steel & lace

He had not turned yet. Not fully. Only enough for her to see the angled set of his shoulders beneath the dark cut of his coat, the sharp dip of a collar against a throat that did not carry tension, only intention.

He stood with his back slightly toward her, a hand resting idly near a display case whose contents were lost in shadow. There was no sense that he had been waiting for long. No restless shifting. No performative stillness. Only the exquisite suggestion that he had known the precise moment she would arrive — and had arranged himself to match it.

With the deliberation of something inevitable and already decided, he turned his head. Not quickly. Not for spectacle. But with the ease of a man who knows his own gravity. His gaze reached her first — not direct, not invasive — but absolute. 

                His body followed second — then he spoke.

His voice entered the room like smoke through a cathedral window — slow and low, curling through the rafters of her mind before settling somewhere interior, someplace between the throat and the spine. The cadence was measured, the pitch near reverent, the articulation so precise it bordered on tactile.

                “I’ve always found this room impossible to catalogue.” 

There was no introduction. No pleasantry. No name spoken aloud. Only that sentence — elegant, unmoored, offered like a string left trailing from a tapestry she had not realized was already unraveling.

He stepped forward, not toward her, but into the center of the space where the shadows folded more tightly around his figure, where the pools of dim light touched only the edges of his coat, the gleam of a single button. He gestured lightly — not with flourish, but with subtle gravity — toward the vitrines lined along the far wall, cases filled with relics and specimens whose origins had long since been reduced to rumor.

                “Everything here was once — ” he continued, voice softer now, but no less resonant. “misclassified — tools thought ornamental, which were in factritual. Vessels carved for beauty but used for blood. They have lived too long beneath the wrong definitions.”

He paused, letting the words hang, unfinished. Not because he lacked more to say — but because he had already said enough.

                “Some objects are more precise in silence.”

It was not until he said the final word — silence — that she realized she had not taken a breath since he began. Alise stood motionless, and yet inside her, something had already begun to shift. Not in panic. Not even in confusion. But in alignment. The way a key fits into a lock not by force, but by inevitability. The way the weight of a body returns to itself after dissection — not reanimated, but understood.

She felt the words in her throat, thick and unfamiliar. Not replies. Not arguments. But echoes.

He had spoken about the room, yes — the cases, the bone, the blood. But the words clung to her. Crawled up the lining of her coat and settled against her sternum. Because something in her knew — perhaps not intellectually, but instinctively — that the room was not the subject.

She was. And when he said, with that quiet conviction —                                                 “I thought it a fitting place.”

                She did not ask,                               “For what?”                 She did not need to.

Because whatever answer might follow, she had already entered it. She was inside the breath of it now, and whatever lay behind that statement had been prepared for her long before the invitation had ever arrived. She stepped forward — not toward him, but into the sentence. Into the space he had curated with such devastating precision.

Her heels did not echo. The floor accepted her presence without sound. The hem of her coat did not flare. It dragged. The air brushed her cheek with the cool touch of aged stone, and still, she did not break his gaze. He did not smile. But he watched her with a stillness that suggested not curiosity, but recognition. 

                As if he had known her from the architecture of her silence alone.                  As if she had been measured, drawn,  and memorized before ever stepping into view.

She stopped just shy of closeness — not out of apprehension, not to flinch away — but from an understanding, deep and unspoken, that the final inch between bodies can carry more meaning than any contact ever could. That proximity, when held taut and unsatisfied, hums louder than touch. Her body obeyed the ancient intuition that some spaces are best left charged, not crossed — not yet.

The tension there was not mere anticipation — it was orchestral. That space between them reverberated like a held note at the end of a concerto, asking not to be resolved, only endured. She stood in it as one might stand before a sculpture carved from something too old to name — not afraid to touch it, exactly, but aware that doing so would change something fundamental.

The silence that bloomed between them was not incidental, nor accidental. It was cultivated. A stillness that descended like velvet drawn over a mirror. Not awkward, not empty, but deliberate. The kind of silence that does not wait to be filled — it chooses to hold its breath. And she stood in it, not nervously, but as one might stand in the hush before a requiem begins — still, composed, aware that she had entered the part of the evening where every gesture echoed more loudly than words.

She watched him. Not with wonder. Not with submission. But with that particular kind of attention a woman grants a man who clearly does not need to speak to be understood. She did not smile. She did not avert her eyes. And yet, there was something in her stillness that felt like an answer. Not submission. Not invitation. But an understanding, ancient as blood: I see you. And I will not be moved unless I choose to be.

He wore his restraint like a tailored suit — dark, perfectly fitted, impossible not to notice. It was in the way he held himself: poised but not rigid, shoulders relaxed with an elegance that did not beg for notice but commanded it. And it was in his mouth — not the shape of it, but the way it curved around words as though each syllable was a choice made with surgical care.

He was striking, but not in the predictable way that flattens. His features were cut fine, but it was the discipline of them that drew her eye. The way they never betrayed him. The way his silence somehow contained entire sentences he had not yet spoken. His voice earlier had not seduced. It had articulated. And yet, it remained in her bloodstream, thrumming somewhere beneath the surface like a second pulse not quite synced to her own.

                She didn’t move closer; she didn’t need to.                 The tension lived quite comfortably where it was.

There was something in his presence — neither his posture nor his features — but in the eloquence of his restraint, the symphonic pause between word and breath, that unsettled her in a way she couldn’t name and did not, yet, try to. And yet — perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps she was simply reading too much into tone and timing — a habit born from long hours alone, where every shadow had narrative potential.

Still, there was a moment — brief, weightless — when she realized, with the kind of slow, private clarity that arrives not in thought but in sensation — if he were to speak again now, low and deliberate, with her name on his tongue as though it belonged to him, she would answer.

                Not out of obedience. Not even out of desire.

