Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The crime scene was a slaughterhouse made quiet. No blood spatter, no frenzy—just bodies arranged with the precision of an artist, as though violence itself had been tamed into something deliberate.

Hotchner stood in the doorway, his commands quiet, efficient, his face unreadable. Reid crouched near the nearest victim, his gloved hands hovering just above the skin, hesitant to disturb the arrangement. Dexter moved among them like he’d always belonged, his badge clipped to his belt, latex gloves snapping into place. He crouched by one of the bodies, his gaze clinical, detached. So careful. So practiced.

“This isn’t rage,” he murmured. “This is… composition. Almost surgical.”

Emily Prentiss joined him, her gaze sweeping over the room with sharp calculation. “Which means it’s him.”

Rossi knelt on the polished floor, his eyes narrowed, as if he could feel echoes in the silence. “Not just him,” he said quietly. “The staging is dual. Two minds at work—working together.”

The room stilled. Even Garcia’s voice, crackling through the comms from Quantico, sounded hesitant.

“You’re not going to like this, but some of these arrangements match Will Graham’s old profiling sketches. Down to the detail. Which is impossible, because Will Graham is—”

“Dead,” Hotchner finished, his voice low, clipped. “Supposedly.”

Before anyone could answer, JJ’s call carried from the far end of the room. “Movement outside!”

The team raised their weapons as two figures stepped into the broken light of the warehouse. One elegant, poised in his tailored suit. The other haunted but steady, his pale eyes carrying a thousand memories.

Hannibal Lecter. Will Graham. Alive. Together.

The BAU froze. Morgan muttered a curse under his breath, disbelief flashing across his face.

Hannibal smiled faintly. His hand brushed against Will’s in a gesture so unguarded, so tender, it felt like defiance. “I see you’ve discovered our work.”

Will’s voice followed, quiet but certain. “We wanted you to.”

Dexter stayed silent, his gaze locked on the pair. Two predators. Not chained to codes or leashes. A couple, he thought. Partners. In love. And in murder. This isn’t a profile I’ve ever made before… but maybe it’s the only one that makes sense.

Something else entirely. He could feel his Dark Passenger stir, whispering with something close to envy. But outwardly, he was calm, professional — another weapon in the BAU’s arsenal.

Hotchner’s voice cut through the tension. “This ends here.”

The air grew tight, fragile as glass. Hannibal and Will on one side, the BAU on the other, Dexter hidden among them like a blade in the fold.

And Hannibal only smiled.

The silence in the warehouse was the kind that pressed against the skin, thick with the weight of recognition.

No one breathed. No one dared.

Lecter and Graham stood framed in the fractured light. Their posture was unhurried, their movements deliberate — as if they had stepped not into a trap, but onto a stage built for them. Two predators revealed not by accident, but by design.

Hotchner was the first to find his voice. “Will.”

The name fell heavy, not as an accusation, not even as a summons, but as though speaking it aloud might shift reality back into something that made sense.

Will’s eyes found his. The recognition there was sharper than any blade. “You wanted me back,” he said softly. “Here I am.”

The team adjusted their stances, safeties clicked beneath fingers, breaths were measured. Morgan’s jaw flexed, fury brimming at the sight of a man who had once been one of them, now standing shoulder to shoulder with the most dangerous predator they had ever chased.

Rossi’s voice came low, touched with something like grief. “Jesus, Will… you chose this.”

Will’s lips curved, not in cruelty but in a strange, painful sincerity. “I choose this.”

Beside him, Hannibal inclined his head slightly, the faintest gesture of pride — or devotion. His hand brushed Will’s again, not hidden, not ashamed. A caress in plain view, the intimacy of it sharper than any violence.

Dexter stood with the team, his weapon trained but his mind wandering beneath the surface. To the others, he was silent, vigilant, another soldier in the line. Inside, he was cataloging: the stillness of Lecter’s frame, the pulse visible just below Graham’s jaw, the way their weight distributed between fight and flight. Two predators bound together. A symbiosis. I’ve never seen it before.

He almost admired it. Almost.

“Drop your weapons!” Hotchner barked.

Hannibal’s eyes flicked to him, calm, almost amused. “Ah, Aaron. Always so certain that words carry weight. But tell me—what will you do when words fail? When the one you called an ally stands across from you by choice?”

Hotchner’s jaw tightened. “Then I treat him like every other killer we hunt.”

For the first time, Will’s expression cracked, the faintest flicker of pain flashing across his face. “You never understood me, Aaron. You never understood what I am. But he does.” His fingers entwined with Hannibal’s fully now, deliberate, unshakable. “And love is understanding each other.”

The words were not shouted. They did not need to be. They landed like thunder.

Dexter felt something stir within him at the raw conviction in Will’s voice, at the mirror of recognition in Hannibal’s. He had spent his life constructing rules, a code to cage his hunger. These two stood unchained, naked in their truth, and yet… still whole. Still together. His Dark Passenger whispered: They’re free in ways you never will be.

But out loud, he said nothing. He was an agent, a profiler, a gun aimed at two fugitives. A mask of normalcy, smooth and seamless.

“Take the shot?” Morgan muttered, tension bristling.

Hotchner didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on Will’s, a final appeal suspended between them, unspoken, unanswered.

The moment stretched thin as glass, waiting for a single sound to shatter it.

And still, Hannibal smiled.

The silence ruptured with the first shot.

It wasn’t clear who fired first. Later, no one would agree — not Reid, whose memory was photographic, nor Morgan, whose trigger finger had twitched with fury, nor Dexter, who had seen the instant of decision before it even arrived.

The warehouse exploded into motion.

Glass shattered as bullets struck the windows; sparks leapt from steel beams. JJ pulled Garcia’s voice into silence with a shouted order over comms as she rolled for cover. Morgan surged forward, weapon barking.

Hannibal moved like water. One moment framed in the broken light, the next gone, pulling Will with him in a sweep of motion so fluid it seemed choreographed. Their silhouettes vanished into the deeper dark of the warehouse’s spine.

“Move!” Hotchner’s command cut through the chaos. The team scattered, taking positions, returning fire into the shadows.

Dexter slipped behind a steel column, breath even, weapon steady. Inside, his Dark Passenger howled with exhilaration. This is the hunt. Two predators cornered, their blood singing in the air.

Reid shouted from across the floor, voice pitched high with urgency. “They’re not firing back! They’re not trying to kill us — they’re just—”

“Buying themselves time,” Rossi finished grimly, ducking as another round of glass burst above him.

A shape flickered at the far end — Will, dragging something across the floor. A heartbeat later, smoke flooded the space, thick and choking, rolling low and then climbing fast.

“Gas grenade!” Prentiss coughed, pulling her shirt over her mouth. “They planned for this!”

Through the fog, Hannibal’s voice carried — calm, amused, infuriatingly unhurried. “You will not stop us here. You were never meant to.”

“Goddamn it!” Morgan fired blindly toward the sound. “Cowards!”

