal’s footsteps fade into a room in the opposite direction of the room my things are in. A woven picnic basket sits on top of the only table in the room that isn’t completely broken or at least slanted from missing legs. Pillar candles in shades of purple somewhere between mauve and periwinkle fill the space in the basket. A box of matches wrapped in parchment paper is tucked into the red plaid ribbon tied around the basket, and underneath the basket is a change of clothes. her life is not worth even half the price i would have to pay to have my shirt dry cleaned. I change after lighting a single candle, just so that I have light enough to see.

Although I can’t really see him, I know that Hannibal is likely kneeled in front of Clarice tying her to the chair. he’s gifted in the art of restraints, be it for pain, pleasure, or both. His clothes whisper his location to me, and I follow their call blindly until I touch his shoulder with my outstretched fingertips.

“Would you like a candle?” I ask. “Might help you see better. Smells nice too.”

“Sure,” he answers. His tone is clipped. i know what that means, and my stomach churns like a sea of crosses.

I sit one by his feet and light it with a match I blow out immediately after. The lavender scented glow washes both of us in flickering orange; Hannibal is the first thing to bloom in my vision as my eyes fight to adjust to the harlequin light. He’s changed out of his coat but not the button up shirt and slacks he was wearing at the bar. unlike me, he’s more comfortable in fancy clothes. he says it feels more natural to him. i am nothing short of obsessed with him. watching him tie clarice up has the same effect as flint striking steel, and my bones singe the muscles under my skin. i want to slither across the hearth and sew myself into the chair for him. i want to look him in the eyes while he disembo

My hand tingles painfully, numb and warm at the same time. The basket, so weighed down by the amount of candles I'd stashed inside of it, had been cutting off circulation the whole time I’d been prepping the lights. I didn’t notice, just as I didn’t notice the flames biting my skin from lingering for too long over an already-lit candle. My hand— bright red from the burn— stings, but I pay it no mind. I can work with a little burn. I’ve done far more with far worse.

Gold effulgence illuminates the room. Shadows dance around the room and haunt the hollow doorjambs leading to the surrounding rooms. A hush blankets the room like asbestos. Breathing it in is a chore in the same way that praying is. Hakeldama, or at least this room in particular, reminds me of a cathedral. It couldn’t be further from one.

her benevolent god will not be appearing this evening.

Hannibal retreats to the other room, the one he’d visited before I’d lit the candles. Clarice sits unattended before me. The restraints are tight; her wrists and ankles are an angry red wherever the skin is visible. Her head lolls to the side, and i could slit her throat right fucking now and just be done with it the candlelight catches a half-crusted sheen of drying drool on her cheek. Her breathing is shallow and slow. My gaze cuts from her nearly-lifeless form when Hannibal comes back into our shared space carrying a tray with an array of vials and syringes. I don’t know what they are. I never have, and I never will. Those kinds of drugs are his thing. I don’t care to know.

He kneels in front of Clarice’s figure. I cross my legs in the chair I had brought into Hakeldama just for me to sit on. My throne of sorts. I rule this place. I make the rules. I create the laws. and i have hannibal as a means to carry out the punishments. He loads a syringe with one of the several clear liquids, and as he preps the needle for the injection, I close my eyes. I don’t need to see her. I just need to hear her.

A scream rips from the back of her throat. I’m almost convinced that if I were to open my eyes, I would see blood spray from her mouth at the force of the sound. I open my eyes, curious. Hannibal’s shirt is still white. The sound cuts for a moment. When it resumes, the hairs on the back of my neck and arms lift. She thrashes once she realises she’s tied down. It’s honestly kind of cute to me that she doesn’t know just how futile resistance is. She doesn’t know just how strong the ropes tying her to the chair are. And she doesn’t know how good the person who tied them is at doing just that, either.

Her scream fades again. Her head slumps to the other side, facing her left, and I can only assume she and Hannibal make eye contact, based on the way he pauses, fingers poised on the plunger of the next loaded syringe.

“Good evening, Clarice,” he says. shadows haunt more than just the doors. they warp themselves to slide between his words like air. she doesn’t know she’s speaking to the devil. He places his hand against her throat. His skin barely graces hers, like he doesn’t want to touch her in the first place. i know for a fact that he doesn’t. not when he already has me, and i give him things i know she never will. His fingers drop a few beats later. “Sleep well?”

Another scream erupts from her lungs. Somewhere in her pathetic cacophony, I make out the syllables that need to be strung together to cry for help, but they’re all delayed and jumbled, like she isn’t sure how to say it anymore. I just smile at her. Hannibal injects another vial of something into her veins. She thrashes again; tears gather in the corners of her eyes and twinkle like stars in the dark.

“Oh sweetheart,” I hum. She jumps, her eyes flitting through the darkness in a poor attempt to find my face. Her pupils reflect my own image back at me. Whatever she’d been injected with had given her a crazed look in her eyes. Her breathing is erratic, and even though she’s silent, her mouth is open, like she wants to keep screaming. how i wish i knew how it felt. “Screaming does no good out here. No one is coming to save you.”

The constellations decorating her eyes are falling comets caught in the lavender haze. “Who are you? What are you doing?” she asks. The words are slurred together, almost like before, but there’s clarity now that she was lacking several moments ago. “Who are you?”

The grin on my face widens until I feel like it’s going to consume the pieces of the mask I still have in place. Hannibal backs away from her. I stalk closer to her. Her face changes with every step I take, and I can see my own face flickering in the back of her corneas. i am the monster in the dark she doesn’t remember to be afraid of. More tears fill the empty skies of her cheeks.

“Don’t you recognise me already, Clarice?” I ask. My voice teeters on the edge of the exaggerated accent I’d been hiding behind all evening and my natural register. I reach into my pocket for another match. I kneel in front of her, and the tangy smell of her sweat mixes with the sulfuric match waste in the back of my throat. Flames flickers across my face. “Or do you need to see me as I am before it clicks?”

I could live a thousand lives. I could live a thousand lives, none of them interacting, never meeting the doppelgangers of myself, and yet I would still not feel as much as I did watching the recognition tick behind Clarice’s eyes. It was hot, warm, and sticky as it crawled over the folds of my brain. Webbed spider feet pull together corners of my mind I never knew existed. I can only hope that it scraped across hers like sandpaper.

“Will?”

She says my name like a prayer. In this moment, I am closer to her than God ever will be. In fact, I am the closest thing to God she will ever know. I am not the God she calls out to when she needs help or guidance. I don’t reside on her living room wall with my arms splayed open, waiting to be taken advantage of. I am not the God of Convenience. I am the God she listens to the preacher tell her about every Sunday. I am the God she is taught to fear, to respect, to appease, lest He strike her down and damn her to eternal suffering. I come from the pages of the Old Testament. My anger may be ignored, but it will always be there, looking for an opportunity to strike.

I lied when I said guilt is the only gift that Christianity has given. Christians gave the world a violent God to fear. I have learned more about punishment from God than anyone or anything else.

I blow the match out before it burns my fingertips. “So you do recognise me,” I hum, this time in my regular voice. there is no need for god to disguise himself, so neither shall i anymore. Behind me, wood scrapes over wood, and I watch Clarice’s eyes try to focus on something in the dark. I don’t concern myself with the commotion behind me. The prep work has always been one of Hannibal’s delights. “I’m assuming, then, that you also recognise my partner.”

“No,” Clarice mumbles. She doesn’t smell like she’s lying. Her sweat only betrays her fear, nothing else. “I… I don’t. I don’t… I think…”

“Oh Clarice, don’t be so silly,” I say, hissing the last word out without meaning to. I smile, saccharine, intent on dripping honey in every hollow spot of her body so that he knows where to start separating the layers of her skin. “Of course you know my husband. Tomas’s best friend? You surely must know your husband’s best friend, for Christ’s sake. We come over every Friday for dinner. You really don’t remember Hannibal?”

“H…annibal?”

Her eyes widen. Candlelight bounces around her irises, melting the colours together until I can’t pick out which one I hate the most. The rays of realisation dawn across her face. Her pulse flutters louder in my ears. The milliseconds pass as millenia while I watch her watch him. While I imagine her thoughts revolving around him. She drinks him in.

i want her to die of thirst.

I grab her jaw. She cries out in shock or pain a few moments before my fingers flatten her tongue to her teeth. She gags. “Yeah, I thought you’d recognise him,” I spit. I tighten my grip on her mandible until her breaths come only as exhales of pain. “Hard not to recognise someone you want between your legs, isn’t it?”

I could probably hear her stomach drop if I put my ear to her abdomen. Her desperate eyes try to search the depths of mine. She doesn’t yet understand that I am the bottomless pit that God cast His opposition into, and all she’ll find is darkness. She shakes her head, slowly at first, then somewhat vigorously. Blood pools under my nails as I force her head to stay in place. She looks at me again. I don’t give her any other option.

“Uh oh, didn’t think I’d find out, did you?” A low whine creeps out of the back of her throat and crawls over my fingers as it tries to escape. Her teeth dig into the joints of my knuckles. “I must say, you had it down for a minute there, but thankfully your poor sister-in-law had such a heavy, guilty conscience about the whole thing. She’s the one who spilled all your secrets to me.”

Her body shudders in her chair. Her tongue lurches against my fingers with the warning of a sob. I take my fingers out of her mouth and wipe them off on my jeans. The silence in my ears pops, and when I look up, Hannibal stands next to me. In his hand is a blade, with the handle outstretched towards me. Our initials are cut into the bone. An anniversary present, handmade from the remains of the Red Dragon and given to me on our honeymoon. our first hunt. warmth radiates from the femur bone i am offered into the ones that call my skin a home. I take the knife from him; a hint of a smile dies on his lips when he disappears into the other room again.

“I won’t lie to you Clarice, that was one of the worst conversations I’ve ever had with someone. I mean, I considered you my friend. And I was so fond of you and your family. But everything that Eve told me… it cut me right to the bone.” I hold the knife up to my face. I point the blade at Clarice and close one eye. Squinting, I focus hard enough to memorise the reflection of her face off the steel blade in the dark. Flames flicker behind her. it’s fascinating to me that god is depicted as fire, not as light. i intend to burn her from the inside out, just as her heavenly father would. “But you know, after I stopped feeling hurt, I was angry. Do you want to know why I was angry, Clarice?”