But because there was something in his intonation, in the reverent sharpness of his diction, that felt less like a call and more like a summons — not from man to woman, but from one instinct to another.

                A strange notion. Possibly indulgent.

She did not know — not yet — if she was moving forward, or merely beginning to tilt. Because he had not touched her. But something in her had already begun to respond — a strain at the base of the spine, the flutter of a thought she couldn’t pin down. She wondered, for the briefest flicker of a second, if this was what it meant to be chosen without being asked.

                Not possessed. Not even pursued.                 But observed.                 And perhaps that was all it took.

Because the undoing doesn’t always begin with a hand or a word. Sometimes it starts with a stillness. A breath too sharply drawn. A name that hasn’t yet been spoken, but already sounds like an answer.

There was something in the way he waited — not impatiently, not expectantly — but like a man who already knew how the silence would end. His posture did not waver, his gaze did not pierce, but she felt it nonetheless, the way one feels weather before it breaks: in the bones, in the blood, in the still air that seems to hum against the skin.

Her voice emerged soft, but shaped — deliberate, as though carved from the air between them, “I wasn’t sure you meant for me to come.” She had meant it as casual, or something approximating it. But the syllables landed too carefully, folded too precisely. A truth poorly disguised as doubt. She regretted it immediately.

                His lips curved — barely. Not a smile.                  Something smaller. More forensic.                                 And yet somehow still warm.

“I meant only to allow for the possibility,” he murmured, his words unfurling like smoke in a sealed room — slow, elegant, and strangely precise. “What you do with that allowance is entirely your own design.”

Alise could not tell if it was a compliment or a caution. But it nestled somewhere beneath her collarbone nonetheless. She studied his profile, but not too directly. Not the way prey watches a predator — she didn’t feel like prey. Not exactly. She felt… like something that had wandered into a story already half-written, and now stood too still for fear of turning the page.

                He didn’t move closer. But she felt, unmistakably, that he had advanced.

“How often,” she asked, fingers absently grazing the fabric at her wrist, “do you extend such allowances to strangers?” 

She expected the wry dismissal of a man too elegant to speak plainly — a practiced deflection. But rather, he met her gaze — not boldly, but with a stillness that suggested familiarity — and with a hush of something remembered, he murmured, “You aren't unfamiliar.”

                As though the word stranger had never once applied.

It was too much and not enough. A statement impossible to challenge without making it a question, so she didn’t. She remained still, allowing it to reshape the room. Because how could she argue with something she had almost believed already?

A low hum passed through her chest, the nervous system’s equivalent of a second glance. The skin at her nape prickled, not with dread but with something more ceremonial — the sense that something sacred had been named, not out loud, but in atmosphere. And if she wasn’t careful, she would bow.

                Not to him — to the idea of him.

There was a pause then — long enough to become a decision — and she found herself speaking again, softly but with spine beneath it, the kind of confidence a woman wears like a blade hidden in silk. “I’m not easily drawn,” she remarked, a slight tilt to her voice. Not flirtation. Statement. And yet… it trembled like a candle’s edge when she finished it, too close to heat.

A breath passed between them. His, not sharp. Not surprised. Merely aware.

                “Then it must be something about this place,” he intoned,                            “that allows certain gravities to behave unusually.”

It was not a provocation. Nor was it the smooth filament of flirtation, strung out between two well-dressed strangers under the guise of intellect. No — his words bore no lilt of seduction, no tilt toward conquest. What he offered was something else entirely: A theory articulated not with desire but with restraint, allowed to settle like wine in an open glass. Left to oxidize. To deepen in the air.

She did not respond. Not aloud. Her lips remained still, curved at the edges with the faint impression of thought, but unformed by language. She had no need to speak, not when the line he’d given her — deceptively mild, exquisitely measured — continued to unfold within her chest like a forgotten verse being recited in a voice that was not hers. The cadence of it was elegant, the implication clever, but it was the familiarity that arrested her. 

Her gaze dipped, slow and deliberate, but not in deference. In contemplation. In quiet acknowledgment of the shift that had occurred, not in the room, but in her. The air had not changed, nor had the lighting. But something subtle had realigned — a tilt in her inner compass that left her, for the first time in years, unsure of the coordinates she moved by.

                Because she did not truly know why she had come here.                 Not fully.  Not honestly.  Not yet.

It was not curiosity — not merely. Nor was it ambition, not in the vulgar sense. There had been a pull, yes, but it hadn’t come from him. At least, she did not think it had. It had been older than his gaze. Older than the card. It had sounded like her name, not as it was often spoken, but as it existed within her — bone-deep, unfinished, reverent.

When he turned from her — and he did, eventually, not abruptly but with the quiet authority of someone closing a book they had read many times before — she didn’t follow. She didn’t speak. But she did watch. Not the line of his back, nor the slope of his retreat. She watched the shape of absence he left behind. The negative space of him. The vacancy sculpted by his departure like a chair pulled from a table long prepared.

                It was shaped, unmistakably, for her.

At the front of the hall, Dr. Lecter descended from the dais with the same preternatural composure he had brought to the lectern — movements fluid, economic, void of the mortal pauses that marked other men. here had been no theatricality to it — no flourish, no final remark — only the quiet retraction of presence, like a scalpel sliding back into velvet. He collected nothing; did not shuffle notes into a briefcase. He murmured two inaudible words to the director of the hosting society — barely enough to qualify as farewell — and slipped into the slow-moving tide of scholars with the ease of a shadow finding its original shape.

He did not glance toward her, but as he passed, his shoulder brushed within inches of the row where she sat, and the wake of his passage disturbed something in the air — not scent, but temperature. As if his movement had shifted the molecules themselves.

She watched the hem of his coat disappear behind the partitioned curtain of the ‘staff only’ doors. Alise stood a full minute later. No celerity. No fluster. A controlled rise, deliberate and clean. She adjusted the fall of her coat with a flick of her fingers and moved toward the aisle, unbothered by the dwindling crowd — leaving no footprint of haste in her wake.