A flash of movement — Will’s outline, brief against the haze. Dexter’s eyes narrowed, his aim perfect. For half a second he considered ending it, pulling the trigger, dropping one predator to the floor. His finger brushed the edge of decision.

But something stopped him. Will’s head had turned just so, his eyes cutting through the smoke and locking with Dexter’s. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t desperation. It was recognition.

Then he was gone, swallowed by the fog.

Hotchner’s voice was ragged but commanding. “Everyone regroup! Now!”

The team fell back, coughing, choking, weapons still raised. By the time the air began to clear, the space where Hannibal and Will had stood was empty. The smoke curled upward in thin, taunting ribbons.

Gone.

Morgan slammed a fist against the wall. “Damn it, they slipped us!”

“No,” Rossi said quietly, his eyes narrowing as if Hannibal’s ghost still lingered. “They wanted us to see them. To know they’re out there. Together.”

Dexter said nothing. His gun lowered slowly, his gaze tracing the space where Will Graham had been a moment before. The Passenger coiled and whispered, restless in his chest. They’ll kill again. They always do.

He slid the weapon back into its holster. Inwardly, he was smiling.

The hunt has only just begun.

The warehouse reeked of smoke and gunpowder, the tang of metal sharp on the tongue. Shattered glass crunched beneath boots as the team regrouped in the central aisle, every breath still ragged with adrenaline.

Hotchner was the first to steady himself. His voice carried the edge of command, but beneath it lay something harder to name — frustration, maybe grief. “Report.”

“Nothing,” JJ said, pulling her earpiece free to silence Garcia’s frantic questions. “No injuries on our side. They’re gone.”

“They planned the whole thing,” Prentiss muttered, sweeping her flashlight across the empty space. “The smoke, the staging, the timing. They wanted us off balance.”

Rossi leaned against a pillar, his face shadowed, lines carved deep. “Not just to escape. To send a message.”

Morgan snapped his head around, anger sparking. “Yeah? And what was the message supposed to be, Rossi? ‘Look how smart we are’? ‘Look how in love we are’? Screw that. Will Graham’s a traitor and Lecter’s a monster. End of story.”

Reid shook his head, words spilling fast as his mind raced. “No, no, it’s more complicated than that. The precision in the staging — it wasn’t just Lecter’s signature. The symmetry in the tableau suggested… harmony. A partnership. He isn’t controlling Will anymore. They’re operating in tandem.”

“That makes it worse,” Morgan shot back.

“Or more dangerous,” Rossi corrected softly.

Hotchner raised a hand, silencing them all. His eyes were on the floor, though his thoughts were miles away. “Whatever they are now, we treat them as one unsub. One unit. No illusions about turning Graham. He made his choice.”

Silence followed. The words were iron.

Dexter said nothing, standing among them like he belonged — because, in their eyes, he did. His face was the picture of calm professionalism, his weapon already holstered, his gloves stripped neatly from his hands.

But inside, the Passenger purred. He replayed the image of Will’s eyes locking on his through the smoke, the strange flicker of understanding that had passed between them. Predators recognized predators. Hannibal’s calm, Will’s conviction — they were dangerous, yes, but more than that, they were pure.

I should have taken the shot, he thought. Ended one of them, at least. But not yet. Not here.

Rossi’s voice pulled him back. “We’ll need to anticipate their moves. Lecter is too theatrical to stay hidden for long. And Graham—” His voice caught for the briefest second, then steadied. “He knows how we think. He knows our methods.”

“Then we change our methods,” Hotchner said simply.

Morgan growled his agreement. Reid still looked pale, shaken, his brilliant mind rebelling at the thought of Will Graham, once their ally, now standing against them with such certainty.

Dexter glanced at each of them in turn. They saw only a colleague, sharp and steady. None of them suspected the hunger pacing behind his eyes, the calculations already unfolding. He was the one thing Lecter and Graham hadn’t anticipated — a predator in the team’s clothing.

The jet touched down just before dawn, engines humming low as it taxied across the tarmac. No one spoke on the flight home. The cabin lights had been dim, shadows stretching long across tired faces. Morgan had sat with his arms crossed, jaw set tight; Reid stared at the blur of clouds, lips moving faintly as if in argument with himself; Hotchner was a stone at the head of the cabin, reviewing every decision as though punishment could be found in repetition.

Back at Quantico, the bullpen was still and sterile, the hum of fluorescent lights filling the silence. Then Garcia appeared — a burst of color against the gray. She all but ran to meet them, relief pouring off her in waves.

“You’re okay,” she breathed, scanning each of them as though to confirm with her own eyes. “All of you. I thought—God, I thought I was going to have to start knitting black veils and cat-sized grief sweaters.”

Morgan allowed himself the smallest smile, shaking his head. “We’re fine, Baby Girl.”

“Fine?” Her voice cracked on the word. “You went face-to-face with Lecter. And Will Graham. Alive. And working together like some kind of… homicidal power couple. And you come back saying ‘fine’?” She pressed her palms to her cheeks, trying to breathe. “I don’t even have a word for how not-fine this is.”

Prentiss dropped into a chair, exhaustion bleeding into her movements. “It’s real, Garcia. They wanted us to see them. To know they’re out there.”

Garcia’s hands trembled as she sank into her seat. “Why? Why show themselves now? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Rossi said, his tone weary but certain. “It wasn’t about escape. It was about identity. They’re not hiding who they are anymore. They’re declaring it.”

Reid’s voice came fast, clipped, as if he couldn’t contain the thoughts running through him. “Lecter and Graham’s symbiosis is—unprecedented. Two minds acting as one, no coercion, no dominance hierarchy. It’s… it’s love, but love transposed onto violence. They’ve fused empathy and predation into a single behavioral signature.”

Garcia stared at him, horrified. “Spence. Honey. Did you just say they’re in love?”

Reid blinked, his mouth opening and closing as he struggled for language. “Yes. That’s exactly what I said.”

The silence that followed was heavier than smoke.

Hotchner broke it with the firmness of steel. “It doesn’t matter what they feel for each other. What matters is that they’re dangerous, and we treat them as such. No illusions. No sentiment.”

Garcia’s voice softened, almost pleading. “But it’s Will. Will Graham. He helped you. He saved people. How can he—”

“He chose Lecter,” Hotchner said flatly.

Across the room, Dexter had remained quiet, a steady presence among them. He sat at one of the desks, hands folded, his expression composed, professional. To Garcia he was the new agent — sharp, reserved, someone she hadn’t known long enough to love yet, but trusted by virtue of the badge he wore.

Inside, though, Dexter listened to their grief, their arguments, their anger, and felt only stillness. He understood choices like Will’s. He understood surrendering to a darkness that felt like truth. But unlike Will Graham, his darkness was not shared. His was solitary. His was secret.

Still, the Passenger stirred. Two killers in love. The BAU chasing shadows. And me, sitting at their center. This is going to be… interesting.

Garcia rubbed her eyes and forced a shaky smile. “Alright. You’re back safe. That’s enough for now. But please, promise me one thing: don’t make me go through that again.”