She opens her mouth. Spit connects her lips to her teeth to the back of her throat. I open my eye and meet both of his as they shimmer like beetles in the dark orange above her head. She tries to speak, but she never gets the chance. Her mouth closes around the mouthpiece as Hannibal slides the rest of the muzzle over her head. A lock clicks behind her head. She tries to turn around to face him, but she never quite manages to sink the claws of her gaze into his back. I watch her scrape over the pieces of him she can only dream of clinging to.

He says one thing to her before he leaves. “Watch your tongue.”

Clarice’s chest rises and falls rapidly. I lick my lips to get a taste of her panic. It’s zesty, like the lemon meringue pie she makes for Easter dinner. It tingles on the tip of my tongue, the same way I’m sure the iron spikes in her mouth sting on the tip of hers. Her sobs echo in the deepest caverns of Hakeldama. They sit obediently at my feet when they finally return to us.

“I was angry because, the more I got to thinking about it, the more I felt like you must really think you’re better than me. Better than God, even.” The smile on my face drops in an instant. Must have melted from the heat of all the candles. “I mean, that’s the only reasonable explanation I have. Either that, or you’re just fucking delusional. Because anyone with eyes can see that Hannibal is wrapped around my little finger so tight it cuts off the circulation. Did you really think you had a chance? Did you think there’s something you could offer him that I couldn’t?”

I hound closer to where she sits, snot running down her face and mixing with the blood in her mouth before it drips between the curves of her collarbones. The scent of iron is overwhelming and consumes the both of us whole. Lavender sits atop the sharp bite of rust and blood and refuses to mix with it. Her makeup is running.

“And what did you think was going to happen to you once he told me?” I whisper. She flinches away from my breath as it washes over her skin. “Because surely you didn’t think so highly of your mediocre pussy that you assumed he wouldn’t tell me you were attempting to sleep with him. I mean, let’s be honest Clarice— you can’t even satisfy your husband.” I trace the knife over her thighs. She cries out around the mouthpiece suppressing her tongue and tries to shy away from the blade. I press the blade down, and the fabric of her clothes splits easily underneath it. “Did you really think you would be able to satisfy mine? Because I promise you, you can’t. You will never be able to. You couldn’t even come close to it.”

She maffles something behind the muzzle. I don’t care to know what she says, nor would it make any difference to me if I could understand her. It’s too late for her pleas or her excuses or anything she thinks she can spit at my feet to change my mind. All I want to do is dig my way under her skin and humiliate her the way she wanted to humiliate me.

“Do you know what happened to Judas after he betrayed Jesus?” I ask. A loud scraping noise clambers up my spine and settles around the crown of my head. I feel his presence behind me. I don’t need to turn around to confirm the validity of my gut feeling. do i need to see the flames to feel them lick my skin? “We all know what happens to Jesus— the Way of the Cross, the crucifixion, the whole ‘forgive them Father’ bullshit thing he said. But do you know what happened to Judas?”

The blow torch wooshes again. Her eyes dance around it. i wish i could cut her head open to watch her brain churn through the information and make the connection. I watch the wail’s birth before it ever breaches her bleeding lips; it bubbles in her raw throat, the steam clouding her eyes with fear. My next breath faintly tastes like garlic.

“There are different accounts for what happened to Judas after he sold Jesus,” I continue. The air sizzles around me. I think, if I closed my eyes and tried hard enough, I could convince myself we were preparing breakfast together, like she and I did on the weekends sometimes after church. “Matthew tells us that he hanged himself out of guilt before ever spending the thirty silver pieces he got for the betrayal. But the book of Acts says he died in a much different way. A way I think is more fitting, especially as a punishment from God for betraying His only son. Do you know what happened to him, Clarice?”

My knife floats around her stomach. Her diaphragm scoops itself out of her belly to avoid accidentally touching the sharp edge caging it in. i could taste the honeythickness of her blood if i wanted to. in fact, i will. The bone handle is heavy in my hands, and part of me is convinced I can feel a pulse beating inside of the ivory. Her face shines like a beacon in the circle of candles, wet from the tears and the sweat. i don’t think she’s accepted her fate. lambs rarely fight back on the block.

“According to Acts, Judas bought a piece of land with that money. He was walking around that field when his intestines just… imploded. They swelled up inside of him and his body fucking burst open. Everything inside of him spilled out of his stomach and onto the ground. He died, alone and in pain. And I think that’s a fitting punishment. He sold the Son of God for the equivalent of roughly 100$. I think God had every right to strike him down for that. Don’t you? I mean, if something as mundane as lying is bad enough to be killed for, surely betrayal of the Son of God deserves the same. Y’know, thinking about it, God sure does like to kill those who wrong Him. And I don’t believe in God myself, but I think He’s got the right idea there.”

Clarice doesn’t move. She doesn’t speak. Hell, I don’t think she even breathes. Her body is entirely still, contrasting the dark red blood on my hands and the insatiable need i have to take this knife and rip through her ribcage until she chokes on her own blood and drowns in front of me. i watch her emotions flit across her eyes like a viewfinder. click, click, click. blood pools in the hollow of her hips. clarice’s next breath is shallow and wet. click. click. click. i can see the pieces falling into place in her mind. she understands she’s going to die. she understands i’m going to make sure of it. a hint of something familiar lingers in the ghosts of her irises. tell me, bunny rabbit, doesn’t betrayal hurt ?

“You did this to yourself,” I spit in her face. She shrieks, but a bloody cough cuts it off prematurely. Stupid bitch pressed her fucking tongue against the spikes. He warned her not to, but she doesn’t know how to listen. “I wouldn’t have to do this to you if you just knew how to be a good friend.” My words patter along the floorboards with a whisper. “All you had to do was be a good fucking friend, Clarice. But you couldn’t even do that.”

I twist the knife side to side. Her scream bores through my skull and leaves its sawdust in the recesses of my mind. More blood stains my hands like ink. I lick the blood from my fingers; his presence distorts. He is no longer beside me, he is simply a part of me, haemorrhaging into my skin and bone marrow until I taste him mixing with the blood and spit in my mouth. Burrowing deep into my skin to keep me warm. Clarice gags. I clean my mess.

I lean away from her. Hannibal transmutes into something… different. Not entirely human, but cut from the same cloth, at least at one point. A wicked cold fills the space between myself and Clarice and chills the both of us from the inside out. I watch her try to swallow handfuls of his vitality down her throat, hoping to digest enough of it to stagger the blows. But I’ve lain with the Devil and comforted him at night. I’ve grown addicted to his seeking fingers scraping my spine and scooping me clean. I’ve loved his darkness since I met him.

I clean the knife on her shirt. It streaks the thin fabric in some places, but otherwise just smears the blood along the blade further. I wasn’t trying to polish it; I just wanted to remind her of her place here. I cut her shirt open from the centre of her chest down to her navel, and I push it open using the point of the dirty knife. I make sure she feels it scrape across her skin. I also make sure that my knife draws blood when I cut her skirt open. It falls open easily. Her blood falls even more so.

Heat pulses close to my ear. If I hold my breath, I can hear the molecules hiss as the fire passes by. Malice cooks the remnants until they’re unbearably golden. A small chunk of the sun, poised and waiting for the call.

“Do you think God forgave Judas after He killed him?”

I watch it happen on hummingbird wings as the seconds separate themselves from each other. He moves like fluid poured from a pitcher. I think that’s part of what attracts me to him so much. He is not so much an evil man as he is molten sin in a glass tube. Clarice doesn’t move at first. Her body quivers, unsure how to mitigate the blistering heat spread across her chest, touching each of her carefully sculpted collarbones. The smell of burning flesh hits my nose before her scream threads itself between my ears. Sound doesn’t break the silence for what feels like three lifetimes. For years, I sit there in silence and watch her skin sear at the edges until the word WHORE is charred into her muscles. When it hits, it is deafening. It is waking up in a thunderstorm.

Neither Hannibal nor I move. We stare at her as she pins herself to the back of the chair. Does she want him to eat through her body with the hot rod? Maybe she does. He relents. Her skin tears away from the smouldering metal with wet and sticky popping noises. She vomits the moment he removes the brand from her body. I wrinkle my nose and move away from her.

Clarice lurches forward, coughing like she can’t breathe. Chunks of whatever she ate for dinner that night spray towards the ground. Black dots of her blood are sprinkled between the pieces. I slink around behind her and slap her a few times on the back. I don’t want her to choke to death. Not when we’ve gone to such effort to prepare for tonight.

When I look up, Hannibal’s back is turned to me. His shirt transforms with every move. Umbras and penumbras battle from his shoulders to his waist. I wish I could burn bright enough to flicker along his skin, especially as he shakes off the last breath of his human disguise and reveals his true nature. I want to be the reason we meet the wolf face to face.

My fingers card through a patch of hair at the back of Clarice’s head. It’s thick with sweat and a little bit of grime from the bridle. The dim light surrounding us catches the flat side of a few blades he arranges on a tray. He must have gotten them in the time it took me to make sure she didn’t choke to death. The shink, shink, shink of Hannibal sharpening his knives soaks into my veins. As I relax into the intimacy of the sound, I pet Clarice’s hair again, almost subconsciously.

I guess, if I really think about it, Clarice is going to get what she wanted all along at the end of the day. She’s going to get to experience a version of my Hannibal that I can only watch him give to others. I only get to chew on the leftover scraps of this side of him. She gets to sit at the table and eat a meal with him. She gets all of his filth, even if he leaves the worst of it for me to lick clean. She’s luckier than she knows.

“Hannibal is going to take over from here,” I tell her. A guttural babble floods the space between her breaths. I continue without giving it any thought. “He’s going to make sure you know exactly why you’re being punished. He’s very good at it. A professional, if you will— I know how much more comfortable you feel in the hands of an expert. Although, I hate to say it, he does like to take his time.”

As I spoke, I made my way to where Hannibal stood at his display of weapons. I traced my fingertips over his shoulder blade, following the straight line pattern of his shirt. I create ripples where my skin seeks the contact of his. It’s like touching marble, but the marble is both freezing and on fire and I can’t decide which parts of my body ache the most. Every muscle in his face, his chest, his abdomen is carved from sinister but vaguely angelic stone. Looking at him is the reverse of Medusa; I find the softest evidence of life in the most concrete of his features. I want to bite into it, break my teeth, and taste the cherry filling.