Her heels struck the floor not as staccato, but as punctuation: a measured semicolon to the evening’s sentence. She was not the first to leave. Certainly not the last. But alone. No one stopped her. No one dared to fall into step beside her. There was something in the stillness of her body that made men hesitate, and something in her gaze that made hesitation feel like a warning obeyed too late.

Outside, the night was cold in the way old marble cools after the chisel stops. The air clung to the breath, wind moving gently, but with purpose, pushing the hem of her wide-legged trousers against her calves. The sky had shifted in the hours since she arrived, sinking into a blue so dark it flirted with violet. Each lamp that lined the narrow street leading away from the hall flickered faintly, their flame-shaped bulbs humming low, casting long skeletal shadows of wrought-iron fencing across the cobblestones. 

Each step against the stone whispered forward like a heartbeat, slow and deliberate, something measured, something coaxing. She didn’t turn around;  didn’t glance behind her. 

He was there — not near the door nor in sight. But somewhere — just beyond the edge of the frame, watching. Not passively. Not as a man interested in her presence. But as something hungry in its stillness.

Her heels didn’t echo — they pulsed. She walked with the grace of someone who knew she was being watched, but refused to grant the watcher the satisfaction of her reaction.

She kept her head high, her shoulders soft, the motion of her hips too subtle to be deliberate — but unmistakable all the same. Lamplight gilded the curve of her cheek, the corner of her mouth, the elegant blade of her jaw. Her silhouette moved like something carefully sculpted: not merely feminine, but mythic. Not seduction. Invocation.

When she reached the car — sleek, black, silent — she slid one hand into her coat pocket to retrieve the keys. The locks chirped in soft reply. She opened the driver’s door but didn’t enter. Not yet. One hand rested on the roof, the other braced lightly on the edge of the frame. 

Then she turned. Not fully. Not dramatically. Just her head — just enough — and he was there. Framed by the stone colonnade like something summoned rather than placed. Stillness made flesh. Dr. Lecter stood half-obscured by shadow, positioned with mathematical precision just within the threshold of lamplight. Not enough to reveal. Just enough to imply.

His posture was the very portrait of studied elegance: one hand in the pocket of a cashmere coat, the other relaxed at his side. He stood with the confidence of someone who had already arrived — someone who never chased, only waited for the inevitable turn.

He made no motion toward her. But his gaze held her still. A scalpel dipped in gold, patient and glinting. No warmth. No cruelty. Only interest. Cold as breath on glass, hot as nerve beneath the blade.

She met it. Not defiantly. Not submissively. Simply — open.

Then she lowered her eyes. Started the engine. Let the purr of ignition fill the silence that yawned between them like a vein freshly opened. The headlights painted the front of the lecture hall in pale white, like a corpse prepped for examination.

She drove away without hurry; the rearview mirror showed nothing behind her.

                                                 ⊹˚₊‧ ︵ ˖ ‿ ༺ ༻ ‿ ˖ ︵ ‧₊˚⊹

By the time she reached the studio, the city had emptied of urgency. The roads thinned into silence, the sky pressed down like dark velvet, and the trees above — bare-limbed and crooked — scratched their silhouettes across the windscreen like a memory she hadn’t meant to keep. She parked beneath their reach, the headlights slicing briefly across brick and frost before flickering out. The engine ticked as it cooled, each contraction of metal a soft, temporal metronome marking her return to stillness.

Alise exhaled through her nose, a long, controlled breath that seemed to strip the evening from her lungs in increments. Her heels clicked in a steady rhythm as she crossed the driveway. 

The door clicked shut behind her with the finality of a scalpel placed back on a tray. The quiet here felt different — less performative than the hush of the lecture hall, less expectant than the darkened colonnade. It was the kind of silence that let the mind wander… but not safely. Her silhouette slid across the candlelit walls like a figure moving underwater — slow, sinuous, framed in gold and oil. She did not turn on the overheads. The fluorescents always felt like interrogation. Wax pools trembled on their pedestals. The heat from the forge had long since faded, but the ghost of its warmth clung to the air like breath on glass. Even the dust had settled as though waiting.

She removed her gloves one finger at a time, folding them with a kind of quiet brutality, and laid them across the nearest stool. Then — the coat.

She shrugged it from her shoulders, the weight of it reluctant, unwilling to fall without grace. The silk lining murmured as it peeled away from her blouse — that sheer, translucent layer already clinging to her with heat and breath. 

She moved with habitual grace, each step unhurried, each motion practiced in a choreography of containment. The coat hung heavy on her shoulders, its silk-lined interior still clinging faintly to the heat of her body — or perhaps, not her own. She reached up, fingers poised to unhook the fastening at her throat — and paused.

The gesture, instinctive, broke pattern.

Her right hand had dipped, almost unconsciously, into the pocket  The one she never used. Nothing practical ever went there. No gloves, no keys, no lipstick. And yet —

                She felt it instantly.                 Foreign. Not bulky. Not heavy. But wrong. Not hers.

Her pulse did not jump. Not in the obvious way. But something in the muscles beneath her ribs pulled taut — a silent drawstring cinched slowly inward. She withdrew it with the caution of someone extracting a shard of glass from between ribs.

There was no rush to discovery. No need for performance. If it was what she thought it was — and even now, she already knew — then it required reverence.

It was a card — no envelope, no seal, no signature to dress its intrusion in politeness. Just a single rectangle of thick, bone-pale cardstock, unmarked save for one line of text, a time, and location. It was exquisite in the way only things meant to endure are — the stock textured like untreated vellum, like something flayed and dried into permanence.Not white, but the shade of bone left too long beneath a frozen sky.

Not new, not old. Timeless. A colour that understood what it meant to be both preserved and witnessed.

