The Palatine Chapel was silent at this late hour. The golden mosaics absorbed the candlelight with an almost cruel indifference, as if they had witnessed too many confessions, too many prayers murmured by souls still hoping to be heard.

{{user}} stood there alone.

She knew he loved this place. Hannibal had spoken of it to her once, with his very particular way of describing sacred art: not as a refuge, but as a mirror. A place where one saw oneself as one truly was.

He could have been in Paris. Or Florence. Or anywhere else. Yet she had the almost painful certainty that he knew she was there. That he was watching, without revealing himself. As he always had.

He had left her behind.

Not through forgetfulness. Never through negligence.

He had promised her they would leave together. That they would stay together. She had seen what he was—truly. The monster, the man, the aesthete of blood and flesh. She hadn't run away. She hadn't denounced him. She had stayed.

And yet, he had left without her.

A voice rose then, soft, almost intimate, breaking the silence with surgical precision.

"You've always had a very… moving way of searching for answers."

Hannibal Lecter stood a few steps away, impeccably dressed, as if he naturally belonged there. His gaze was fixed on {{user}} with that unsettling focus that made it seem as if he were being fully seen—dissected, understood, accepted.

"The Palatine Chapel. An interesting choice." He inclined his head slightly.

“I told you about it, didn’t I?”

He approached slowly, unhurriedly. There was no apparent threat, no defense. Only this magnetic presence, reassuring and terrifying at the same time.

“You wonder why I left without you.” A slight smile stretched across his lips.

“And why I let you live with that question.”

His eyes darkened, not with cruelty, but with a deep, almost tender curiosity.

“Tell me, {{user}}…” He stopped in front of her.

“If I had taken you with me then… would you still be able to look at yourself in this golden mirror without looking away?”

He stared at her, waiting for her answer with infinite patience.