He looks at me. His hands pause their rhythm, and in their stillness, my eyes find their outline in the dark. They shimmer. His arms shimmer. His eyes shimmer, too, when I meet them. Their tenebrosity fills the pools of my mind palace until it floods and I am stepping in all of him. If I were his moon, I would have crashed into his surface, but the gravitational pull resumes its rotations when he looks back at his knives. The only things he loves more than me.

My hand drops. The ghost of a shy smile haunts my face. There will be plenty of time for him to invade my senses after. Still, our little games of cat and mouse will never fail to light little fireworks to burn holes underneath my skin. I hide a blush behind my knees when I perch myself atop my seat of honour.

Hannibal silently approaches her motionless form. I don’t think she even notices him come closer, and if she does, she certainly doesn’t stir. Light reflects off the spine of his knives as he kneels in front of her. He tilts his head slowly side to side, like he’s sizing her up or something. Maybe he is, I don’t know. Watching him hunt is fun, though. I don’t need to read his mind to know his thoughts are made of. The way he looks at her is the way I imagine a cheetah looks at a gazelle supping from a pond nearby. His fingers trace contemplatively over the heel of the blade. He looks like he’s trying to make up his mind about something. I bite my lip.

“You know, Clarice, you got yourself caught up in something you really shouldn’t have,” he mutters. My arm hair stands on end, and I grip the armrests so hard my nails nock the wood. “And if Tomas knew what thoughts you had about his close friend…” A low whistle cracks through the cold air. “Let’s just say that I’m sure it’ll break his heart less to find out you’re dead.” If I hadn’t been studying his every movement, I might have missed the way he angles his jaw ever so slightly in my direction again, the way he had in the bar when I met Clarice by the bathroom. “I know that’s certainly how I would feel, were I to find myself in his place.”

Something feverish bubbles in the pit of my stomach. I breathe in slowly through my nose and force myself to look anywhere but him. I know he isn’t worried about me being unfaithful. I have done nothing but show him how devoted I am to him and to this little life we have, in some ways quite literally, carved out of the world for ourselves. But he likes to remind me of my place anyway. And I like knowing that the only way out of this is through him.

After enough time has passed that the sentiment has not only drilled itself into my head but between my thighs, he turns away and stands up straight. His sudden rise jolts me from my daze, and I busy myself with pulling a pack of American Spirits out of my pocket. I only ever smoke when we’re intimate. The match I slide from the box spits its flame at me, and smoke envelops my vision. I hear something indistinct after I close my eyes.

My lungs smoulder, and I exhale. Clarice exhales, too. Her breath tangles itself in her lap before falling on the floor in a clump, plopping sadly in the puddle of her blood under her feet. The scold’s bridle clunks to the ground next. A choked grunt dies in the middle of the room. I open my eyes in time to watch him pull her head back until the meat of her throat is on display. Leather slides smoothly over itself, and the cherry of my cigarette glows neon red in the centre of Clarice’s elongated neck. Two forked pieces of metal protrude from above and underneath the spot hidden by my cigarette, right along the length of her throat. The top prong settles under her chin, and the bottom rests at the highest peak of her breastbone.

“Do you believe in God, Clarice?” Hannibal’s voice is clear. Tendrils of smoke try to grab the syllables from the air and drag them down to drown them in shallow pools of wax. My head falls to the side while I pull another hit off my cigarette. Ash floats to the ground, and he says, “I know you go to church every Sunday, and I know you say ‘amen’ before every meal, but there’s a difference between knowing God and pretending you do. So, do you really believe in God, or do you pretend to?”

“Please.” I almost didn’t recognise her voice. The puncture holes in her tongue alter her speech. She no longer sounds like herself, but someone else masquerading as their idea of who Clarice was once upon a time. “Please, you don’t have to do this. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,—”

The moan that slips past my lips, around the cigarette in my mouth, when Hannibal shoves a knife through her back is involuntary and, thankfully, quiet. Her shirt slowly turns black. She squeals like a rodent caught in a trap. I blow smoke rings to the ceiling while we wait for her to shut up.

“You didn’t answer the question.” Hannibal polishes the knife off with some towel he always keeps handy. He doesn’t like dirtying his tools. “I’ll ask one more time, and if you fail to answer again, I will cut your tongue out. Now, Clarice. Do you believe in God?” Each word is punctuated like a fist in the gut. Her mouth quivers open. Hannibal forces her to close it again. I force myself to watch the end of my cigarette go from black to red to grey and ignore the buzzing in my stomach. “Prove it. Nod.”

I would have loved to have seen the look in her eyes at that moment. With my eyes closed, I imagine the way hers would tick slowly through her jumbled emotions— nothing, then confusion, then dread, and the dread sinks to the bottom of her being like a stone. I wonder if any of the colours faded in her irises. He looms demonically over her when I look at them again. Her bleeding chest shakes. Hannibal gathers her tears with his index finger and sucks them off. I hold my breath and ache with the blinding need to lick her eyelashes and taste what he tastes. Is it sweet? Is she sweet for him? Is she sweeter than me?

I scrape the butt of the cigarette across the scarred arm of the chair.

She jerks her head down once. Blood and spit gargle in the cradle of her chest. Her next few sounds are high pitched and wet. I think about eating them with a spoon, and Hannibal abandons his post behind her to ponder over his knives. One still remains in her shoulder, and I busy my itching hands with cleaning the one I used more thoroughly.

I don’t know what kinds of knives he has. I know he has a lot, but that’s about it. He’s tried to teach me the different ones and their different uses more times than I’ve lost count. It just isn’t for me. I prefer to use my hands when I can. It just feels more natural for me that way as opposed to using anything else. More… personal. Which is fine, because he finds my approach tasteless, I know he does, even if he doesn’t say so. We work with what we know best. He knows each of his knives like his own heartbeats. I wasn’t kidding when I said they were the only things he loves more than me.

I like when Hannibal uses his knives. I like watching him use them. He’s oddly inhuman when he works, but then again, he shouldn’t be classified as something human anyway. Hannibal has this debonair quality about him that he maintains at all times, no matter what, but when he picks up his blades, it’s as if some… primordial, ravening numen of sin possesses him. Sometimes I convince myself that he could pass between dimensions if he tried, leaving me behind. He wouldn’t, though. He’s evil, not heartless— I carry that part of him with me.

“So, you do believe in God,” Hannibal says. His tone, while skeptic on the surface, carries a thoughtfulness I don’t often hear from him. It commands my attention. My eyes are on him. I know he knows. “Then I’m sure you know what His stance on adultery is?”

Clarice shakes her head after a moment. The sharp points of the forked ends create little incisions where her skin meets metal. She whimpers in pain. I hate her. I hate how pathetic she is.

“No, I don’t,” she finally whispers.

Hannibal clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. I smirk, the reflection of it waving hello from the short, wide flat of my own knife. Disappointment. This isn’t going to end well for her. Not that it was going to in the first place, but he’s particularly Mephistophelean with the ones he finds aggravating.

“Looks like someone hasn’t read the Bible in its entirety,” he remarks. Disdain. It drips down my spine like scalding water. “That’s fine. Not many people do, they just repeat what they’re told is in the Book. Catholics have an excuse for this— they weren’t allowed to read the Bible for quite some time, and most still don’t. But your father raised you in a Protestant church. You don’t have that excuse.”

Hannibal turns around to face her. Flames dance from his sudden movement, and more shadows writhe along the walls of the room, making it look alive. The knife in one hand has a curved, fat blade. I recognise the instrument immediately. The scar it left across my hips twinges uncomfortably as he flexes his fingers around the handle. In his other, a metal rod with a pockmarked surface. That one I know is for sharpening his blade— and he does so as he walks towards her. I wonder how she feels, listening to the sound of her impending doom, unable to do anything but meet it head on.

His eyes meet mine almost unintentionally. I say almost, because I know Hannibal, and his moves are usually coordinated for a specific reason, even if he’s the only one who knows what the reason is. Neither of us react. That’s the deal. But that doesn’t stop his eyes from ripping a bloody hole through me, starting at my throat and cracking my bones until my ribcage shatters. I feel the flower of a moan budding in my throat. I wish he would.

My fingers slip on the knife as I clean it. I don’t know if it was an accident. He watches me put my bleeding finger to my lips. He cuts his gaze away, staring at nothing now, and extends his jaw. The blade scraping over the sharpener catches hard, bony pieces of my spine and yanks me closer to him with every single swish.

“Infidelity is mentioned quite a few times in the Bible,” he says. The thickness in his voice chokes me from across the room. “Most people assume that adultery is just a physical sin, and in a way, they are correct. Adultery falls under the umbrella of sexual immorality, and those sins are called the only sins you commit unto yourself. The easiest way to commit that atrocity is in the flesh. But that’s not the full scope of what God considers to be adultery. It’s not just fornication that counts.”

Hannibal puts the sharpener away. He picks up a chair with one hand and carries it across the room. It clunks to the ground in front of her. He puts the knife in between his teeth, and I cross my legs the opposite direction as he rolls his sleeves up. Hannibal kicks her legs open before he seats himself between her knees. My mouth is full of cotton.

“Jesus Christ himself is the one who said that simply looking upon someone with lust in your heart counts as sin.” My view of what Hannibal does next is partially obscured, since my chair is behind where he’s slowly crouching between her legs. My grip on the handle of the blade tightens. My jaw sets so hard my teeth ache. “That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? You look at me like that, Clarice.” Her sobs return. I silently wonder to myself if, at this very moment, as the warmth of his breath heats her skin, she’s praying for God to intervene? I wonder if Judas prayed for similar. “You look at me like you want to eat me.”

My vision blots with maroon rorschach. all i see in the scattered images is my hands around her throat, and her face turning blue as my thumbs dig under her jawbone. i can feel her last breath escape into my lungs as if it’s my first. the noise inside my head is static passing through running water. she doesn’t deserve his eyes on her corpse. her last visage of earth shouldn’t be his face. it should be mine. she deserves to die as impudently as she lived, and i deserve to be the one to take everything from her, the same way she she wanted to take it from me.

Hannibal pauses, mouth mere inches from her inner thigh. why is he so close to her? I catch him looking at me through his eyelashes for the briefest of moments before he averts his gaze. i see. My throat itches for another cigarette.