She held it under the nearest light, and the words rose slowly into relief, their presence pressed into the cardstock so finely that it looked less like print and more like something scarred there by the heat.

                Some truths require privacy.

The gilding was not gold — not truly. It was subtler than that, catching the light like the thin sheen of blood just beginning to dry — a shimer that vanished if you looked too directly.

Beneath it, in a clean serif:

                Midnight.                 Tarn House Museum, South Wing.

That was all — no name, no signature, no contact. She turned the card over; it was blank. Not an oversight, but a choice.

Her breath deepened, but she didn’t shiver — didn’t flinch. She simply looked at it. The card didn’t demand anything. It didn’t threaten. It offered, in the quiet way something ancient and precise, might offer a knife before a vow.

A smile did not quite emerge from the taut line of pursed lips, but a pulse stirred just beneath the skin — not quick, not panicked. Sure. Steady. Like something inside her had been waiting for a knock that hadn’t come until now.

                It wasn’t curiosity and it wasn’t fear.                 It was older than both.

It moved through her like instinct passed down through generations of women who understood that the door you open in silence is the one you can never quite close again.

There was no tremor in her hand; no flush to her cheeks. Her mouth unreadable. But deep beneath her ribs, behind the pale structure of bone and muscle and memory, something shifted.

                Because she knew, without question —                 This wasn’t an invitation; it was a summons.

A thought slowly moved through her as a finely manicured fingertip traced along the bottom edge, where the texture shifted — an almost imperceptible ridge, like the suggestion of a blade that had chosen not to cut her.

A thought moved through her, slow and foreign, like blood returning to a limb long fallen asleep.

                The card had not been in her coat before the lecture.                 Of this, she was certain.

She would have felt it. She calibrated her silhouette with the obsessive grace of a surgeon prepping a cadaver for instruction — nothing out of place. Not ever.

Her brow twitched — not a furrow, but a subtle disturbance, the faint ripple of a thought surfacing from somewhere low and quiet. She tried to place it. The moment. The insertion.

Not at the entrance — she’d been alone then, collected, untouched.

Not during the crowd’s dispersal — there had been space around her, a polite perimeter that never broke.

No one had reached for her.

                Except — someone had. Once. Just once.

The brush of fabric; the brief swell of proximity. The precise moment when he passed the third-row aisle — too near to be polite, too deliberate to be careless. The current that moved across her shoulder, a subtle pressure barely registering under the corset’s structure. She had noted it and dismissed it at the time.

Static, she thought. Friction. Simply a shift in the air. But no —  her breath caught. Not in surprise, but confirmation. It had been him; he had placed it. Not with flourish, nor even intrusion. 

A man does not place something inside a woman’s coat pocket unless he has taken her measure down to the millimeter. Unless he has studied the movement of her arms, the way the fabric clings across her ribs when she breathes, the space between her stillness and her surrender — and found there a place for his presence to live. He had known exactly where to place his hand. He had known the depth of her pocket by sight. And he had known she would not feel it — not then. Not until she was alone. Unobserved. And by then, of course, it would be too late to call it violation.

                He touched her and she hadn’t known.

She folded the card precisely along its spine, returned it to the pocket from which it had emerged, and stepped back from the hook where her coat now hung, swaying faintly as though still carrying the echo of his hand.

She did not say his name aloud, but her thoughts shaped it. And the studio — its walls varnished with pigment and wax, its air humming with old breath — seemed to respond.

He rose with the deliberate ease of a man for whom movement was never rushed, only revealed — each gesture unfurling with the kind of slow, elegant grace that suggested not performance, but choreography long perfected. His posture was impeccable, not merely upright but composed — as though his spine were a deliberate axis from which the rest of him extended, every angle refined into stillness. He did not adjust his cuffs, did not clear his throat, did not waste a single breath on artifice.

He stood the way one might stand at an altar: not supplicant, but sovereign — calm, assured, weightless in bearing and yet immovably present. The fall of his coat was exact, the tilt of his head precise, his hands resting lightly on the edges of the lectern, not to steady himself, but to anchor the moment.

                He looked neither hurried nor idle.  He looked inevitable.

He began not with words, but with silence — not the silence of uncertainty, but of orchestration. Dr. Hannibal Lecter stood at the lectern like a figure already sculpted for it, as though the dais had been constructed around the inevitability of his presence. He did not adjust his sleeves, did not clear his throat, did not search the room for permission to begin. He had no need for theatrics. The room obeyed him on arrival. It always had. Conversations faded to murmurs, then vanished entirely, like candles extinguishing themselves out of respect. The air settled into a kind of reverent stillness — not expectation, but deference.

This was not the first time he had spoken here. The audience — a curated blend of scholars, patrons, and those educated enough to feign understanding — had come for the performance as much as the content. But tonight was not for them. Not entirely. Tonight, the architecture of his lecture hall had a second function. Tonight, the room itself was a lure, and he had arranged it accordingly.

                Now, standing above them all,   he opened his mouth not in greeting,                                                                                                     but in invocation.

                “Anatomy,”                  he began,       his voice resonant and paced with deliberate slowness,                  “is the architecture of truth.    It does not lie, though it often conceals.”

The cadence of his speech settled into the room like silk drawn across glass — smooth, fluid, deceptively soft, with something sharper hidden beneath. There was no need to raise his voice. He did not ask for attention; he made silence worthwhile. His diction was crystalline, each syllable honed to precision, his tone neither warm nor cold but studied — velvet that remembered bone. He spoke not as a man offering knowledge, but as one excavating it in real time, as though his words were not prepared but emerging directly from the marrow of thought.

He wove his lecture through layers of flesh and function: the elegance of musculature, the tensile strength of ligaments, the way bone scaffolded beauty and buried structures revealed more in death than in life. He spoke of the thoracic cavity, of the ribcage like a cathedral’s vault, of symmetry as a cruel illusion inevitably undone by time. But behind every anatomical term, beneath every mention of tendon or vessel, there ran another current entirely — a second discourse, silent and unmistakable, meant not for the room, but for the one woman seated just beyond reach.