Morgan squeezed her shoulder, and the tension in the room eased by a fraction.

But Hotchner’s eyes were already on the board, on the faces of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham pinned beneath the harsh light. “We won’t have a choice,” he said quietly.

In the conference room, files and photos littered the table: bodies posed like saints in death, grotesque still lifes carved into permanence.

Hotchner stood at the head of the table, arms crossed. Behind him, the projection screen glowed with a face the team knew too well — Hannibal Lecter’s.

“Let’s be clear,” Hotch began. “Hannibal Lecter is not just a fugitive psychiatrist. He is a prolific serial murderer. And now, he is no longer acting alone.”

He clicked the remote. The image shifted: scenes of the Florence countryside, grainy photographs of victims from decades past. Women, couples, brutalized in ways both intimate and theatrical.

Prentiss straightened in her chair. “Il Mostro di Firenze.”

Rossi nodded grimly. “I worked with Interpol on that case. We never found him. But the signatures match. Surgical precision, ritualistic mutilation. We assumed it was a local. But Lecter lived in Florence for years. It was him.”

Morgan let out a low whistle. “So not only are we dealing with Hannibal the Cannibal, but also the damn Boogeyman of Italy.”

“Which means his career spans decades and continents,” Prentiss said, voice sharp. “And Will Graham chose that man.”

Reid’s hands fluttered against the tabletop, restless, mind burning through patterns. “You’re missing it. Will didn’t choose a monster. He chose someone who mirrored him. Someone who understood his empathy and reflected it back. That’s what makes them so dangerous together. It’s not manipulation — it’s resonance.”

Morgan turned toward him, incredulous. “Resonance? Reid, he’s in bed with a cannibal who’s been killing people since before we were even profiling. You’re making it sound like a love story.”

Reid’s gaze didn’t falter. “Because it is. And that’s exactly why we can’t underestimate them.”

Garcia, pale from where she sat with her laptop open, whispered, “You’re saying they’re like… soulmates in murder.”

“Exactly,” Rossi said. “And that bond makes them harder to break apart than any partnership we’ve ever faced. You cut at one, the other bleeds.”

Hotchner’s eyes swept the table. “Which means we stop treating Will as a victim. We treat them as one unsub. One organism.”

A hush fell. The truth was brutal, but it settled like iron.

Dexter had been silent until now, his eyes on the photographs, his face composed. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, even, professional. “You won’t catch them by looking at them separately. You need to map their psychology as a single profile. Every crime scene will be a conversation between them — two voices woven together. Find the dissonance, and you’ll find their weakness.”

The team glanced at him, surprised by the clarity of his insight.

“Good,” Hotchner said after a pause. “That’s the approach we’ll take.”

Dexter nodded once, outwardly calm, inwardly listening to the Passenger’s whisper. Not bad. You’ve just described yourself — two voices in one body. If only they knew.

Garcia broke the silence with a sharp inhale. “So, um… how exactly do we find two people who are smarter than all of us put together, and apparently in love enough to make Bonnie and Clyde look like prom kids?”

Hotchner clicked to the next slide: the warehouse crime scene. “We start with what they wanted us to see. They staged their reveal for a reason. We find the reason, we find them.”

The room settled into work, a war council gathered against something more intimate than terror, more dangerous than genius — a pair of lovers writing their devotion in blood.

And Dexter, sitting at their table, smiled inwardly. Hunters chasing hunters. And me, hidden in plain sight. This is going to be beautiful.

The car rattled along the back roads, headlights cutting tunnels through the fog. Smoke still clung to Will’s hair, the smell of gunpowder woven into his coat. He kept one hand steady on the wheel, the other resting on the arm Hannibal had draped lazily between them.

For a long time, neither spoke. The silence was not strained. It was thick with something else: exhilaration, the echo of survival, the pulse of having stood in the open, side by side, and lived.

Finally, Will exhaled. “They saw us.”

“They were meant to,” Hannibal said. His voice was calm, almost drowsy, but his eyes glimmered with the kind of joy other men reserved for love songs. “To keep us hidden would have been to deny what we are. What we chose.”

Will’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “You enjoyed it.”

A faint smile curved across Hannibal’s mouth. “Didn’t you?”

Will glanced at him, the question landing like a challenge. His eyes softened, betraying the answer he didn’t speak. “Maybe.”

Hannibal’s hand slid from the console to Will’s thigh, warm and grounding. “Do not diminish yourself, Will. Tonight, you did not hesitate. You stood with me before them all. You told them the truth.”

Will swallowed, his throat tight. He remembered Hotchner’s face — the grief disguised as command, the iron words: He made his choice.

“I did.” His voice was rough. “I told them.”

“And now there can be no doubt,” Hannibal said, his gaze still fixed on the fog ahead, though his words were for Will alone. “We are one. They will chase us as one. They will try to understand us as one. And they will fail.”

The car wound deeper into the countryside, leaving New Orleans’s shadow far behind.

Will let the silence settle again, then broke it with a whisper. “They’ll hunt us harder than anyone. Hotch. Rossi. Reid. They’ll never stop.”

“They can’t stop,” Hannibal replied softly. “It is their nature to hunt. Just as it is ours to elude. But, my Will, we have an advantage.”

Will turned toward him, his pale eyes catching the faint reflection of the dash. “What advantage?”

Hannibal finally looked at him, the full force of his attention like a weight pressed against the soul. His smile was not cruel — it was tender, reverent.

“We have each other.”

The words landed between them, steady as a heartbeat.

Will’s grip loosened on the wheel. He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, almost a sob. His free hand found Hannibal’s and closed around it.

The fog swallowed them whole.

The safehouse was a ruin dressed in shadows.

It sat on the outskirts of St. Bernard Parish, a crumbling plantation house that time had gnawed hollow. The paint peeled in long white strips from its columns; the windows were half-shattered and stuffed with wood; the air inside smelled of dust and rain-soaked earth.

To anyone else, it was abandonment. To Hannibal, it was sanctuary.

He moved through the foyer with calm assurance, setting down the leather case he had carried from the car. The case looked too fine for this place, its brass gleaming faintly in the candlelight Will struck against the dark. A single flame came alive, throwing their shadows long against the rotting walls.

“This won’t hold forever,” Will said. His voice carried the weight of pragmatism, though his tone betrayed no fear. He set the candle on the mantle where once there had been family portraits. “They’ll come. They’ll track us.”

“Of course they will.” Hannibal removed his jacket, folding it neatly over a chair whose cane seat had long since collapsed. He smoothed the fabric with the same reverence he gave to a body before cutting into it. “It is their nature. And ours to welcome them.”

Will turned toward him, eyes narrowed. “You make it sound like an invitation.”

“Isn’t it?” Hannibal’s smile was faint, glinting in the firelight. “To reveal ourselves as we are — openly, unapologetically — is the purest act of love. They see us now, Will. The world cannot unsee us.”