“Well,” he amends, “maybe I should say that you look at me like you want me to eat you.”

She pierces the room with a harrowing screech. I pay no attention to her; instead, I watch Hannibal. I watch him chew, and I watch him swallow, and I watch him lick the blood off her thigh. The missing mass from her leg bleeds regardless. An endless flow of her holy spirit pouring out onto his leather shoes.

Hannibal inserts the tip of his blade between the top layer of her skin and the layer he exposed when he bit into her. He slices, his movements clean and precise. Blood drips from his chin, staining his shirt collar. I struggle to light my next cigarette until I force myself to bury my thoughts under whatever Clarice is doing. My mouth fills with smoke when hers empties its agony. Ichor soaks her to the bone; her shirt is no longer the same colour it was when we arrived at Hakeldama. The brand in her chest looks discoloured too, even in the weak light that the candles give off.

“I take it this isn’t what you had in mind when you said you wanted me—” and he pops his fingers through the opening his knife creates in the middle of her skin’s layers “—between your thighs, is it, Clarice.”

He rips her skin apart along the incision he created. His forearm, from his fingertips to right above his wrist, glistens in the dark. And he looks at me, eyes just as dark, blood smeared across his mouth. I nearly choke on my cigarette. She nearly chokes on the sick she can’t turn her head to expel.

Hannibal turns his attention back to his toys. I sweep the ashes off my lap before they burn holes in my clothes. She gags. Hannibal reaches out to lean her to one side, so she can cough up whatever is stuck in her throat. She vomits once with a shuddering cough. The sick lands in her hair and down the front of her chest. A plea for help grates past the wounds in her throat. It falls to the ground with a hollow thud.

Once she’s stable, Hannibal picks his knife back up. He doesn’t make any more incisions. I curiously wave the smoke from my face. I sit up straighter, even leaning forward just a little to get a better look at what he’s doing. He holds a flap of skin in place and carves out a couple of whole pieces; the bits of flesh are no bigger than a snack sized Halloween candy bar. I blink, and he materialises in front of me.

His face hovers in front of mine. I taste his cologne in the back of my throat. I feel his eyes hooked into my cheeks, holding me still. I see the Beast coiled in wait behind his pupils. It swirls in the depths of his irises, teeth bared and bright and starving. Hannibal traces my lips with that jagged gaze of his, and I hold my breath so he can’t cut my tongue open. Iron corrodes the scent of juniper berries and cedar. Suddenly his kneeled presence in front of me makes sense.

His fingers prod at my lips. All I can do is open my mouth.

He feeds me. His eyes do not leave mine the entire time. Not when I accept his offering, slowly swallowing it whole, the way I imagine God planned to swallow Isaac. Not when I lick at the blood drying on his fingers, even as he pulls them away. Not when I reach for his wrist and guide them back to my mouth. I stare at the Beast and it thrashes its tail against the glass of its enclosure. I open my mouth wider, inviting it to crawl in.

I would be lying if I said I haven’t grown to share his appetite. I no longer merely tolerate.

I notice the taste of blood is missing before I register that he’s gone back to his seat, intent on finishing the job he started. My legs tremble slightly, and while he strips away more layers of Clarice’s skin, I realise she’s trembling too, just like me. She’s stopped screaming. Shock must have set in while he was pounding the walls of my skull. My upper lip still stinks of him, and I rub my knuckles over my Cupid’s bow until she convulses again. I turn my head; she pukes for a third (but, unfortunately, likely not the final) time.

I take another drag off my cigarette. He removes several more cuts of meat from her thigh; I don’t know why he does it. The dogs wouldn't eat her from our plates if it were between that and starvation. They haven't even eaten table scraps since Mason. Humiliation is the only explanation. Of course it is. His sadism parades around the room with a smirk on its face. I see that smirk reflected the one other time he chooses to devour a bite. He laughs at her gut-wrenching screams. Hannibal outright mocks her pleas for him to stop, please. Her pain entertains him even more when he repeats his previous actions on her other thigh. I have to look away before he finishes. His blatant lasciviousness had begun to choke me from the middle of my chest.

Does he think about doing this to me? Using his teeth to clean my bones, my blood choking him as it tries to replace his body’s oxygen. I watch him work: slow and unholy fingers pick her blood cells off his sharpest blade. Does the thought of me tied up and repulsive gnaw through his bones as he tries to dig into hers? I think if I met his eyes, bathed in blood and rinsed in lavender flame, I would know the answer to my query. I don’t check. The idea of it being a yes is too overwhelming. I hope he knows I would sit still as he dined.

I dare to look back at them when pained gasps for air replace her yells. Hannibal wipes his forearm across his forehead in similar amatory fashion, then rests his wrists on his knees, hands facing Clarice. “I get the feeling that you’re growing bored of this position,” he says, feigning a devastation he could never feel in the first place. The words take their time scuttling off his tongue. I gag myself with the last breaths of my cigarette. He backs away from her, breathing just as heavily. “We can switch it up, if you’d like.”

When he turns around, he pins me down with his eyes again. I do not resist. I don't protest and I don't fight back. Instead, I smile at him and arch my back just slightly. It’s enough to push out my chest a little, but it’s mostly to show him my throat— look at me, aren’t I such a pretty little lamb for you? His nostrils flare and he looks away. He forgets that I know how to play this game too.

I follow the arch in my back through and fully stand up. My joints groan in protest, and I soothe their complaints with a lengthy stretch that leaves me feeling just a little bit lighter. My fingers tap along the metal fork still craning Clarice’s neck. It’s slick with sweat and tears, blood, and whatever she had thrown up. Her unfocused eyes converge on mine.

“While we wait for Hannibal to clean up and prepare for the next part, why don’t I get you something to eat, yeah? You need something on your stomach after that,” I say. I can’t tell if the ersatz comfort in my voice is what compels her to nod yes, or if the blood loss and trauma has driven her to the point of some fucked up antemortem bliss already. I caress her hair. She falls into my smile and builds a nest there, intent on never leaving. I pat her cheek. “Well, lucky for you, I thought ahead, and I already got you a little something to eat on the way over here. Want me to go get it for you?”

She nods again, slow and with a wince she doesn’t seem to realise is occurring. I cast a single look back at him. He’s obscured by the poor light, bent over his table looking for something, paying me no mind at all. I purse my lips. Whatever. I face the front door again, and I wordlessly steal into the midnight.

I retrieve my gift for Clarice in a matter of minutes. Neither of them seem to notice the time that’s passed, nor do they comment on the plastic bag swinging by my side. I drop the bag with the rabbit heart into my seat before standing behind Clarice. I unbuckle the clasp holding the heretic fork against her neck. It slides off with some effort— I have to dislodge one of the prongs from the oozing letter O on her chest— and she sits still, stiff, for some time before allowing herself to relax her neck. Tears cleanse her face the moment she’s able to lay eyes on her thighs, or what’s left of them. She jerks once, twice, and I hold a handful of Clarice’s hair away from her face as she empties her stomach one last time.

“Poor thing,” I murmur. Her body shakes under the weight of her sobs. “Here, how about that snack to ease your mind, yeah? It’ll do you some good.”

She searches for me in the dark. I smile at her, all teeth, and her body follows my retreating footsteps the way a sunflower follows the stars in the sky. My smile warps with the absence of her gaze. So trusting. So naive. So fucking stupid. I sit in front of her with the heart cupped in my hands. She looks only at me. She trusts only me. I use my clean knife and carve out the left atrium. A fat deposit clings to the chamber, but Clarice doesn’t seem to notice or care as she sucks the raw meat into her mouth.

“That’s a good girl,” I hum. Clarice’s eyes flicker, some last beat of hope trying to claw its way to the surface. She eats from my palm believing that I will save her. She licks my fingers clean thinking I care. A water bottle sits at the foot of my chair. I hold it to her lips; she leaves not a drop. “Better?”

Clarice nods, weak. I screw the cap back on the bottle. I watch Hannibal load another syringe in the outskirts of my vision. He flicks the needle, and something spurts out. It should not twist my stomach in knots the way it does. I turn back to Clarice; her mouth moves, but I can’t hear what she says. I lean closer.

“I said… what… did I eat?” Her words are hoarse and almost unintelligible.

“Ah.” I lean back away from her, suddenly inundated by the foul smell emanating from her. “That was your petition for forgiveness.”

“Huh?”

I stand back up. I don’t respond to her, too busy licking the remaining blood off my fingers— not until I’ve sat down at least. I wait, the words balancing impatiently on my tongue, and Hannibal leisurely strides back to haunt in front of her. Her forlorn eyes seek mine before his body blocks me from her sight. Clarice’s upturned face reminds me of a Biblical painting I’m certain must exist somewhere in Paris or Florence or whatever city Hannibal loves taking me to visit. If one doesn’t exist, I think that maybe, when this is all over, I’ll have Hannibal put her in one.

He sits again, warming the seat I left cold for him. He looks from her face to the mangled remnants of her thighs, and I can tell by the subtle movements of his head that he’s inspecting the wound for something. A vein— and he injects the syringe’s contents into an exposed one, hands steady and cold when he holds her into place. I wonder if she still feels pain, or if the shock has set in and offered her the briefest of reprieves. I wonder what it feels like to watch whatever it is in his syringe swim between her plasma and haemoglobin.

“Mm… I read in the Bible that God only offers forgiveness to those who shed the blood of something that represents their state of mind when approaching Him,” I say. Hannibal eases her back into her chair. Her motor function declines a little bit more with each passing moment. I watch it slip from her; I watch her realise her restraints are beyond just physical. I suck in mouthfuls of her salty panic. “I think, in many ways, consumption counts as a sacrifice to the Lord. Jesus shared pieces of His body with the Disciples. Sacrifices were usually made at an altar, no matter if they were human or animal. If your body is a temple for God anyway, why wouldn’t something passing the altar of your lips count?” His knives masticate the empty buzzing in my head again. I reach for another cigarette out of habit. “You ate the heart of a rabbit I hit and killed on the way here. It reminded me of you— foolish. Fragile. I kept it for you. I wanted to give you a chance at forgiveness, just in case God is real.”