When he described absence — the ghost space where muscle should be, the negative form that once held shape — he was not thinking of a textbook. He was thinking of her sculpture, the one she had cast in bronze: ribcage hollowed, vertebrae singing with restraint, a body defined not by what remained, but by what had been taken away.

And when his voice dipped, reverent and low, to speak of the clavicle — that narrow arc between throat and shoulder, so easily broken it bordered on symbolic — he did not scan the audience. He did not pace or gesture wide. He allowed his gaze, almost imperceptibly, to drift toward the line of her shoulder — not to linger, but to mark.

                Exposed.  Vulnerable.   And still,  always noticed.

                He did not need to look to know she was listening.

He could feel it — the pulse of her presence radiating through the still air like warmth from a stone long after the sun had set. She sat as though born to stillness, yet every movement, however minute, carried consequence. When she crossed her legs in the opposite direction, when she shifted her weight slightly or adjusted the soft scarf at her throat, the air between them shifted in tandem. A fragrance rose — not overtly perfumed, but layered: resin, rose, the faintest trace of myrrh. 

His body responded before his mind allowed it. Not with lust, not in the ordinary sense. It was not yet that. It was something deeper — a biological prelude to desire, that quiet alchemy of attention quickening into alertness. The tips of his fingers prickled, not from nerves, but awareness. From restraint preparing to be tested.

He continued without stumbling, without pause. As he turned — just briefly, to gesture toward a projected sketch behind him, a chiaroscuro rendering of the latissimus flayed and drawn back from the spine — he saw it. In the dark gloss of the screen’s reflection, her gaze. 

                Focused.  Steady.  Watching.  Not admiring.  Studying.

                                             She had been watching him all along.

His lips curved — not into a smile, not fully. Just the faintest lift at the corner, an acknowledgment not meant for the audience, but for her alone. The flicker of something private in the midst of public performance.

He returned to the lectern with no change in expression, and resumed his text with seamless poise.

He spoke now of dissection — not as violation, but as reverence. Of the act of cutting not as destruction, but as intimacy; understanding born not from domination, but from patience. 

                “ To cut carefully, ”  he murmured, his voice dropping just above a whisper, the cadence almost too quiet to catch unless one was already listening closely,  “ is to feel more than to see. ”

His fingers grazed the edge of the lectern not for emphasis, but as though he were remembering something — or someone — through touch alone. The words hung there, delicate and deliberate, like the echo of a secret not quite spoken aloud. Dr. Lecter let the silence that followed stretch — long enough to unsettle, long enough to land. It echoed not like absence, but like a note held just past resolution, the moment before release.

                And then, with the soft breath of a man returning from prayer, he continued.

He did not glance toward her again, not overtly. But every word that followed felt calibrated — not for the room, but for the single listener he could not afford to address directly. She couldn’t have said what changed exactly. The cadence, perhaps. The shape of his vowels. The way each word seemed to settle in the air before continuing on, like a pianist letting the sustain pedal linger half a second too long.

The lecture continued, ostensibly unbroken, but its undercurrent shifted. What had begun as anatomical turned personal, turned psychological. He spoke of proximity. Of skin. Of the space between the body and the blade. How it changes — not with depth, but with intention.

                “There is no incision without intimacy,”                           his voice pitched lower, almost meditative. 

                “However clinical the hand, the blade remembers what the mind tries to forget.”  His tone carried no flourish, no call for emphasis — and yet the line lingered, heavy in the stillness that followed. To most, it would read as nothing more than an observation on surgical philosophy. But to Alise — seated a few rows away, still as breath withheld — it felt different. Not performance. Not instruction. Something quieter. Closer.

The words made something in her ribs tighten — not sharply, but with pressure. Like a string drawn taut inside her without warning. She did not flinch, simply exhaled. Slowly. The phrase floated outward like silk cut against the grain — clean, purposeful, designed to draw blood without spilling it. 

He did not look for reaction, but felt it anyway: the near-imperceptible way the tension in the room tightened around that single statement, like her corset being drawn two notches tighter. She heard it, understood it. Perhaps even recognised the game they now played — language used not to define, but to draw close.

Perhaps it was the lighting, she told herself, or perhaps it was the sonorous way he shaped certain phrases. Yet, something in his delivery felt heavier now. Not flirtatious. Not personal. But weightier. More specific. She could not imagine to whom he meant to direct it — if he meant anything at all beyond the shape of the lecture — but the air around her seat felt denser than before. She imagined it was nothing. Her own projection. A side effect of being too aware, too alert.

Alise adjusted her posture, almost without thought. Not rigid, not performative — just a faint lengthening of the spine, a tilt of the chin. As though responding to some shift in temperature, some unspoken cue. A reflex, nothing more. She crossed her legs again, slower this time, the fabric of her trousers whispering in the quiet space around her. She was not looking at him. She had not looked at him. Not properly.

When she looked up again, he was gesturing toward a sketch behind him — a study of the spine, its fragility hidden beneath illusion, the vulnerability of nerves nestled in bone. He spoke of memory housed in the muscular system, of trauma traced along fascial seams. How pain could become posture. How the body never forgets.

Behind him, the image shifted: an anatomical sketch rendered in deep graphite — not flayed, but peeled, a back bowed in tension, the scapulae like wings in retreat. He did not explain the choice of illustration. He allowed the image to speak for itself. Allowed them to draw whatever parallels they dared between the subject’s exposed interior and his own increasingly exposed restraint.

There was a moment — no more than the length of a breath — where he paused, ostensibly to let the audience absorb a point. But truly, it was to feel. To mark the air between them again. She had not moved, not since the last shift, but he could sense her attention sharpening. Like a scalpel honed not for use, but for precision. Her stillness was not absence. It was readiness.