For a moment, Will said nothing. The weight of the candlelight fell across his face, highlighting the hollows beneath his eyes, the sharpness of his cheekbones. He looked worn, haunted, and yet, beneath it all, steady.

“I saw Reid’s face,” he said at last. “Hotch’s. Even Rossi. They looked at me like I’d died twice over. Like I was something to mourn.”

Hannibal approached him, slow, deliberate, until their shadows merged on the cracked plaster wall. He lifted a hand, brushing the ash and sweat from Will’s cheek with the gentlest touch.

“You are not theirs to mourn,” he murmured. “You are yours to savor.”

The words landed with a finality Will couldn’t resist. He leaned into the touch, eyes closing, breath trembling out of him as if the weight of the world had finally been allowed to slip from his shoulders.

When he opened them again, his gaze was clear. “Then we need to move carefully. We can’t give them another chance to box us in. Not yet.”

“Carefully,” Hannibal echoed, though his smile suggested something far more elaborate. “And beautifully.”

He turned back to the case, unclasping it with a metallic click. Inside, gleaming instruments caught the candlelight: scalpels, bone saws, delicate hooks. Not for immediate use — not yet. But Hannibal never traveled without them.

Will watched him, a blend of wariness and something warmer threading through his chest. He remembered the gunfire, the smoke, the split-second where Dexter Morgan’s eyes had locked with his. Recognition had passed there, wordless and sharp.

“They had someone new,” Will said.

“Yes,” Hannibal replied, fingers grazing the instruments. “And he is not like the others.”

“You saw it too.”

Hannibal closed the case softly, then looked back at him, eyes gleaming in the flicker of flame. “Predators recognize their own.”

Will felt the weight of that truth settle over him like a shroud. Hannibal stepped closer again, his hands resting against Will’s shoulders, grounding him.

“Let them hunt us,” Hannibal said softly, voice velvet over steel. “Let them chase our love across their maps and case files. In the end, they will come to understand nothing — except that we are indivisible.”

Will’s mouth quirked, not quite a smile, but close. He leaned forward, his forehead resting against Hannibal’s. For a moment, the world shrank to breath and warmth and the steady pulse of being alive, together, unbroken.

“They’ll never stop,” he whispered.

“Neither will we,” Hannibal replied.

The candle guttered, shadows bowing across the ruined walls, as if the sanctuary itself bent to their union.

The house groaned with the wind, its timbers flexing like an old ship abandoned to the tide. Candlelight licked the walls, drawing their shadows tall and wavering.

Will sat on the arm of the broken chair where Hannibal had left his jacket. His eyes lingered on the leather case of instruments, closed now, resting between them like a secret they both knew by heart.

“You talk like you’re directing an opera,” he said at last, voice dry, almost sardonic. “But tonight was chaos.”

Hannibal leaned against the mantle, head bowed in thought. The candle flame caught in his eyes, giving them a faint, inhuman glow. “Chaos is not the enemy. Music requires dissonance to find resolution.”

“It was close,” Will countered. His thumb traced the edge of the candle’s brass holder, as if testing its heat. “Too close.”

“Close,” Hannibal allowed, lifting his gaze to him, “but not failure.”

The silence stretched, thick with the residue of gunfire and smoke. Will rose from the chair and crossed the floor. Hannibal didn’t move, though his gaze followed every step.

When Will stopped before him, the candlelight revealed the exhaustion carved into his face — and beneath it, something sharper, more deliberate. He reached out, fingers brushing against Hannibal’s collar, a gesture deceptively casual.

“You’d risk everything just to be seen,” Will said quietly.

“With you,” Hannibal replied, “risked everything to be seen with you.”

For a heartbeat, neither moved. Then Will leaned in, closing the distance. The kiss was brief, unhurried, deliberate — not meant to ignite but to affirm. Hannibal didn’t initiate; he never did. He let Will’s mouth claim his, let Will’s hand tighten faintly at his jaw, and only then did he return it, precise and restrained, answering what had been given.

When Will drew back, his breath stirred against Hannibal’s cheek. His voice was low, but certain. “Don’t mistake me for your disciple.”

Hannibal’s eyes softened, the faintest hint of reverence flickering there. “Never.”

Will’s hand lingered a moment longer before falling away. The space between them held the weight of the kiss, the decision, the symmetry of a bond neither would deny.

The candle burned lower, the shadows bowing closer, merging into one.

The bullpen was nearly silent, the hum of computers and the distant grind of the building’s HVAC the only sounds left alive. The others had peeled away one by one, chasing showers, fresh clothes, or a few precious minutes of rest.

Reid hadn’t moved. He sat at his desk, shoulders slumped, the lamplight throwing shadows across the case file open in front of him. His eyes skimmed lines without reading, circling again and again to the same words. He could still hear Will’s voice from the warehouse, steady, unrepentant: I choose him.

“Spence.”

Reid startled when the hand landed on his shoulder. He looked up into Morgan’s tired smile, that mix of weariness and warmth that always seemed to cut through the fog.

“You’ve been reading the same page for half an hour,” Morgan said, lowering himself into the chair beside him. “Don’t tell me you’ve found some brand-new insight the rest of us missed.”

Reid’s lips twitched, almost a smile, but it faltered. “I keep replaying it. The way he looked at us. The way he said it. Like it didn’t cost him anything to stand beside Hannibal.”

Morgan leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Yeah. That part stuck with me too.”

“He was one of us,” Reid said quietly. “He taught me things, he—he listened in a way most people don’t. And now he’s…” His voice trailed off, unable to find the word.

Morgan finished it for him. “Gone.”

Reid shook his head. “No, that’s not it. He’s not gone. He’s still there. He’s just—shifted. As if everything we thought anchored him was… optional.”

For a while, neither spoke. The bullpen felt cavernous in the silence. Finally, Morgan leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his voice dropping low.

“Reid, you gotta stop carrying that weight on yourself. What Will did, what he’s doing now? That’s on him. Not you. Not us. He made his choice.”

Reid stared down at the file, fingers tracing the edge of a photograph without seeing it. “I don’t want to believe he’s irredeemable.”

Morgan’s jaw worked, the muscle ticking. He looked at Reid with the kind of patience that came from years of friendship, years of watching him break himself against puzzles no one else could solve.

“You believe in people,” Morgan said simply. “That’s who you are. And it’s why you’re good at what you do. But sometimes? People don’t come back. Sometimes, Pretty Boy, the best thing you can do for yourself is accept that and keep moving.”

Reid’s throat worked. “Do you really believe that?”

Morgan gave a small, humorless laugh. “I have to. If I start doubting it, I start doubting every choice I’ve ever made. Every unsub I put down, every kid I tried to save. And if I let myself go down that road…” He shook his head, the words trailing into silence.

Reid looked at him then, really looked, and saw not just the steel but the tired man behind it. He reached for something lighter, something to keep the air from collapsing in on them both. “You sound almost wise, Derek.”

Morgan smirked. “Almost?”

“Don’t get used to it,” Reid said, and the smile that tugged at his mouth was real this time.