The sound of a gag clouds her form, but it never quite makes it out. A frigid gust of air quaffs her retching. The glow in the room disappears; the candles all go out, with only the vestige of the wicks smouldering visible. I must have left the door open when I came back from the car. I get up and close the door, guided by memory of Hakeldama’s layout and a match I had lit for my cigarette. The door creaks and clicks itself closed. The smallest gust of wind stealing through the door blows my match out, plunging me into complete darkness.

I feel along the wall to find my way back to my chair, and subsequently back to my matches so that I can relight the candles that went out. I find my chair, find the matchbook hiding in the cushion, and while I’m still on my hands and knees, I turn around. My nose presses into a mass of wet woollen material I wasn’t expecting. Before I can gasp or yell or react in any way, he twists my hair between his knuckles and holds me still. Blood and sweat and the underlying sickly-sweet smell of decay he’s always coated in overwhelm me.

He won’t look at me. I know he won’t dare, that this brief moment of forbidden contact is all he’s allowing himself. I can feel how hard his dick is through his slacks. I pause. This is a test, for both of us, to see what we’ll do. He holds his breath and looks at the wall, but he doesn’t pull away when I place my hand on his upper hip. He doesn’t pull away when I rub my thumb over the outline of the bullet wound Francis left him with hidden underneath his shirt.

I press my mouth against his pants. I find his belt easily in the dark— I’ve gotten so good at doing this with one hand I don’t even have to think about what my fingers do. His own fingers twitch in my hair. The discarded box of matches tumbles to the ground with a sad shake. I use both hands to pull the front of his pants open. I slowly untuck his shirt. He doesn’t move. He still holds his breath. I continue moving slowly, savouring the seconds between individual kisses I bury under the trail of pubic hair peeking just over the waistband of his underwear. I graze my teeth over his skin, and he sucks his stomach in. A point for me.

My tongue has just barely dipped beneath the hem of his underwear when Hannibal roughly yanks me backwards by the same hair he used to draw me in. My head thumps off the arm of the chair behind me, and I accidentally bite my lip so hard I taste my own blood for the first time tonight. It’s at this point Hannibal finally looks at me. He nails me down with his eyes again. I watch the Beast beat itself against his pupils. Trying to break free and get to me.

He turns around with himself put back in place as if nothing even happened. I suck the blood from my lip, gather my matches, and start lighting the candles again. No amount of lavender will drive the smell of his skin from my memory, but it’s enough distraction to stop my knees from shaking.

“So, Clarice.” Hannibal speaks like he’s got something stuck in his throat. I can’t help but think about him being stuck in mine. I know, deep down, that he’s thinking about the exact same thing too. “I don’t think I got to my point earlier. I was just about to tell you what God’s punishment for adultery is, but we got a little, ah… busy, so I didn’t get the chance to.” A moan dies on my tongue. I refuse to give him the satisfaction— I know he used that tone on purpose, just to taunt me. I resist. His knives sing to me from across the room and give it away in one breath. More sharpening. Always sharpening. Yearning, too, dripping in the cracks. “I can tell you now, unless, of course, you already know what it is?”

Clarice remains still. And she remains still. And she remains still. “I… I can’t move,” she says. Her words are whispered. She sounds more tired than anything else. “What did you give me just now?”

Hannibal smiles. Not his normal smile, the smile he wears out with company, the smile the world knows him by. He smiles with his teeth, bared and white. He smiles the way a wolf does as it crunches the neckbones of some smaller prey in its jaw. “Just a little something to help you relax,” he responds. He sits down in front of her. He has more knives in his hands now than he did when he was skinning her. “I noticed you got a bit tetchy earlier. Thought this could help.”

“That doesn’t tell me what it is,” Clarice weeps. My eyes roll into the back of my skull. I’ve grown so exhausted of her incessant crying— it’s giving me a splitting fucking headache at this point, and when I take my seat behind them, my only thought is about how much I wish she would just shut the fuck up. “What did you give me?”

Hannibal sits like a statue. He doesn’t move, and then he does, marble cracking under his collar as he rolls his neck to ease the tension I can almost taste on the back of his neck. Thunder rumbles along his body. “Like I said, it’s to help you relax.” Hannibal sounds more tetchy himself. He doesn’t like being interrogated by the pieces of meat at the end of his blade. Never has. Don’t reckon he ever will. “Now, where were we? Ah yes. The punishment for adultery. Do you know what it is?”

“I can’t move,” she whines. Snot clogs her nose, and she coughs on her own spit. My lip curls in disgust. She keeps blabbering on while I shake a final cigarette from the crumpled pack in my pocket. Smoke eddies from the cherry, and I suck a breath down deep. “What have you done to me?”

The end of the cigarette crackles as it burns. Crimson red embers fracture the dark, and he moves in between the billows of smoke. His blade catches the underside of her tongue; blood spurts from the stump Hannibal leaves behind, bleeding from her mouth, before Clarice has even had a moment to register what happened. I drape my legs, crossed at the ankle, over the arm of my chair. I lean against the other, one arm behind my head. He drops her severed tongue on the floor with a dampened plop. I find the whole thing very amusing. I wonder if he rolled his eyes before elinguating her. I wonder if it felt good to do it.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Hannibal jeers. The softest hints of a growl bite the heels of his words, the kind I only ever hear him use when we’re alone. My thighs squeeze together tight. The cigarette shakes between my middle and index fingers. “But that’s fine. I can tell you the answer.”

Shink. Shink. Shink. I almost consider it a lullaby. Or a beautiful hymn. Each sweep of the blade is another whispered verse, and I sink my head below its melodies until I drown. Lullaby was wrong, far too juvenile for the weight of the emotions I taste on the back of my teeth while he works. Hymn is better. The paean doesn’t lull me to sleep. It brings something deep inside of me to life like nothing else does. I imagine it fills me with the same swell of power that “How Great Thou Art” fills God with.

“The punishment,” Hannibal says, voice low and dark and velvet and tempting, “is exactly what you’d expect it to be. It’s the same punishment for a lot of things that people do for one reason or another. Witchcraft… violating the Sabbath… incest— cheating on your spouse in particular. It’s the same punishment Judas got.” His knives stop singing to me mid-song. “Death.” A pause, and then— “I’m going to kill you, Clarice. And I’m going to enjoy every second of it.”

Hannibal no longer hides the rolling thunder under his tongue. With a final shaky exhale of my cigarette, I realise that he isn’t talking to Clarice anymore. Not really. And why would he? She can’t reply. Even if she wasn’t drugged to high Hell right now, she’s crying again. Nothing he could say to her would matter. She’s trying to cope with the fact that she’s about to fucking die. No, he’s not talking to her. He’s talking to me. For the first time all evening, he is addressing me directly. I sit up straight, tiptoes on the ground. I stub the cigarette out with my boot. The air in Hakeldama vanishes in an instant, and I welcome the heavens into the peeling walls of our sacred little shack. He’s talking to me.

I have his full attention.

“You might think that the drugs paralysing you right now are also going to make it so that you don’t feel any pain,” Hannibal whispers. The sound of his voice is cotton on my spine. His very presence itches under my collar. He takes his time with every syllable, speaking slow on purpose, knowing how well it would peel my bones apart on a molecular level. “And you’ve probably been waiting for it to kick in, thinking ‘any minute now, it’s going to stop hurting and I won’t feel like this anymore,’ but that’s not going to happen.” His hand, still dripping with the same blood pouring from her mouth, touches her face— first with his fingers, then with the blade still tucked into the curve of his palm. She doesn’t react. She can’t. “You’re going to feel everything. Every single move I make is going to ache in every single part of your body. And it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt a lot. But I need you to do something for me. It's very simple. All you have to do is keep your eyes on me.”

The room flares with a swell of heat that radiates outwards from where Hannibal sits on his knees in front of Clarice. My blood boils, but so does the spit in the back of my mouth and the sweat on my upper lip. My lungs expand and shrink at the same time, until it feels like every breath I take is a bubble I can’t swallow. I memorise the outline of his back, the way his hair is hanging in his eyes, the glint of the knife in his hand before it slices through Clarice’s abdomen. Then, I memorise the way her skin splits open: slowly, then all at once.

Blood leisurely waterfalls from her waist, like she’s reluctant to part with what amount is left in her body. I watch him dig his fingers in the incision he made. I feel it as if he’s doing it to me instead— it stings. And he was right, it aches, so desperately. It radiates from my hips to my knees and elbows before ebbing gently to my fingertips. I almost feel high. The smell of blood gags me. It’s thick and overwhelming and getting stronger by the second as Hannibal pries his way into her. He doesn’t usually do it like this. He doesn’t cut into his meat until they’re dead, and even then it’s just to dress them. This is different. This is a love letter dedicated just to me. This is his sacrifice to me.

He removes his hands from her abdominal cavity with measured precision. I can't quite make out what it is, but I can see that there's something small and slick in the palms of his hand. His hands glisten; it's more obvious now that he's holding more than one thing. He tosses them to the ground as if they are an afterthought in his madness. I lean closer to the red lumps on the floor. Chambers of a heart. He'd fished the rabbit heart I fed her from her stomach. No chance for forgiveness now. My blood coagulates under my skin.

I feel his fingertips crawling on my own guts while I watch him rearrange the contents of hers. The room is silent. Mostly. Mostly silent. Wet sounds of fingers prodding still-warm organs swathe the centre of the room. My breath escapes only for a moment. It echoes loudly in my ears. His moan echoes even louder, until the walls of my head shake with the force. Another one comes. I lose even more air. I nearly black out when he suddenly bites a chunk out of her abdomen. He chews. He swallows. I shift in my seat.

“What’s wrong Clarice?” he asks. He sounds so rough, like he swallowed gravel and not her stomach. Like her blood was acid instead of honey. He shoves his arm in deeper. The pain in her eyes is almost sickening. The arousal clouding my own eyes is far more vile. “I thought you wanted me inside of you.”

I can’t help it. I bite my lip, I bite my hand, I bite my tongue and cross my legs, but the deprived moan I couldn’t swallow down surfaces. It rings in the silence. Hannibal pauses in his onslaught. I hold my breath. The candles make the natural Hellfire in his eyes burn even hotter. He smiles. He smiles, and blood drips from his teeth.