His hands, still resting lightly on the lectern’s edge, adjusted slightly. Not to fidget. To ground himself.

                “The body,” he said softly, “is not a map. It is a manuscript —                                                     scarred, rewritten, and revised. ”

He let the weight of the metaphor land. And then, finally — finally — he lifted his gaze, not to the audience, but just above their heads, in the direction of her row. A deliberate drift. A line of sight that never found her face, but brushed past it. Near enough to disturb. Near enough to beckon.

She didn’t move. But she felt it. Not his eyes. The air. The way it changed in the moment between breath and speech.

She didn’t believe it was intentional. There were too many people. Too many directions to look. It was nothing. Still, her fingers tightened around the edge of her clutch.

                “ For those who know how to read it, ” he finished,                                              “ the body confesses everything. ”

There was no reaction from the room. No laughter. No nervous shifting. Just the sound of his voice folding neatly back into silence, and then continuing on, smooth as thread drawn through cloth.

Alise let her gaze settle just to the side of the lectern, as though watching the shadows cast by his movements rather than the man himself. She did not fidget. She did not smile. She only listened — closely — perhaps too closely.

And though she would never have said it aloud — even to herself — she felt as though she had become part of something she hadn’t agreed to participate in. Not a conversation. Not quite. But something like a study. 

                And she wasn’t sure who was doing the observing.

He did not smile. But his voice, when it resumed, had acquired a texture it had not carried before — something quieter, smoother, like satin stretched over a blade. 

The rest of the lecture continued in that same key — formal, composed, informative to the casual ear. But for those who knew how to listen, it had become something else entirely.

A confession.   A proposition. 

                                   An invocation dressed as education.

And all of it — every syllable, every breath — directed not to the hall, not to the faculty or benefactors or scholars seated in faint rows of indigo and grey. But to her.

Black, not merely in color but in intent — a shade that seemed to absorb the light around it. It lay centered on the threshold as if placed with surgical care. No seal. No sender. Bound in a narrow length of pale blue ribbon, soft as breath against the paper's velvet grain.

                Alise stood very still.                 Then she bent, slowly, and retrieved it.

She did not open it at once. Instead, she returned to her workbench, her gait measured — not cautious, but deliberate, as though carrying something volatile. She cleared a space beside the incomplete sternum, the tools laid out like relics: gouges, calipers, the filigreed scalpel she used for scoring resin. She laid the envelope down in the silence they kept.

The ribbon came free with a single pull, the knot loosened like silk slipping from a throat.

The invitation within was heavy-stock ivory, its edges pressed with the faintest filigree of gold. The script was unmistakably handwritten — not ornate, but meticulous. Anatomical, almost. There was no flamboyance to the lettering. Only elegance held in restraint.

                                                  ⊹˚₊‧ ︵ ˖ ‿ ༺ ༻ ‿ ˖ ︵ ‧₊˚⊹

                                                     𝑫𝒓. 𝑯𝒂𝒏𝒏𝒊𝒃𝒂𝒍 𝑳𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒆𝒓                                                         𝑅𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑓                                                     𝑴𝒔. 𝑨𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝑴𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒆 

                                                𝑭𝒐𝒓 𝒂𝒏 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒍𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒏:                                                                     𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑃𝑜𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐹𝑜𝑟𝑚

                                  La forme derrière la beauté, le silence sous la peau. The form behind the beauty, the silence beneath the skin.

                                                                                              Thursday evening, eight o'clock                                                                                                                      Location enclosed.                                                                                                       Attendance strictly limited.

                                                    ⊹˚₊‧ ︵ ˖ ‿ ༺  ༻ ‿ ˖ ︵ ‧₊˚⊹

Beneath the formal card, a smaller note was tucked — unembellished, torn from a different page, the texture coarse, fibrous, like something kept close to the skin.

                                                          The script here was leaner. More intimate, precise.

                                                    ⊹˚₊‧ ︵ ˖ ‿ ༺ ༻ ‿ ˖ ︵ ‧₊˚⊹

𝑺𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒕𝒓𝒖𝒕𝒉𝒔 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒗𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔.  𝑺𝒐𝒎𝒆, 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒊𝒏 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒙𝒊𝒎𝒊𝒕𝒚. 𝑰 𝒉𝒐𝒑𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖'𝒍𝒍 𝒔𝒊𝒕 𝒄𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒆.

                                                     ⊹˚₊‧ ︵ ˖ ‿ ༺  ༻ ‿ ˖ ︵ ‧₊˚⊹

She read it twice. Then once more — not for clarity, but for temperature.

Outside, the light had continued its descent, slanting low across the studio walls, turning the steel girders to lines of copper and blood. Shadows elongated. The bronze at her elbows deepened in tone.

She did not smile. But something within her ribs — something old and architectural — shifted. He had written with the confidence of a man who did not invite, but summoned.

And she —

                              She would go.

                                                            She did not yet know where she would sit.                                                             But she would be there when he began to speak.

「 𝒏𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆       »

She dressed as one might prepare a specimen for observation — with reverence and the intimate knowledge that what is concealed is often more intimate than what is shown.

The ensemble she chose had the severity of uniform, yet none of its simplicity. A sheer, pearl-white blouse floated across her arms like breath held in silk, its collar sharp as intention. Over it, she fastened a fitted corset-like bodice in jet black — the shape severe, anatomical in its precision, folding over her ribs like a second sternum. It gave her the posture of sculpture — held, upright, composed — yet every movement beneath remained supple, feminine, alive.

The trousers were wide-legged and severe, falling in sharp, unbroken lines to the floor, cuffless and silent as shadow. There was something almost clerical about them — the dignity of mourning clothes worn not in grief, but in control.

She did not reach for color — only texture, contrast.

