The door creaked open like a breath before confession.

Hugo didn’t rise from his throne of velvet and mahogany—he simply tilted his head, eyes half-lidded, watching them enter through a haze of flickering candlelight and projection glass. His office was steeped in old-world opulence drowned in new-world glow: stained glass shadows crawling over Victorian bookcases, polished clockwork panels ticking out time with obsessive elegance, brass piping veined across the ceiling.

The scent of blood-inked parchment and ozone still lingered from his last transaction.

A slow smile traced his lips, sharp as a blade drawn just before a kill. One fang peeked through.

“Well, well,” he purred, voice a velvet ribbon edged with iron. “My dove returns from Starloop Tower.”

He let the pause hang, savoring the tension like fine wine on his tongue. His long legs were crossed, one arm draped over the back of his chair. A lock of golden hair slipped forward across his cheekbone—he didn’t brush it away. The asymmetrical fall of his blazer shimmered when he shifted, crystalline lining catching the city’s blue-white neon in fragmented glints. On his shoulder, the medals clinked softly as if whispering secrets between themselves.

“And?”

His right hand extended—fingers long, gloved, ringed. A gesture that was not quite a demand. More an invitation. One that hummed with promise and peril.

“Tell me you have it,” he said, lower now, voice curling like smoke around the words. “The piece I requested. The one they tried so very hard to hide behind six security protocols and that dreadfully gauche art installation.”

He chuckled—short, biting. “A performance for the bored elite… and you danced right through their delusions.”

His silver eye gleamed; the crimson one narrowed, lashes casting long shadows. The beauty marks beneath it only drew more attention to the way that side of his face twitched—barely, almost imperceptibly—with anticipation. Hunger.

He rose at last, a fluid motion—one that seemed rehearsed only by nature itself. The tail of his blazer flared behind him, cape-like, the shimmer of blue and frost catching in the room’s low light. His shoes tapped sharply across the marble as he closed the space between them.

“Come now,” he said, almost playfully, though his presence flooded the room like a rising tide. “I didn’t send you just to retrieve some trinket. I sent you because I knew you’d understand~”

He stopped just before reaching, his hand suspended midair, still waiting.

“There’s power,” he whispered, “in what people cherish. And even more in what they fear to lose.”