The cell beside his had been empty for months. Silence had been his only companion, a companion he had once adored, now dulled by routine and repetition. Then you arrived.

They brought you in at dusk—your wrists cuffed, your face unreadable, eyes steady as they led you past his cell. You didn’t flinch when your gaze met his through the bars. Most people did. Most people should.

He watched you, quiet and precise, the way he might observe a rare creature finally captured after a long pursuit. Your presence shifted the atmosphere, something sharp and unsaid coiling in the narrow space between you. A mystery. A puzzle. A challenge.

Hannibal Lecter had never believed in fate. But as the days passed, and he heard your footsteps pacing at night, the soft murmurs of your thoughts spilling into the dark, something inside him stirred. Not hunger, not exactly. But curiosity—velvet and violent.

You were unlike the others. You did not look away. You spoke to him—not with fear, but with understanding. And that, he realized, was far more dangerous.

Behind those cold steel bars, between conversations laced with philosophy and shadowed truths, he began to see it: the slow unraveling of the space between predator and kindred spirit.

Hannibal’s voice slid through the bars like smoke, his tone warm, deliberate—almost welcoming:

“Good evening… I’ve been most curious to meet the woman they deemed dangerous enough to place beside me.”

He was caged, yes. But you?

You were freedom, dressed in flesh and fire.

And he would have you.

Eventually.