Gold accents adorned her sparingly — small, circular earrings like open sutures, and a vintage timepiece snug on her wrist, its weight just enough to remind her of the hour. A delicate scarf, the color of old parchment, had been folded and knotted loosely at her throat — not tight, not ostentatious. A single suggestion of softness. She would remove it later.

Her shoes: patent black stilettos, impossibly sharp. They didn't click when she walked. They whispered. The heels weren't for beauty. They were for height.

She wore scent the way others wore intent — not for allure, but for memory. Resin, faint rose, and something darker — a whiff of myrrh, of something once burnt and made sacred in the act. She applied it with the same hand that polished bone.

Her clutch was structured, black leather, gold-lettered. Simple. Surgical. It held only what was essential: a single compact, a tube of nude lipstick, a fine-tipped pen, a worn copy of Sparkling Cyanide with the spine gently broken. And the invitation, folded and refolded until its creases had creases.

She stared at herself in the long mirror — not with vanity, but with measure.

The black bow pinned at the base of her chignon lent the illusion of girlishness, but in context, it looked more like a seal. A ribbon tied around a gift best unwrapped slowly — or not at all.

She stepped into the evening not as a guest, but as a participant. A respondent to a summons written in ink and anatomical metaphor. Alise would arrive on time — neither early nor late. Just long enough after him that he would have time to imagine her entrance.

The drive was brief. But deliberate. She took the long way. Not out of uncertainty — never that — but to let the quiet spool out a little longer. Let the anticipation stretch, not snap. The city passed around her in low murmurs and sodium lights, the kind of glow that doesn't illuminate so much as gild. Her hands rested lightly at ten and two, wrists fine-boned against the wheel, her reflection fractured across the windshield glass — eyes forward, lips unsmiling, posture immaculate. She drove the way she sculpted: precisely, without waste.

The streets narrowed as she neared the venue — a historic building folded into one of the older districts, where cobblestones still told stories and the trees bowed low with memory. She pulled into a discreet rear lot and stepped out into dusk.

                              The wind moved gently. Not cold, not warm — but tactile.

She paused before approaching the entrance, one hand adjusting the fall of her scarf, the other ghosting over the line of her waist. Her heels made no sound on the stone. Just rhythm. Just presence.

The lecture hall was quiet in the way cathedrals are quiet — not empty, but watching.

The interior held the breath of centuries. Cream plaster walls rose high into a vaulted ceiling carved with ornamental ribs, as though the very structure had once been a living thing. Sconces lit the aisle with low amber light, flickering steadily, casting long twin shadows of her form as she entered. The air smelled faintly of cedarwood and old linen, like pressed books and dusted archives.

Voices murmured here and there, respectful, restrained — the rustle of tailored sleeves, the clearing of polite throats. The audience was well-dressed. Academic. Wealth threaded through with erudition, not flash. She did not glance at any of them.

The dais was bare but for the lectern — minimalist, blackened wood, flanked by nothing but shadow and the great, vaulted screen that waited behind it like an altar cloth not yet drawn back.

She didn't have to look to know where he was.

                              But she did. Casually. Controlled.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter occupied the front row, stage left, his figure turned just slightly off-center — not enough to invite attention, but enough to capture the precise angle of the room's entrance. It was a studied asymmetry, meant to look incidental. He sat in half-profile, immaculate in posture, the picture of composed anticipation. One leg was crossed with effortless precision, a gloved hand resting atop his knee, while the other arm draped over the back of the chair beside him with casual ownership.

That chair — conspicuously empty — held the kind of vacancy that waits, not merely for a body, but for a decision.

His eyes moved first. Not his head — just the slow, deliberate rise of his gaze, as though gravity had shifted in her direction, as though even the weight of his pupils obeyed a deeper instinct.

She did not pause. Her descent through the aisle was as silent as it was certain, unhurried and unperformed. There was no acknowledgment of the onlookers, no glances cast toward the whispering audience. She walked like someone who knew she had already been seen — not just by him, but by the room itself.

The open seat was obvious. Not ostentatious. Not labeled. But undeniably intended. In a hall lined with unoccupied chairs, this one stood apart by virtue of its placement — its vacancy beside him was not happenstance. It was declaration, veiled in subtlety.

                And still, she passed it.

Not with defiance, not even with hesitation — but with the kind of practiced discipline that rewrites the air in its wake. To sit beside him now would have been to name what neither of them had yet spoken aloud. It would have been acquiescence. Confirmation.

And so, she moved three seats down. Still near. Still within his radius. But with just enough distance to let tension breathe between them — to allow meaning to steep in silence rather than speech.

It was not refusal. It was restraint — the kind that wields more power than surrender ever could.

She seated herself with the quiet gravity of ritual, her spine held in perfect line, ankles crossed, hands folding atop her clutch with the elegance of a closing psalm.

                                                                           He did not turn.

He didn't need to. She felt it — the shift in the air, the almost imperceptible tilt of his head, a gesture so minute it might have gone unnoticed by anyone else. But not her.

A silent offering, acknowledged.

                                        This seat was left for you.

                                                                           And in refusing it, she made it sacred.

Her body ached. Not with fatigue, but with preservation — as if she had been cast in place overnight, a sculpture forced into breath again.

She sat up carefully, every movement deliberate, as though to disturb the stillness would be a kind of blasphemy. Her long fingers trailed against the linen-draped edge of a nearby sculpture, the fabric whispering beneath her touch. Bronze beneath it pulsed faintly with the heat memory of fire. She closed her eyes.

                His voice still lingered at the nape of her neck.

He had said it as one might kiss skin without touching it. And now it lived inside her—beneath the sternum, tucked under the rib she once sculpted absent. She could feel it, maddeningly, in the hollows.

Somewhere above, the industrial girders groaned softly in the warming air. The studio stirred, waking around her. But Alise did not move from the chaise. She allowed the gold light to slip across her wrist, illuminating the faint charcoal marks still ghosting her fingertips from the night before.