Clarice’s intestines slither to the floor with a soft, soggy slap. Hannibal’s knives clatter to the ground beside them once his arm is free. He crawls to me on his hands and knees, bloody handprints getting lost in the dark as he draws near. I uncross my legs. He emerges between them, and when he kisses me, he tastes like mint and iron and smoke again. I can’t get enough of it. I will never get enough of it. He could scar the back of my throat with his tongue and I would still seek his lips out.

I barely get to kiss him back before his lips leave mine. I follow them away from me without thinking, desperate for anything to soothe the kindling ache the ghost of his kiss left on my lips, but he’s too busy to notice.

My pants are undone and around my thighs before I can protest or even process what’s happened. The cool air coils around my limbs. I barely notice it, too preoccupied with Hannibal’s mouth pressing kisses against my abdomen, my waist, my thighs. He bites a bruise into my hip and pulls me closer. I stop breathing when his tongue meets my cock.

The sparks his mouth sends crackling through my arteries reminds me of the time I electrocuted myself as a kid. My grandfather had a ranch somewhere in Alabama, and I visited a lot the year my parents got divorced, because neither one of them wanted to deal with me while they were busy ruining their own lives. He had an electric fence around the coops to keep foxes away from the hens and eggs. I touched it that year on purpose. I was too young to understand my own motives, but self reflection over the years has led me to believe that I was probably hoping it’d kill me. It didn’t. I remember what it felt like to touch it, though— sharp and loud. Like holding a lightning bolt between my teeth and trying not to let it break me open. Like eating filaments from broken lightbulbs in the attic. I felt the crisp shock repeat in every nerve for what felt like aeons. It ached, and then it didn’t, and my jeans were stiff that afternoon until I hid myself away in the barn.

Hannibal’s mouth around my cock feels like an electric fence. He is intent on keeping me corralled in one spot, right where he wants me, for that same eternity I spent with my hand on a live wire. My nervous system hisses and snaps and completely rewires itself the moment his head moves — I cry out, and his response drums filthily against my skin. I don’t notice I’m moaning his name until I hear my voice echo itself back to me in the dark. I look down. His eyes bore into mine with the same intensity they’ve held all evening, if not more. They’re darker than the night sky outside. The Beast’s maw searches for me in the dark. Guide me. My hands grip his hair tight and shove his head down, down, down until the tip of my dick meets the back of his throat. I feel his sounds before I hear them. He tastes mine.

His eyes close. His pace slows. I grapple air into my lungs, but my reprieve is short lived. Hannibal mantles the head of my dick with his lips; he sucks, gentle, something he rarely ever is. I sigh, then I whimper, and then I groan from the back of my throat as he sucks. The tip of Hannibal’s tongue flirts with the head’s slit. I have no doubt that he’s savouring the taste of my precum as he ekes it out of me. The thought corrodes my bones until I melt under his fingers and mouth.

I look down. He isn’t looking at me, too busy suckling on my cock to care about anything else. I admire his figure in the candlelight; shadows dance over him like they’re trying to avoid him. Light won’t stick to his frame. He exists between both, just like right now, he exists between my thighs. And I exist there with him, my consciousness buried in the spit on his teeth when he suddenly swallows my cock to the back of his throat. My sanity is laced up solely in the back of his mind. He fully intends to let me die there.

Hannibal looks up at me again. The Beast swishes its tail at me. I can’t move in its presence. I can’t move while his eyes are on me. He sets his jaw and pulls off, teeth scraping over my dick just enough to send goosebumps rippling across my skin. My eyes roll back, and my back arches. He moans. I die a little bit on the tip of his tongue. He swipes it clean and moans at my flavour. When I look down at him again, his eyes betray his ever-growing, insatiable appetite. Hannibal pulls his lips off my cock long enough to lick at the bloody mess he’s made while kneeling before me. Not to clean it. Just to watch me squirm.

The carnality of his gaze and the way the blood from his mouth smears across my stomach and upper thighs weighs like a stone in my gut. The longer I look in his eyes, the heavier it gets, until I feel like something inside of me is about to splinter into a million pieces. I can’t watch him. I can’t. I’ll die if I keep staring into his eyes while he blows me. He knows that— that’s why he did it. I squeeze my eyes shut, thinking it’ll help, but it doesn’t. With my eyes closed, all I have to focus on is the way his mouth feels, wet and hot and tight— and his tongue slides along my shaft with concupiscence, so fucking slow I could goddamn die, and—

Light blinds me when I open my eyes. I search the room for something, anything to focus on that isn’t hannibal swallowing around me, and all i can taste is my own spinal fluid leaking down the back of my throat and my eyes lock on Clarice’s. They’re borderline empty. Their light has almost been extinguished, and the absence of hope is a hollow red dot in the centre of her pupils. There’s a pain in her eyes unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. I watch his head bob in my lap on the outskirts of my vision, but I watch her through a tunnel. His mouth clouds my sight but not enough to obscure her face. She almost looks peaceful. I know it’s only because of the drugs— without them, she’d be crying at the top of her lungs. But she just sits there, still and silent. A porcelain doll of sorts. Hannibal swallows his spit around my dick, and in between gasping breaths, I think that maybe she looks like an angel. If comeliness were earned, right now, she would be beautiful.

My head falls back. I wonder what it must feel like, to have her insides strewn on the ground so haphazardly by the same man she fantasised about sleeping with nightly, only to watch him crawl across the floor like a fucking dog to kneel at my feet and fuck me instead. My bones decrepitate. Did he mean to? Was that his plan all along, to edge her with bastardisations of what she wanted only to get me off instead? He sucks my balls into his mouth, almost like a confirmation of my suspicions. My toes curl in my shoes so hard they start cramping. Fuck. Of course it was. Maybe he even carved our names into her bones, the way couples carve their names into trees. He does it all the time. He's a lovesick puppy, but only for me.

“Good boy,” I spit through gritted teeth. “For me.” Hannibal groans. I feel it in my own spine; I almost collapse then, but I suck in my stomach and let it fester in the pit of my gut. I repeat myself, this time louder, so Clarice can hear me clearly from where she sits. I pull his head down further on my cock. “Good boy for me, Hannibal.”

The noises he makes between my thighs are depraved and sacrilegious. I hold him in place with my thighs. I want him to stay exactly where he is. His nails dig deeper in my skin, splitting it open in a few spots, and blood rushes to the surface of my skin as a tsunami of hungry lust crashes repeatedly against the shores of my pelvis. Hannibal stares at me with wide eyes bearing false innocence we both know he has never once possessed. Still, it shatters me, if only enough for him to put a hook through the cracked opening in my belly and reel me into his mouth. He’s so good. He’s so fucking good. He doesn’t even have to try— he knows how to pull my head under the raging sea of arousal and drown me there.

Hannibal pulls off. His lips are swollen, slick, and shiny with spit. A thin trail of saliva connects his tongue to the tip of my cock until he sucks it into his mouth in quite possibly the most obscene fashion known to man. I exhale, loud and shaky. Feeling slowly returns to my fingertips while I pet his hair. He kisses my abdomen, soft and sweet and gentle, not once breaking our eye contact. His tongue explores the light pink scar I bear from hip to hip. Every touch of his skin against mine cuts like a whip. I crave more and more and more— little deaths by a thousand cuts. I want his thousand cuts. He's already left me with a few. I just want more.

The room disappears from sight. All that exists is his mouth, and his nose pressing against my groin, and my own heartbeat thumping wildly in my ears. The bottom of my stomach drops out, but not in an unpleasant or bad way. It feels like I’ve been on a roller coaster and just reached the top of the final dip in the track. I pull him closer with my thighs, and Hannibal groans right into the base of my cock. It radiates like a gunshot. I feel like blacking out.

When I look up again, I try to meet his eyes, but the fire that burns in them is too strong, too hot. I can’t. I look for Clarice again. My eyes fight to focus on her in the dying light. Her silhouette is more slumped, and I’m almost convinced she’s finally dead, but a thrill slides through my veins alongside the ecstasy when I see that she’s still breathing. It takes me a minute to see it at first, but I can see that her eyes are still fixed on us. Still watching.

I wonder if she’s jealous. I hope so. I hope that out of everything, this is the most painful part of the whole night for her. I hope that watching Hannibal fuck me after gutting her was more painful and humiliating than the actual gutting itself. Surely it must be. Surely it must fucking ravage her to be confronted with a scenario in which her death is ignored in favour of making me cum. I hope she’s jealous. I hope it fucking destroys her. I hope it eats through what’s left of her until she finally dies.

A sharp shudder passes down my spine. I guess I got so lost in thought that I didn’t realise that Hannibal had already coaxed me to the edge. It registers in my brain like a miniature arc blast, and my fingers stiffen in his hair. My muscles constrict all at once. My teeth ache, my bones ache, but I don’t care. I cry out, over and over, and he groans— I can’t even hear myself over the heat rush in my head. My ears are stopped up thanks to how hard I’m straining. My body is cut down the middle but none of my pieces know which side they’re meant to be on.

And then— an exhale in the cold. Tension releases from the bone marrow it had coiled into. My brain short circuits, and the electrical current that passes from his mouth to the centre of my abdomen is almost biblical. My eyes open after what feels like a system reset. He swallows; my thigh twitches, and his hair tickles between my knees. Colours look brighter. The candlelight is almost fluorescent with these brand new eyes. Hannibal kisses my bare skin just to taste the sweat. His eyes are, somehow, even darker than before.

I look up at Clarice and try to find her eyes through her hair. When I find them, they don’t look back.

-

“What’s on your mind, Will?”

I am pulled from my inner dusk by the sound of his voice. “What?”

“You look deep in thought. What are you thinking about?”

“Oh.” I dump the candles’ wax onto the floorboards. “I was thinking about the conversation we had after I shot Eldon Stammets.”

He smiles like he’s amused with me. He most likely is. He’s told me I’m the most amusing thing he’s ever encountered. “I remember,” Hannibal says. “It was the first time you admitted you liked killing Hobbs.”

“Of course that’s the part that you remember,” I say, dry but affectionate. “But yes, I did say that. More importantly, though, you told me that God felt powerful when He killed. You said it must feel good to Him too. And, y’know, I never really understood what you meant by that when you said it.” I stop, and my eyes sweep over the butchered mess of skin and bone that Clarice has been reduced to. “I think I get it now.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” I whisper. “I feel made in His image. Just like you said.”

He doesn’t respond. Even if he did, I wouldn’t be able to hear him over the flames.