Morgan chuckled, leaning over to squeeze the back of Reid’s neck, a gesture warm and grounding. “Always got your back, Spence. Don’t forget it.”

“I won’t,” Reid murmured.

The bullpen was still, but the heaviness had lifted, just a little. They sat in companionable silence for a moment longer, two friends in the eye of a storm, before Hotchner’s voice cut across the space, summoning them to the conference room.

The spell broke. But the comfort lingered.

Some bonds, Reid thought as he gathered his files, were not so easily broken.

The room smelled faintly of toner and dust, paper warmed by the hum of overhead lights. Case files were spread across the table in neat, weary stacks, photographs pinned along the boards at the far end: Hannibal, Will, their victims posed like cryptic offerings.

Dexter slipped in quietly, a folder tucked under his arm. He moved the way he always did — deliberate, unobtrusive, as though his body knew how to take up as little space as possible. He set the file down with precision, aligned it with the edge of the table, and began flipping through it.

He didn’t notice Reid until he spoke.

“You’re organized.”

Dexter looked up. Reid was at the opposite end of the table, a file already open before him, his eyes darting across pages at a speed that suggested he was absorbing entire paragraphs at a glance. His tie was loose, hair mussed, and there was a pen cap between his teeth.

Dexter gave the faintest smile, one that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Habit.”

Reid tilted his head, studying him. “Organized habits are usually compensatory. For anxiety. Or for control.”

Dexter met his gaze for a fraction longer than necessary. “Maybe both.”

Reid pulled the pen cap free, dropping it onto the folder in front of him. “You don’t talk much.”

“Neither do you,” Dexter replied evenly.

That earned him the faintest flicker of a smile — quick, gone almost before it appeared. Reid’s fingers tapped lightly against the file. “I talk when I have something worth saying.”

Dexter nodded. “Same.”

Silence settled again, not hostile, but not quite comfortable either. Just two men surrounded by paper and the echoes of violence, their quietness folding into each other like overlapping shadows.

Reid broke it this time, his tone softer, more curious. “You’ve been with us, what — four weeks?”

“About that.”

“I’ve been here for over a decade, and I still feel like the new guy sometimes.” He gave a quick, self-conscious laugh. “Guess that never really goes away.”

Dexter let himself glance at him — quick, assessing. “Doesn’t look that way to me. You seem… established.”

“Maybe,” Reid said. His eyes drifted toward Hannibal’s photograph pinned to the board. His voice dropped. “But with him? With Will? It feels like the ground keeps moving under my feet.”

Dexter followed his gaze to the photographs. Will’s pale eyes stared back from the paper, steady, unrepentant.

“Then we stand anyway,” Dexter said quietly.

Reid looked at him again, surprised by the certainty in the words. He nodded once, almost grateful, then bent back over the file.

Dexter returned to his own work, his face calm, his movements precise. But inside, the Passenger stirred, amused by the odd symmetry of it: two quiet men, side by side, speaking truths without meaning to.

The room hummed on, silent but for the shuffle of papers and the scratching of pens.

Hotchner’s office glowed faintly through its glass walls, the blinds half-drawn. Outside, the bullpen was nearly deserted, agents trickling out for the night. Inside, three figures remained: Hotch behind his desk, Rossi in the chair opposite, Prentiss leaning against the window frame, arms crossed.

Files were spread between them — the photographs from New Orleans, maps, timelines.

“It’s not just the posing,” Rossi said, tapping a photograph of the warehouse victims. “It’s the precision. Everything they do is calculated, but not in the usual way. It isn’t about avoiding detection. It’s about speaking.”

“Speaking to who?” Emily asked.

“To us.” Rossi’s voice was tired, but firm. “Every scene is a conversation. Lecter did it for years. Graham’s joined the chorus. That makes the profile twice as complex — two voices braided together.”

Hotch studied the photographs in silence, his jaw clenched. Finally he said, “Then we stop treating the scenes like evidence. We treat them like language. We decode what they’re saying, not just what they did.”

Emily pushed off the window frame, stepping closer to the desk. “So what’s the message here? In New Orleans?”

Rossi rubbed his chin, his expression shadowed. “Declaration. Identity. They weren’t just escaping. They wanted us to see them, together. That was the point.”

Hotch leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “And we did. Now they know exactly how shaken we are.”

Emily frowned, glancing at him. “Are we shaken?”

Hotch’s gaze flicked toward her, steady but unreadable. “We’re human.”

The room settled into a heavy silence. Outside, the faint hum of the bullpen carried on, indifferent.

Rossi sighed, pulling a map toward him. “They won’t stay put. Lecter never did. He’s a traveler, a hunter of settings as much as of people. Florence, Paris, Baltimore… now New Orleans. Each place is chosen for its aesthetic value as much as its practicality.”

Emily nodded slowly. “So where next? Another city with history, culture, stage value?”

“Exactly,” Rossi said. “The stage matters as much as the act. If we can predict the kind of stage, we can predict the act.”

Hotch’s voice cut in, clipped and precise. “Then we narrow it down. No more chasing shadows. We focus on where they’d go, not just where they’ve been.”

He looked at both of them, his eyes hard. “Lecter and Graham want us to see them. Fine. Then we’ll be waiting when they do.”

For a moment, the three of them sat together in silence — veterans of too many hunts, bound by the knowledge that this one was unlike any they had faced before.

The clock ticked on, indifferent.

Rossi pushed one of the crime scene photos across the table, his jaw tight. “This is the last tableau from the warehouse. The one we barely had time to register before the smoke.”

Hotchner studied it silently. The image was as grotesque as it was deliberate: two victims, male, their torsos slit open from sternum to pelvis. The skin had been peeled back with surgical precision, organs displaced and woven together, liver pressed against stomach, heart chambers twisted and sutured in a grotesque embrace. Their arms had been crossed, sewn together at the forearms, so the pair seemed to hold each other even in death.

Emily’s mouth tightened as she leaned closer. “It’s… fusion. Not just two bodies posed, but literally joined. Their insides folded together until they look like one organism.”

Rossi nodded grimly. “It’s a message. They’re showing us exactly what they are now. Not Hannibal, not Will, but Hannibal-and-Will. A single entity.”

Hotch’s face was unreadable, though his eyes lingered on the image. “It’s theatrical. They wanted us to see it before they revealed themselves.”

“Not just theatrical,” Rossi said, his tone heavier. “Symbolic. They’re telling us they’ve merged. That their bond is beyond manipulation or dominance. This isn’t teacher and student anymore. This is…” He trailed off, searching for the word.

“Symbiosis,” Emily supplied.

Rossi inclined his head. “Exactly.”

Hotch closed the folder, the image snapping out of view. “Then we do have to stop thinking of them as two suspects. From this point on, we profile them as one.”

Emily leaned back in her chair, arms crossed. “How long has it been since the fall? Three months? Four?”

“Four,” Rossi said flatly. His eyes were shadowed, his voice carrying the weight of years of chasing monsters. “They didn’t stay ghosts for long.”

