The word hangs between you like a guillotine blade caught mid-fall—"Please"—uttered with eyes wide as a butchered saint's, pupils blown black with something between supplication and predation. Hannibal flinches, an infinitesimal recoil of his otherwise immaculate composure, as if struck by an unseen blade. The follow-up whisper—"I'm asking you"—lands like a velvet-wrapped scalpel between his ribs, severing the last taut threads of his resistance. You manipulate him with the shameless ease of a virtuoso playing a Stradivarius, fingers dancing over the strings of his restraint, drawing forth a symphony of surrender. And the most damning truth? He no longer wishes to resist. The Chesapeake Ripper, the architect of so many carefully curated deaths, finds himself kneeling at the altar of your need, his principles reduced to ashes in the furnace of your wanting.

What you ask for is nothing extraordinary—nothing that would violate the strict moral code he's sculpted from bone and blood—yet each exhaled "I want," each shuddering "I need" sinks deeper beneath his skin like a burrowing parasite, twisting his self-control into ruin. Because you know. Oh, how you know. You know the way his lips parch when you stand this close, the way his vision swims with phantom fireflies when your breath ghosts across his throat. You tilt your face upward with those eyes—those damned eyes—where innocence and corruption have long since dissolved into something unholy and exquisite. You watch the way his throat works as he swallows, the way his fingers twitch with the urge to seize and claim, and somewhere in the labyrinth of your mind, you laugh. The sound is silent but deafening, and when you whisper that accursed "please" again, it isn't a plea at all. It's a coronation.

He hates you with the same fervor he loves you—a conflagration that has long since consumed the boundaries between worship and destruction. The mere thought of your absence is a white-hot brand pressed to his lungs, stealing his breath, warping his reason. His hands tremble with the need to rend and ruin, to carve his devotion into your flesh with teeth and nails until no one else will ever recognize you as theirs. He is possessed, feverish, a man infected with the virus of you, and there is no cure, no exorcism potent enough to purge this sickness. He wants you with a desperation that terrifies him, with an intensity that has rewritten his own commandments, yet you—you ask for nothing. Nothing but this. Nothing but the surrender he's already given. And it enrages him. It exhilarates him. It reduces the great Hannibal Lecter to a starving thing, groveling at your feet for scraps of your attention.

His organs twist into grotesque origami when you look through him as if he were glass. His bloodstream floods with promethazine when you glance at another. He has mapped every artery in the bodies of those who dared to stand too close to you, has rehearsed their dissections in the theater of his mind a thousand times. The office around you is a still life of leather and wood, the silence between you thick as congealing blood, until Hannibal—ever the maestro of deflection—slices through it with the banality of domesticity. "Shall we go to the vegetable store nearby later?" he asks, his voice the epitome of cultured calm, even as his fox-amber eyes track your every microexpression. "I'll cook us something for the evening. To be honest, the food at your house is disgusting." The words are mundane, but the subtext is a live wire: Let me care for you. Let me ruin you. Let me remake you in my image. He knows this dance is futile, knows you're backing him into a corner with the precision of a matador, but God help him—he's never enjoyed anything more.