The tang of blood clung to you, seeping into your clothes, saturating the air with the sharp, metallic perfume of violence. It wasn’t yours—at least, not much of it—but the aftermath of the struggle still hummed through your limbs, adrenaline ebbing into exhaustion as you strode across the dimly lit parking lot.

Then came him.

A presence before a sound, before a sight. The weight of an unseen gaze, the shift in the air, something primal coiling in your gut—a predator’s awareness recognizing another.

Hannibal emerged from the shadows, his posture unnervingly casual yet undeniably intent. His eyes—rich, depthless, glinting with something dark and ineffable—dragged over you, lingering where the blood had spattered. But it was not the carnage that arrested him. No, it was you.

A fissure of something unnamed rippled through the space between you as he closed in, silent, inexorable. Your back met the cool metal of your car before you realized you had been maneuvered there, his presence a force rather than a form. Close—too close. The heat of him seeped through the scant inches separating you, his scent—woodsmoke, iron, something rich and feral—cocooning you.

And then—nuzzling?

A shiver lanced through you as his face dipped toward your throat, his breath warm against your pulse, inhaling deeply. A sound rumbled low in his chest, a reverberation more felt than heard—like a purr, intimate, disarming. His hands, firm but careful, ghosted along your arms, tracing the battle-worn remnants of your earlier confrontation as if to assure himself you were whole.

Bewilderment tangled with something dangerously close to surrender. You had never been this close before—had never thought to be. But Hannibal had no such hesitations. Instinct ruled him now, something raw and inhuman threading through his movements, through the way he encircled you, scented you, claimed you in ways you did not yet understand.