Hotch’s gaze swept between them. “Which means they don’t intend to. They want us to see them, to understand them. Every crime scene from here on won’t just be murder. It’ll be a statement.”

Emily’s eyes flicked back to the photo, the grotesque sutures, the organs folded into one impossible body. “Statement or not, it’s still butchery.”

“Maybe,” Rossi said softly. “But to them? It’s a love letter.”

The silence that followed pressed against the glass walls like a tide, heavy, suffocating.

Hotchner tapped a finger against the closed folder, his voice clipped. “The location matters, but it’s not our only angle. Look at the timing. From the fall to New Orleans — four months. They didn’t wait long to reveal themselves. Which means they won’t wait long to strike again.”

Rossi spread another photograph across the table: the sutured bodies, organs braided into one grotesque mass. “This isn’t just murder. It’s escalation. They’re daring us. The message isn’t where — it’s how far they’ll go next.”

Emily leaned forward, eyes sharp. “So the question isn’t which city, it’s how they’ll top this. They’ve moved from precision to theater. What comes after fusing two men into one?”

Rossi’s jaw tightened. “A larger canvas. More bodies. More spectacle. Something so audacious it’ll drown out anything that came before.”

Hotch folded his arms, thinking aloud. “They’ll need supplies. Medical equipment, surgical tools, chemical agents. Lecter’s meticulous — he won’t risk improvising. If we track purchases, shipments, thefts in the right circles, we get ahead of them.”

Emily nodded. “And victims. They won’t pick at random. There’s always meaning — personal, symbolic, or both. If we can decode their victimology, we cut them off before they set the stage.”

The three of them stood over the table, the photographs and files spread like a grim tarot. The ticking of the clock filled the silence.

Finally Rossi exhaled. “We don’t have to know the stage. We just have to read the script before they turn the page.”

Hotch’s gaze was steady, hard. “Then we’d better start reading fast. Get the geniuses.”

Dexter had never seen anything like Garcia’s office. The rest of Quantico was glass, steel, and restraint — but here, the walls pulsed with color. Fairy lights curled like vines, a lava lamp gurgled in the corner, and half a dozen figurines guarded the monitors like sentinels from another world.

He found himself almost amused. In a place devoted to cataloging the worst of humanity, Garcia had built a sanctuary of glitter and glow. A shield. A mask of her own, not unlike his.

Reid sat in the chair to her left, a stack of files balanced on his knee, his long fingers shuffling pages with restless precision. Across from them, Dexter leaned against the edge of the desk, arms crossed, his expression composed but attentive.

Garcia tapped at her keyboard, screens flickering with lists of transactions. “Okay, so per Hotch’s orders, I’ve widened the search radius for surgical-grade equipment. You’d be amazed at how many people buy bone saws online. And grossed out. Definitely grossed out.”

Reid didn’t look up from his file. “Lecter wouldn’t rely on amateur suppliers. He’d want quality. Precision instruments. Probably European manufacturers.”

“Got it,” Garcia said, fingers flying. “Filtering down to imports with high-dollar value. That narrows it to…” She paused as the numbers on the screen shrank. “Well, a lot less.”

Dexter leaned closer, his voice quiet, steady. “Look for orders that don’t make sense. Private buyers with no medical license. Institutions ordering equipment they’d never use. That’s where you’ll find him.”

Reid glanced at him, brow furrowing slightly. “That’s a very… specific suggestion.”

Dexter gave a faint smile, unbothered. “Patterns like this aren’t new. Criminals often leave trails in what they buy, not just what they do.”

Garcia shot Reid a quick look — she, too, had caught the edge in Dexter’s tone — but she turned back to her screens. “Okay, spooky but helpful. Running the filter now.”

Numbers began scrolling. Reid leaned forward, his eyes flicking between the files in his lap and the names populating the screen. “Victimology will help us narrow further. Lecter’s always been deliberate. If he’s escalating, the victims won’t just be symbolic — they’ll be chosen for how they fit together.”

Garcia wrinkled her nose. “Like the warehouse bodies.”

Reid’s voice was low, clinical. “Exactly. Two lives woven into one narrative. If he repeats the pattern, the next set won’t be random. They’ll be complementary. Opposites. Twins. Lovers.”

Dexter’s gaze lingered on Reid for a moment, unreadable. Then he said, almost too casually, “So if we identify pairs at risk, we anticipate the stage before it’s built.”

Reid looked back at him, and for a brief second their eyes held. Not suspicion, not trust — just recognition. Two quiet men, both too precise for comfort.

Garcia broke the tension, spinning back to face them. “Well, gentlemen, if our bad guys are shopping for scalpels and body doubles, I’ll find them. But it won’t be pretty.”

Dexter’s mouth curved faintly, though his eyes remained cool. “It never is.”

The room settled into the rhythm of keys clattering, pages flipping, and the quiet hum of minds working — three hunters circling prey they barely understood.

The storm had passed hours ago, but the house still smelled of damp wood and smoke, the remnants of their fire lingering in the rafters. The shutters rattled with the wind. Upstairs, the bedroom was stripped down to essentials — two beds, mismatched, with blankets folded over thin mattresses.

Will lay on his side, back to the wall, watching the candle flicker on the dresser. Hannibal sat at the foot of the opposite bed, dressing gown loose at the throat, a book closed in his hands. Neither had spoken for some time, yet the silence was companionable, thick with thought rather than emptiness.

“Rossi will push them east,” Will murmured finally. His voice was roughened by fatigue. “He knows you too well to think you’ll settle in one place. Especially here.”

Hannibal’s eyes lifted from the book, amused. “Yes. He’ll paint a map for Hotch. Florence, Paris, Vienna. Cities with blood in their stones.”

Will gave a faint smile, though it faded quickly. “And he won’t be wrong.”

Hannibal set the book aside, folding his hands over his knee. “But he will be too broad. Their net will stretch too wide. We will slip through, as always.”

Will rolled onto his back, staring at the cracked ceiling. “We can’t return to Florence. Too many eyes. Paris is no longer indulgent. Vienna would be comfortable, but predictable.”

His words hung there, deliberate. Hannibal did not answer immediately; he considered them as though turning each city like a gem in his hand.

“You want a stage,” Will said. “A stage large enough to carry weight. But not so large it drowns us.”

Hannibal’s gaze softened at that. “A place where myth and empire coexist. Where the ruin of history feeds the appetite of the present. Where blood spilled upon marble becomes more than violence — it becomes rite.”

Will turned his head toward him, eyes narrowing faintly. “You’ve already chosen.”

Hannibal inclined his head a fraction. “Perhaps.”

The candle guttered, throwing their shadows long against the wall. Will sat up, pushing his hair back from his forehead, the exhaustion in his movements tempered by certainty.

“They’ll follow us,” he said quietly. “They always will.”

“Of course,” Hannibal replied. He rose from the bed with his usual elegance, crossing to the window where the moonlight silvered the curtains. “That is the nature of the hunt. But the setting, Will… the setting must be worthy. Ancient stones, eternal judgments. We must make the world see what we have become.”

