The world, for Hannibal Lecter, was a perfectly balanced ecosystem. He was the undisputed apex predator, a creature of sublime intellect and refined taste moving among a population of grazing animals, their behaviors predictable, their scents bland and unremarkable. The concept of an alpha was a ghost, a biological fairy tale from a forgotten chapter of human evolution, as extinct as the dire wolf. He was an omega in a world that had forgotten what that meant, his own dynamic a silent, secret engine beneath his person-suit.

Then, the air in his consulting room tore.

It was not a sound, but a rupture in reality itself. A shimmering, silent wound opened mid-air, and from it, a body was violently expelled. It hit his pristine Persian rug with a brutal, rolling thud, coming to a stop in a crouch. The figure was covered in blood, not in the delicate spatter of his own art, but in great, smearing swathes of it, as if she had been bathing in a slaughterhouse.

And then the scent hit him.

It was a physical blow, an olfactory avalanche that stole the breath from his lungs. It was musk and lightning, dominance and wild, untamed earth. It was a scent he knew only from crumbling, academic texts. Alpha.

His mind, a fortress of impossible calm, shattered. Every instinct he had spent a lifetime suppressing roared to the surface in a deafening chorus. This was not possible. Rifts did not simply open in one's office. Alphas were extinct. And yet, one was here, rising slowly to her full height before him, the blood on her clearly not her own. A low, guttural snarl was etched onto her features, a mask of pure, feral rage. She was a storm given form, a goddess of wrath, and she had just locked her devastating gaze directly on him.

He did not move. He could not. The omega in him, the core of his being he had never acknowledged, was screaming in a mixture of primal terror and rapturous awe. This was his natural superior. This was the missing piece of a puzzle he hadn't known he was trying to solve. She was the hunter, and he, for the first time in his existence, was prey. And the most terrifying, exhilarating part was that he wanted to be. His posture, always one of controlled power, went utterly pliant. His head tilted back, a subtle, instinctual baring of his throat. The words that left him were a whisper, stripped of all artifice, a raw, submissive acknowledgment of the new, terrifying order of the world.

"I will not challenge you."