-

We walk to our car. It’s parked across from Hakeldama in an easier-to-access section of the woods, far enough away from the blaze to not catch any attention from any emergency vehicle that might drive by, but still close enough to see the billowing smoke and the bright orange flames still dance in the moonlight. He smells like kerosene as he leads me through the tall grass. I’m still not sure which one of us started the fire. Probably him. He usually cleans up the mess.

I follow blindly behind him. My body runs on autopilot. My legs, though shaky, work of their own accord without me really having to think about it. My mind wanders the landscape ahead of us, or behind us, or somewhere just out of my reach, I’m not really sure. I can’t think straight. I haven’t been able to think straight since Hannibal pulled my pants up and got up off his knees. Some part of me still sits on that chair, staring at Clarice’s body, shivering with a post-orgasm high as Hannibal leaves heart shaped hickies between my thighs.

Every time my eyes dance around his silhouette, it feels like I’m stoking hot coals somewhere in the deepest recess of my gut. It’s a magnetic kind of discomfort. I am drawn to it, almost desperate to seek out the leaden feeling that crushes my pelvis. Hannibal’s attention is focused on getting us to our car. I can’t stop picturing the blood on my stomach. I don’t know if it’s mine I see, or if it’s hers.

I don’t even really remember making it to our car. One minute I’m stumbling over the underbrush— the next moment, Hannibal’s turning the key in the ignition. The heat rumbles slowly through the car, and I draw my knees to my chest. Hannibal loads one of his CDs into the stereo. Symphonies bleed into the air. We sit in silence.

I watch Hakeldama burn. It burns slow, and it burns quiet. The smoke blots out the stars twinkling in the sky until all that’s left is just… black. All that’s left is just a gaping, bleeding hole in the universe, but no one is going to notice this brand new portal to hell for hours. It’s just going to burn until someone smells the smoke. By then, though, it’ll be too late. We’ll be back home asleep, creating an alibi, before the emergency response teams ever show up.

Right now, however, Hannibal and I are in our car. We are watching the past few months of our lives quite literally go up in smoke, but I don’t think he’s paying attention to the fire. I’m certainly not. I’m too busy holding my breath. I don’t want a taste of his cologne to hit the back of my throat, because I know I won’t be able to behave properly otherwise. He keeps his hands on the wheel or in his lap or on the mirror, just to keep them off of me. I pretend I’m not still thinking about the way he looked at me when he crawled across that stupid fucking floor— like he was going to eat me — and he watches me do it.

“Are you okay my lamb?” Hannibal asks.

His honeyed words rot deep inside my solar plexus. He’s so fucking smug. He has been smug since the moment I first met him. I lock my gaze on a pile of leaves somewhere just outside of the clearing because I refuse to let him know that the smallest ounce of his attention has me choking to death on butterflies. I set my jaw. I don’t look at him. I won’t look at him.

“I’m, yeah. I’m fine.” I fix my gaze on the fire again. I nod towards it as convincingly as I possibly can. “Just watching.”

“Mm.” He doesn’t sound compelled by my words and it’s absolutely because he can see through my bullshit. I can smell his too, but he’s got an advantage— my brain is in pieces. I still haven’t recuperated from what he did while on his knees. I didn’t have time. After he finished, we had to clean up. This was an easier cleanup than other hunts, but we had to make sure we got all of our equipment. Now that I think about it, I think he is the one who started the fire. I think he looked me in the eyes as he did it. “You just don’t sound very sure of that.”

“Am I not sat next to you watching the fucking house burn down, Hannibal?”

I don’t need to look at him to know he’s grinning. I can hear it in his voice when he speaks . “That’s not the part I was referring to Will,” he says, just barely above a whisper in the dark, “and you knew that when you answered.”

He leans close, and there’s no way for me to avoid breathing in the smell of his skin. Underneath the sweat and blood— which is already enough to send my head swimming— he smells like the trees we’ve hidden ourselves away in with the smallest hint of something citrusy lingering at the top. And leather, too, but only when I focus. I can’t help but focus every time my lungs expand. His cologne is wearing off. i want to lick the rest of it off his neck and wrists until it makes me sick to my stomach.

I sit in silence for as long as I can muster up the strength to. I ignore the salt burning my throat and the rust clogging my throat until I have no choice but to cough my insides up around them. I barely have to turn to face Hannibal— he’s already so close it hurts. His cologne replaces the cytoplasm in my cells and slowly spreads, almost like a cancer.

“Fine.” I whisper back. “You’re right.”

He tilts his head to the side. His eyes are a maelstrom: dark, violent, and on the precipice of his pupils I can see the same Beast from before weave through his scleras and plot its escape. I sit still. Hannibal reaches up and strokes his thumb over my cheek. The gesture is so sweet, so tender, it’s almost hard for me to believe these same hands tore into a woman’s viscera and left it on the floor to rot. Only almost, though.

Hannibal’s fingers tap my chin pensively. “Right about what?”

Fucking bastard. I suck my lips against my teeth in silence while I try to gather enough of my sentience to reply. His fingers are on my pulse. “You know what.”

“I want you to say it.”

I stare indignantly at him through my lashes. I bite my tongue, because I refuse to collapse to his will so easily. He already got me inside, where I was mesmerised by his knives and his hands and I couldn’t force myself to think clearly, but here, in our own car, where the cold air clouds my breath in front of me—

Strong fingers wrap tight around my throat. No more little clouds form. My heartbeat is thunder inside my head, and I can feel each one of his fingers staining my throat with fresh bruises. The Beast in his eyes hunts the prey in mine. It runs. I run. We run, Laelaps and the Teumessian fox, until its jaw clamps down around my throat. Hannibal chokes me harder; black spots form in my vision. The lack of air in my lungs makes it hard to sit still, as my still-sensitive cock rubs uncomfortably against my clothes as it stiffens in my underwear.

“Say it.”

The direct order rings through my body like a bell. Its reverberations shake my metal spine. I feel weak. I feel dizzy, too, but not from him strangling me— well, it is because of that, I guess, but the way I want him to crawl down my throat and tear me open from the inside out is suffocating my brain far more than the lack of oxygen. His grip twists around my throat tighter. If I could, I’d moan.

I reach up and dig my thumb nail right into his radial artery until I’m sure he can feel his fingertips tingle. His nostrils flare and his jaw ticks; he only does that when I turn him on. A little victory of my own. When I finally gulp down enough air to speak, I hiss, “You’re right, I knew what you meant, I just didn’t want to tell you I keep thinking about you sucking my dick earlier.”

Silence precedes the explosive rush of air clamouring its way down into my lungs. The fresh air stings, reminding me of chewing on a piece of mint gum while drinking water, for half a second before his lips are on mine to steal it back.

I lose track of time in the shape of his mouth. I don’t know how long we spent making out in the front seat, but I remember seeing the windows coated with a thick sheet of fog on the inside while waiting for Hannibal to crawl into the backseat to meet me.

His mouth greets me with a warm welcome. He pushes me down flat, and the leather seats burn through my shirt to freeze me, despite the fact that the heat’s on full blast. I use the excuse to cling tighter to Hannibal, desperate to leech the heat he produces to an overabundance. He lets me, but at the expense of our clothes. My fingers trace the contours of his chest as he leaves rich purple bruises along my throat. I catch sight of the blood still stuck to my stomach from when he sucked me off earlier; my belly churns with boiling mercury.

I don’t even think about what I’m doing with my hands until the buckle of his belt grazes my abdomen. I inhale sharply through my teeth from the metallic touch of sudden cold, but it doesn’t do enough to interrupt my efforts to get my hands in his pants. Hannibal’s cock is warm and hard when I curl my fingers around its shaft. The slightest movement of my hand has his breath trembling in my throat. He sounds so pretty when I touch him. He never sounds like this otherwise. Hannibal stops kissing me in favour of gnawing at my collarbones like a wild animal desperate for scraps.

I rub my thumb over the tip of his dick, similar to how he used his tongue on mine earlier, and I balloon with an eclectic mix of lust and joy at the way he ruts his hips into my hand. His teeth scrape over my skin. I know he won’t be able to do more while I’m jerking him off. My hands are one of his weaknesses, like Kryptonite, rendering whatever it is that spits the flames desperate to destroy my mind and body into his soul useless. He’s unravelling. I get to hold all the loose thread.

Hannibal’s breath is hot on my shoulder. His noises are too, but in a different way. Each grunt of pleasure that tumbles from his throat tears its way through my skin and into my bloodstream until I almost feel high from it. My heart beats slowly and shallowly in the pit of my stomach. His cock throbs in my hand. My name whispers from his lips like an invocation of God. did it sound so pretty when lucifer cried out for god?

Hannibal grabs my wrist so hard I feel my bones shift underneath his fingers. I moan, both in pain and pleasure, and he twists my arm behind my back until my arm is trapped underneath me. My other hand is pinned against the door on the driver’s side. The volcanic swirl of heat in my gut burns a hole through my sternum, leaking into my heart and lungs until all I feel is fire and need. His teeth are so close to my skin. Thumping rings in my ears as we stare at each other. His breathing is heavy, and I can guess why.

The Beast slithers from its safe spot and darts into mine, ensnaring whatever prey I am in its teeth. Its meal does not fight back. In fact, I offer up my throat.

Hannibal’s eyes dart to my neck. Then to my eyes. Then to my neck again, slick and shiny with his spit. We lay in muffled silence for what feels like a lifetime, and then— I shiver as I hear the click of his blade being unsheathed. He cuts my pants off of me. If I weren’t so horny, I’d probably be annoyed, because those were my favourite pants, but the cool blade kisses my hips like a secondary lover, and I can’t be bothered to care about anything that isn’t my own skin or the taste of blood.

After cutting my shirt off, Hannibal holds his switchblade to my throat. I mewl, just for him, just the way he likes. He exhales like it’s a chore, and I feel the blade nick my skin just enough to leave a cut, but not enough to bleed. Disappointing. I press my throat up into his knife, until I feel the metal in my larynx when I breathe in. I inhale like it’s a chore and challenge him with my eyes. Hannibal likes fucking things he puts his knives in. I want to be his pincushion.

He doesn’t move— at least not at first. But then the blade slides cleanly over my skin, and blood cools in the dip of my collarbones, and I feel his tongue slide over the incision. If it were deeper, he’d have his tongue inside of it, but he never cuts my throat deep.