Will joined him at the window, their reflections blurred together in the glass. He didn’t smile, but there was a grim acceptance in his face, as if the choice had been made for them long before they spoke it.

“Then let’s give them a stage,” he said.

The wind pressed against the shutters, the candle flame flared, and between them the unspoken word hung heavy, unmistakable.

Not Florence.

Not Paris.

Not Vienna.

A city older, heavier. Eternal.

They moved through the safe house with the slow, precise economy of people who know how to use time as a tool. Paperbacks were chosen and then set aside. Clothes were folded not for haste but so they would look unremarkable — the ordinary uniform of travelers who mean nothing to the world. Hannibal arranged the small folio of documents on the dresser and smoothed the edges as if the papers themselves must be calmed before they could be trusted.

Will watched him, a slow smile ghosting his face. “You always make it look effortless,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Hannibal’s eyes never left the sheets. “Effortless is a discipline,” he replied. “And discipline is preparation made beautiful.”

They spoke little of procedure. When they spoke of travel it was in abstractions: intermediaries, plausible routes, stops that would make their passage appear ordinary to everyone who glanced their way. Hannibal had friends — not names to call, but people arranged across a map — and he moved among them as a conductor among instruments, arranging a quiet chord that could carry them across an ocean. He offered Will only the facts he needed: times, a small stack of currency, an itinerary printed with careful restraint.

Will laid his palm flat on the folio and let his fingers rest on the paper as though feeling the pulse beneath. “We’ll be seen,” he said. “Airports are full of eyes.”

“We will be visible,” Hannibal agreed, “and that visibility is useful. It will tell us where the watchers are weak and where they are strong.” He folded the papers together and tucked them back into the folio as if closing a book.

They left the safe house before dawn, the road still sleeping under a blue-gray hush. The drive to the airport was short, the car moving through small, familiar towns that had not yet woken. They spoke intermittently about small comforts: which hotel they would avoid, how to carry a conversation with the indifferent blandness of strangers, which books to take for the long stretches between cities.

At the airport their faces were ordinary among ordinary faces. Will wore a soft sweater; Hannibal a coat the color of rain. They moved together through the lines with the quiet, practiced cleanness of people traveling often enough to know the choreography. A customs agent’s nod, a clerk’s stamped hand — processes that exist for the world’s order and that, in their solidity, allowed the two of them to feel temporarily like townsmen strolling a market.

On the plane, Hannibal watched Will the way someone studies the grain of polished wood, appreciating its texture without needing to alter it. Will read with the book open on his lap, the corner of his mouth lifted at certain sentences. Hannibal sipped tea, the porcelain cup a small, civilized thing to hold in a sea of recycled air.

They did not talk about victims or stages or the particular artistry that had become part of their speech. They spoke of more domestic matters — which tastes to seek in the new city, which sculptures to look at from a distance, what an afternoon might feel like when it was theirs and not the world’s. Their intimacy was in the small economies of care: Hannibal adjusting the blanket across Will’s knees, Will sliding his hand to rest against Hannibal’s palm and leaving it there.

When the flight dipped, when the fastness of altitude softened into approach, the light at the window turned from hard and white to warm and low. They watched the world unscroll beneath them: tiles and roofs, a grid of light converging into a denser, older heart. Will tightened his fingers around Hannibal’s and didn’t let go.

They disembarked with the seamlessness of two people who had rehearsed this a thousand times in private. Their bags arrived on a separate carousel; their faces were stepped across the threshold of a city that smelled of citrus and stone and something older than the sea. Columns rose in the distance in the soft twilight like an architecture of bones; narrow streets folded into one another and fell away into shadow. The air was the color of dust warmed by sunlight. It was a place of ruins, of palimpsests; it felt, to both of them, like a stage that remembered its plays.

They walked without naming the place aloud. Names are labels for those who would judge. Instead they let the city speak to them in marble and terrace and the slow cadence of evening bells, and in those details they recognized the choice they had made.

Hannibal let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “It will do,” he said.

Will’s hand tightened once more. “It will. It already does.”

They turned away from the airport lights and into the streets, two figures folding themselves into the city’s old pattern — careful, deliberate, ready.

Chapter Text

Their lodging was tucked into a street so narrow the moonlight barely touched it, the walls pressed close with ivy and faded shutters. The air smelled of wet stone, wine, and roasting meat from trattorias that spilled golden light onto the cobblestones. Trastevere was alive but not loud: laughter in courtyards, the clink of glasses, bells striking the hour in the distance.

They moved together without speaking, their footsteps quiet on the uneven stones. The city around them carried centuries in its bones — frescoes hidden behind peeling plaster, fragments of Latin carved into walls that held washing lines now.

Will paused when they reached the square. Before them stood Santa Maria in Trastevere, its façade glowing in the soft yellow of streetlamps. Mosaics shimmered above the columns, gold tesserae catching the light like fragments of a sun that had not yet set.

Hannibal followed his gaze, his mouth curving faintly. “Twelfth century. One of the oldest churches in Rome still standing. The mosaics are Cosmatesque, though altered many times. The Virgin enthroned with child.”

Will’s voice interrupted softly. “Older than that. Some scholars think the first sanctuary was here as early as the third century. And see those columns?” He gestured toward the portico, the marble shafts veined with age. “They weren’t made for this church. They were taken from the Baths of Caracalla. Pagan marble, reused for Christian worship. A place of bathing, turned into a place of prayer.”

Hannibal’s eyes shifted to him, genuinely surprised. His silence invited Will to go on.

Will’s tone was low, almost reflective. “It’s not just a church. It’s a palimpsest. Every stone carries another story underneath — empire, then church, then neighborhood. Nothing ever disappears. It just gets rewritten.”

For a long moment Hannibal said nothing. The light caught the lines of his face, but his expression was unreadable — except for the small flicker in his eyes, something that looked dangerously close to reverence.

Finally, he inclined his head, the faintest bow of acknowledgment. “You surprise me, Will. And I do not surprise easily.”

Will gave a thin smile. “Rome makes it easy.”

They stood there together, two shadows at the edge of the square, the mosaics glinting above them. Around them the city moved on, indifferent to the weight of history or the intimacy of the moment.

Later, back in their rooms above a narrow alley, they unpacked with quiet efficiency. Hannibal laid his coat across the chair with its usual precision; Will set his book on the bedside table, worn pages soft from his hands. They didn’t speak of what came next. Not yet. The city was a stage waiting to be claimed, but for now, there was only the rhythm of the street below and the quiet comfort of having arrived together.

The bells rang again, low and resonant, carrying across the rooftops.

Hannibal, already seated, turned to watch Will by the window, his profile lit by the glow of the city. “Pagan marble turned into prayer,” he said softly. “You’re right. Nothing ever disappears. It only changes shape.”

Will looked back at him, and in that glance the choice of Rome — though never spoken — became undeniable.

