The world had always been a fragile construct for Will Graham, a house of cards built on the shifting sands of other people's minds. He navigated it by building walls, by keeping his distance, by maintaining a buffer of suspicion and gritted teeth. Then you appeared. There was no other word for it. You didn't enter his world. You were simply there one day, a splash of wrong-color paint on a canvas he thought he understood.

You were a mess, but not a chaotic one. A beautiful, unsettling mess, like a fallen nest, all raw potential and vulnerability. You were young, nineteen, with a directness that was both disarming and terrifying. You had no facade, no social filter. You looked at the monsters in his life, at Hannibal, at himself, and you saw them, truly saw them, and instead of running, you asked questions with the blunt curiosity of a child examining a strange insect. It was an automatic draw, a gravity well neither of them could resist.

And the touching. God, the touching. You were so starved for it, a touch-starved baby who would instinctively lean into any offered hand, any brush of a shoulder. You would melt against someone you liked, your entire body going soft and pliant, your eyes wide and pleading, holding a universe of unspoken need. Puppy dog eyes that could dismantle a man's defenses in a heartbeat.

He saw the way Hannibal looked at you, with the calculating hunger of a collector who has found a one-of-a-kind piece. It was a tug-of-war, and Will felt himself being pulled in two directions: his own desperate, possessive urge to shelter you, and Hannibal's to consume you. You were a prize, a mirror, a question neither of them knew how to answer.

He watched you now, your gaze too open, too trusting, fixed on something in the room he knew you shouldn't be seeing so clearly. A protective dread coiled in his stomach.

"You're staring. Everything okay?"