                She had not washed them off.                 She had not wanted to.

It was not vanity. It was evidence. That her hands had touched something sacred. That creation had passed through her. That she had felt something.

                             Then —                  a key in the lock.

Alise did not startle. She merely rose, a breath given form, the robe sliding more fully over one shoulder as she crossed the room in silence.

                                The door opened.

                “Rejoice, her eminence has been summoned by the light of god—”                                                                                                             Camille.

She entered like an aria played on a broken harpsichord: entirely too loud, entirely too bright, and inexplicably right.

Trench coat flapping behind her, hair coiled in reckless spirals, one earring a skeletal hand clutching a gemstone. She held coffee and pastry like offerings. Her sunglasses were unnecessary, theatrical, perched on her nose like a challenge.

“You,” Camille announced, “look like someone who just exorcised a demon using candlelight and unresolved sexual tension.”

                                Alise blinked, then tilted her head, chin lifting slightly,                  “The demon was quite civilized.”

“Oh, I bet he was.” Camille closed the door behind her with her foot, scanning the room like a tourist in a haunted cathedral. “How is it that this place always smells like incense, gunpowder, and heartbreak?”

                Alise murmured, “It’s curated.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Camille declared, placing the coffees down beside a jar of preserved beetles, her tone that rare blend of fondness and theatrical exasperation only the closest friends could master. “Here. Caffeine and carbohydrates. The only gods that love you back.”

Alise approached with the slow, residual elegance of a statue coaxed into movement. She took the coffee from Camille’s hand without thanks — not out of coldness, but ritual. Camille never expected gratitude. Only participation.

“Did you sleep?” Camille asked, voice lowered now — still playful, but with a touch of genuine concern. It was the question she always asked when the studio smelled too much like wax and memory.

                                Alise’s answer was a tilt of the head.                                                  Not quite no, not quite yes.

Camille studied her like a half-open book. Then, slowly, with deliberate mischief, she reached into the paper bag and retrieved the croissant — brandishing it like a relic.

“You’ve been weird lately,” she said, voice lighter again. “Even weirder than your usual 'I make saints out of skeletons' vibe.” Alise raised a single brow as Camille tore into the croissant with her teeth, speaking around flaky pastry. “You’re distracted. Tortured in a new way. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

Alise turned toward the sculpture nearest her, its linen shroud illuminated from behind — not brightly, but dimly, like candlelight through gauze. Bronze shadowed beneath, still damp from yesterday’s shaping. She reached toward it, absently, fingertips grazing the covered edge.

“I’m always tortured,” she said, almost conversationally, like she was stating a dietary restriction.

Camille made a noise between a scoff and a chuckle. “Yes, but you’re usually predictably tortured. Like, tortured with rules. Now there’s this…” She flapped her croissant-holding hand vaguely, sending crumbs in a minor arc. “This broody, whispery something going on. Like you’re halfway in love with a secret and trying really hard not to write it poetry.”

Alise’s lips parted — not to speak, but as if a thought had tried to surface and she caught it before it could rise too far. She closed them again. A breath passed slowly through her ribs, long and even.

                                Camille’s tone dipped, just a little. “Lisey,” she said. “Come on. Who is it?”

Alise didn’t look at her. Instead, her hand hovered near the table’s edge, pausing over a carving tool she didn’t touch — the thin, hooked kind meant for fine bonework. Her fingers floated just above it, like testing heat, or maybe reading something only she could feel. She smiled faintly.

                                “It’s nothing. You’re being dramatic.”

“I’m being dramatic?” Camille leaned forward like a hawk eyeing a confession. “You’ve been floating around here like you’re haunted by a sexy dissertation.”

Alise huffed — a small, genuine sound, more amused than annoyed. “That’s a hell of a metaphor.”

                                “Tell me I’m wrong.”

Alise finally glanced at her, and her eyes were warm but unreadable — the way candlelight flickers without ever quite revealing the thing it’s trying to show. “It’s not what you think. It’s just... professional. There’s been some interest in the work.”

“Oh god,” Camille groaned. “Is it a curator? A critic? Someone terrible and powerful?” She narrowed her eyes. “Please tell me it’s not a collector. You always get that weird look when someone buys something like they’re touching a part of you they didn’t earn.” Alise looked at her then — not sharply, but too quickly. A flicker. A blink.

                                Camille gasped, eyes widening with mock outrage.                                  “Oh my god, is it a collector?!”

Alise turned her back before she could answer, but Camille caught the tilt of her mouth — the smallest upturn at the corner. Not a smile. But something unmistakably kept. A private flame.

Camille nearly choked on a laugh and flung a balled napkin at her. “You are in love with a secret!” she cried. “Why do I always have to drag this shit out of you like some poor archaeologist in a dig site full of emotional repression and rotting baroque metaphors?”

Alise glanced over her shoulder with a deadpan calm that only made Camille laugh harder. “That’s your thesis title now,” she added. “‘Love in the Time of Necrotic Symbolism.’ I’ll write your foreword.”

“I’ll have it engraved,” Alise replied dryly, but the ease in her voice was practiced. Controlled.

She moved toward the windows with her coffee, letting the morning’s gold skim the slope of her arm, the warm hue of her skin like light through amber. It was easy to let Camille tease. It was even easier to play the part of the mildly amused, vaguely intrigued artist, distracted by patronage and deadlines and nothing more.

But her heart was still thudding in that quiet, rib-bound way it did when she thought of him.

And Camille — clever, nosy, infuriating Camille — had felt the change in the air like a shift in pressure before a storm. She hadn’t guessed who, but she wasn’t wrong about the presence of something.

Alise took a slow sip, schooling her features back into their usual stillness.

“Just promise me,” Camille said, her voice drifting gently from the chaise, “whoever he is… that he deserves whatever part of you he gets.”

                                Alise didn’t answer.