Hannibal licks up what he can before the incision stops bleeding. His breaths come in deep rumbles that echo in the back of both of our chests. Bloody kisses smear across my neck and shoulders. I watch him wipe my blood off the corner of his mouth before he shoves his fingers down my throat. My brain shuts off almost immediately. I suck, and I suck, and I suck. His knife carves another heart into my hip. I groan, and my fingers curl into a fist behind my back.

Hannibal holds the switchblade in his teeth while he readjusts how I’m laying. He shimmies the rest of the way out of his pants, and he discards them on the floorboard with the remnants of my clothes. Our eyes meet once we’re skin to skin. He grabs the switchblade from between his teeth and drags the point of the blade over my thighs. It tickles, but it also numbs me from the waist down. I whimper. He smiles. I swallow around Hannibal’s fingers to keep any other noise from slipping past.

He digs the blade in deeper until I’m bleeding again. It’s not much— a thin line of crimson shimmers like black diamonds in the stolen bits of moonlight that spill over our shadows, but it’s enough to shatter whatever self restraint I’d been festering for the last however long. I bite down; blood fills my mouth, and he hisses in pain. I swallow the mouthful of his blood with a grin before he yanks his fingers out of my mouth. Hannibal’s blood splashes along my abdomen and mixes with the rest. Mine streaks across his ribs when he moves back. I grin at him, and I giggle when he immediately looks away. The switchblade tumbles to the floor.

“Are you okay my lamb?” I ask, in the same tone he asked me. Just to mock him.

Hannibal’s eyes flash with something dangerous. My nerves spark with electric need and something like fear, but not quite. I don’t have a word for it. I don’t have to have a word for it, though, and I don’t need words ever again after his fingers push inside of me. Using his own blood as lube. I could fucking die.

I collapse back into the pleated leather of the seat, and it sticks to my skin from the mix of blood and sweat. I don’t even fucking care. All I care about is how his fingers feel when they curl inside of me, and how they feel when he pushes them in deeper, and how they feel when they stretch me open. I groan because it hurts like hell. I moan because it feels like heaven. My eyelids flutter shut; suddenly, all I am is whatever I can feel, and all I can feel is Hannibal fucking me with his fingers.

After what feels like a blissful eternity, I am dropped back into an empty reality as I realise he’s pulled his fingers out of me. I blink through the dark to try and find him. Our eyes meet in the middle of the shadows, and I am held in place by them. Such impiety paints his irises that I can’t look away. He is the rapture in my head, rendering my thoughts moot simply by breaking them in half. when humans were first tempted by the devil, did he hold them so tenderly in his palms before dashing their souls against the rocks? would my mephistopheles be more brutal with his love? i hope so. i want the sickest shades of his violence all for myself. And then, like the flowers blooming in spring, I gasp for air.

I hadn’t noticed Hannibal line himself up in between my legs. His cock presses against my hole but doesn’t stop until our hips are connected. My blood stains his hip. I only see it when he pulls back out and i feel every single fucking movement he makes in the marrow of my pelvic bone but the image burns itself on the inside of my eyelids. I see the harsh red outline every time I blink. My heart. His heart. I lick his blood off my teeth. It has a candied taste that I never knew was possible to possess. He kisses me.

The kiss doesn’t last for very long. I didn’t think it would once he tasted himself. Instead, he warms my skin with his breath, and I grab his shoulder with my free hand. My nails dig into his muscle, which only makes him fuck me harder. My wanton breathing echoes over the radio in the backseat. I bury a groan in his shoulder when he shoves in deeper, my teeth leaving crescent moon indents in his skin. Hannibal repeats my own sounds of pleasure back to me.

I wrap my legs tight around Hannibal’s waist to keep him in place. The car squeaks a little as it shakes back and forth from the force of his body driving into mine, and all I can do is grip the seat belt buckle under my back like a lifeline. My fingers ache. My stomach aches. Everything fucking aches, and it all aches for him and his violence specifically. I watch him through hooded eyes and silently beg him to break my bones. He won’t, I know he won’t, no matter how deep he digs his nails into the bloody heart on my hip. I want him to hurt me in ways he won’t allow himself to hurt me in. I want him to hunt me in ways he saves in his back pocket to use as lethal takedown. I don’t care. I want him to kill me and I want him to eat his favourite pieces and take the rest home in a glass jar. I want him to love me.

His mouth clumsily fits into the concave of my shoulder, and he bites down so hard my vision glosses over. The moonlight aggravates them so I close my eyes. Star-like shapes dance in the darkness. I taste them singe the back of my throat, and I feel them chew on my pelvis. He’s there in the middle of all of it. Warm, sweaty, and reeking of blood and ash. Satan crawling through the cracks of the Earth to get to me specifically. I want to crack open his ribcage and live there. I want him to fuck me until I stop breathing.

Bones shift in my wrist like before, and I realise too late that he’s pinning me down again. I cry pleasure that weaves through the snare drums in the song playing through the radio. He cries power into my collarbone until it shakes. I whine, mouth open, and he spits in my mouth after. I shudder so hard he stops, concerned.

“Nonono, don’t stop,” I whimper. I sound so fucking pathetic. I don’t care. I don’t care. All of my muscles are screaming for him to move before my entire body atrophies into the seat. “Fuck me, please— don’t stop, keep going, fuck me, fuck me, f—”

Hannibal cuts me off with a quick, sharp rut of his hips into mine. My head knocks into the door, and I’m convinced I feel the bones in my hips and lower spine crack from the force. I don’t care. I want it “harder, fuck, harder,” and he swallows my guttural pleas down into the bottom of his stomach. Hannibal kisses me to shut me up. Whatever creature he harbours in his eyes clamps its incisors and fangs around the fleshy part of my throat. I bleed. I bleed. I give them both whatever I have.

eat me. eat me. fuck and kill me and then fill me with cum when it’s over.

Tears melt into my hairline. I’m not sure when I started crying, but it doesn’t matter. I sob, each breath I take shallow and pained and full of Hannibal’s name, each exhale a moan or something louder, something filthier. He keeps whispering in my ear— he tells me I’m a good boy, and that I make pretty sounds, and that I’d be prettier with his knife in my chest. I can’t reply. I’m too busy trying to find oxygen in the upper troposphere of the backseat. He knows he’s right. He doesn’t need me to say it too.

Hannibal grips my hips tight and pulls me closer. He holds my thighs in place despite their trembling. My chest heaves. I hold onto his left forearm hard my fingertips turn the colour of a corpse. would he fuck me still if i were one? i think he might. He chuffs. I bleat submission through my tears. He snarls, and I feel the sound in the back of my mind first, then in the bottom of my stomach. He holds me down. Trapped. All his.

I whine until it hurts. All other sounds scrape my vocal cords raw. Every so often, my muscles convulse underneath my skin, like they’re threatening to pull themselves clean out of me. My nervous system doesn’t know how to process anything that isn’t hard cock deep inside of me fucking me until he’s finished and satisfied with me. I can’t see through the tears in my eyes. Precum beads at the head of my own dick before sliding down the length of my shaft and pooling on my stomach.

The ringing in my ears crescendos until it’s the only thing I can hear besides the rush of my own blood as it courses through my collapsing veins. I squeeze my eyes shut, and more tears flood my ears. I stop breathing. I don’t need air— I just need him to keep fucking me into the burgundy leather he has me pinned to. And he does. All I become are his hands on my skin, and his cock buried deep inside of me, and the heart still exudating plasma on my hip. My head aches. Both of them. My nails tear through Hannibal’s chest. I can’t understand what expletive escapes him into the night, but I feel it pulsate in my gut.

I come through gritted teeth with my hand fisted against his chest. My thighs squeeze his waist, and I bang my head off the door several times while waiting for my muscles to uncoil underneath my skin. I feel like a piece of paper on fire— curling in on my own edges, white hot as it spreads from end to end. I remember groaning his name. I remember how it tasted on the front of my throat before it morphed into a gasp of surprise halfway through. I remember how it dripped down into the pit of my stomach like milk and honey. When he finally pulls out, his cum dribbles out of me and onto the leather seat.

I struggle for air. I still can’t really see straight, but I can make out enough shapes to see Hannibal. I blink a few times. His face clears in my vision; I watch him grab the clothes he cut off me to use as a rag to clean us both off. I don’t watch and barely respond to his touch as he cleans first himself, then me. Everything tingles. Everything is both hot and cold at the same time, and I can’t stop shivering and sweating. Hannibal hands me a too-big hoodie he has stashed under his seat. He covers my waist with a blanket.

I pull the hoodie on once I remember how to move my limbs again. Hannibal’s already dressed by then, wearing a different sweatshirt— I guess he left it in the back window— and his pants. A cigarette dangles from between his lips and fills the car’s cabin with smoke. He watches me with a pleasant expression on his face. I sit and stare at my knees and try to remember how to make myself function.

He offers me the cigarette after blowing smoke through his nose. I shake my head. “You don’t smoke menthol,” I mutter.

Hannibal smiles, but it’s different from any other time he’s smiled during the night. He’s not being affectatious. He’s not being smug. He’s not being… anything. There’s nothing malicious in the curves of his lips. It’s just warm. “This is one of yours, my lamb.”

My insides twist, this time with affection. I let him place the cigarette in my mouth. I inhale, and I hold the smoke in my chest while I memorise the outline of his face. I blow a smoke ring back at him. It floats above his head, suspended in the sticky air like a shining halo. I think I read somewhere that Lucifer was God’s favourite angel before being cast out. I wonder if Lucifer was still his favourite after the fall, too.

I give Hannibal the cigarette again. As he smokes, I think to myself— he’s my favourite. Doesn’t matter what or who he is. Doesn’t matter what he does. I like him the best out of anything in this world and the next. Hannibal exhales more smoke and looks up at me like I’m the only thing in the universe. I am drawn to him like tides to the moon. Like a moth to flame. Like foxes to rabbit blood. Like a lamb to slaughter. He raises his eyebrows, and I understand his secret language fluently.

I open my mouth. He puts the cigarette out on my tongue. Once it’s out, he gets back behind the wheel. I stay in the backseat, and he drives. I fall asleep with the taste of ash and his blood, still fresh and lingering in my mouth.