The streets narrowed as the night deepened, lanterns burning low above wooden doors, ivy curling thickly over stone. A trattoria closed its shutters with a hollow clap, leaving only the warm scent of garlic and wine behind. Children’s voices had long faded; now there was only the rhythm of footsteps and the distant hum of bells rolling from across the river.

Hannibal and Will walked side by side without hurry, their shadows stretching unevenly across the cobbles. The city wrapped itself around them: arches leaning over alleyways, fountains trickling where time had worn the marble smooth, cats slipping between doorways like streaks of silence.

Will stopped to look at a small shrine tucked into a wall — a Madonna lit by a single electric bulb, cheap and buzzing faintly, surrounded by fading flowers. His eyes lingered on the statue, then shifted to Hannibal.

“Even here,” he said, voice low, “they mark their corners with devotion. Every street is an altar.”

Hannibal’s gaze followed his. “It is the nature of mankind to dress its fears in ritual. The city is a cathedral with no roof.”

They moved on. The air smelled of moss and smoke, the kind of damp that clings to ancient stone. A pair of young lovers passed them, laughing quietly, their arms entangled as they disappeared into a side street. Will’s eyes tracked them until they vanished, then fell back to the cobbles beneath his shoes.

“Our next…” he hesitated, searching for the word, “…opera. It will need to feel inevitable. As if the city itself demanded it.”

Hannibal inclined his head, his expression unreadable. “Yes. The stones here already remember blood. They will not resist remembering more.”

Will gave a faint, almost weary smile. “Then we let the city decide the role. We only give it form.”

For a time they said nothing else. They walked beneath the weight of centuries, the night folding around them like a curtain. From a balcony above, laundry swayed in the night air, whispering against the rail. Somewhere a violin played faintly, the sound carried unevenly across the tiles.

When they returned to their lodging, the shutters closed them off from the square below. Hannibal lit a single lamp, its glow soft against the plaster walls. The room smelled faintly of dust and lavender from the linen.

Hannibal removed a bottle of red from his bag — a local vintage, bought without ceremony at a shop down the street. He poured two glasses with his usual precision, though the wine sloshed slightly against the rim of Will’s glass as he handed it over. Will smiled faintly at that, as if the imperfection was more telling than the ritual.

They sat opposite each other at the small table, their knees almost touching. Outside, the faint violin still played somewhere in the neighborhood, threading its way through the open shutters.

Will lifted his glass. “To not being caught.”

Hannibal touched his own glass to Will’s, the faint ring of crystal brief but clear. “To not being forgotten.”

They drank.

Afterward, Will reached for the book he had carried with him from the safe house. The cover was worn, its corners softened by years. He opened to a page, thumb resting on the margin, and began to read aloud. His voice was low, not theatrical, but steady, carrying the weight of the words without decoration.

Hannibal leaned back in his chair, eyes fixed on him. For once he did not analyze or annotate; he simply listened, the rhythm of Will’s voice filling the small room. When Will closed the book, Hannibal inclined his head slightly, a gesture of appreciation more intimate than any applause.

Later, Hannibal stood at the basin, water running cold over his hands as he washed away the day. Will leaned against the doorframe, wine still in hand, watching him with a calm that was almost disarming. Hannibal dried his hands with a towel, then crossed the room to Will without breaking his gaze.

Neither spoke. Will set his glass aside and reached for the lamp, lowering the flame until the room sank into shadow. They moved around one another easily, the choreography of domestic life already theirs.

When they lay down — not in the same bed, but close enough that the rhythm of breath carried from one to the other — the silence was warm, not empty.

Will glanced once more toward the shuttered window, where the city breathed beyond the glass. “It won’t be long,” he said quietly.

Hannibal’s eyes caught his, the faintest flicker of a smile there. “No. Not long at all.”

The lamp went dark. Outside, Trastevere kept its secrets, unaware that its streets had already been chosen as part of a stage.

Garcia’s office hummed with light and color. Monitors bathed the room in shifting blues and greens, fairy lights twinkled like constellations above their heads, and an old record player turned lazily in the corner, filling the silence with a low hum.

Dexter sat at her side, posture straight, eyes steady on the screens. His presence made the space feel smaller, like a candle burning too close to its wick.

Garcia typed quickly, her bracelets clinking against the desk. “So, I’ve narrowed down our window of travel, but the system’s not exactly eager to cough up transatlantic departures that look suspicious. Everyone and their grandmother goes to Europe these days.”

Dexter leaned forward, the glow of the monitors sharpening the lines of his face. “Suspicion isn’t always in the departure. Look for inconsistencies. Tickets purchased under ordinary names, but with unusual payment methods. Last-minute changes. Duplicate identities.”

Garcia shot him a sideways glance, her fingers still moving. “You really do have a knack for sounding spooky, you know that? I say potato salad, you say forged manifests.”

Dexter allowed himself a small, deliberate smile. “Well, I’ve never trusted potato salad either.”

Garcia blinked at him, then laughed — a sharp burst that filled the room. “See, that’s what I mean. Creepy and funny. It’s a weird combo, Morgan.”

“Story of my life,” he said, almost too smoothly, and turned his eyes back to the scrolling data.

Names and numbers flickered by until a pattern emerged. Dexter pointed with precise calm. “Here. Same traveler, four times over. No one makes that many mistakes by accident.”

Garcia leaned closer, her painted nails tapping the screen. “Either we’ve got the world’s sloppiest travel agent, or…”

“Or someone wanted to vanish into the background,” Dexter finished. His voice was calm, almost satisfied. “That’s the trail.”

Garcia sat back, blinking at him. “You don’t miss much, do you?”

His smile widened, faint but intentional. “Only the unimportant things. Like potato salad.”

Garcia snorted before she could stop herself, covering her mouth. “God help me, you’re actually funny.”

The silence that followed was warmer than before, filled only by the hum of the record player. She typed faster now, her focus sharpened. “Alright, then. Let’s follow the breadcrumbs. You and me, Morgan.”

Dexter’s gaze lingered on her reflection in the glass of the monitor, her bright hair haloed by LEDs. In her world of color and light, he looked almost like a shadow.

“Let’s,” he said softly.

The data tightened into clearer shapes: names narrowing into possibilities, dates drawing lines on the map. Somewhere across the ocean, two predators had already chosen their stage. And here, in this small, glowing room, another predator watched the trail with the same hunger — only his mask smiled back at Garcia.

The office room was quieter now, blinds drawn, the city beyond Quantico shut out by lines of shadow. The air smelled faintly of coffee gone cold. Files spread across the table, each one a fragment of the monsters they were chasing.

Rossi leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, his eyes fixed on the photographs of the warehouse tableau. “This isn’t just escalation. It’s punctuation. They’re marking the start of something bigger.”

Emily sat forward, resting her elbows on the table. “So the question isn’t just why that display, it’s why now.”

Hotch stood at the head of the table, hands braced on the wood. His expression was calm, but his voice carried the weight of command. “We know why Lecter performs. Control. Artistry. But Will Graham’s part in this changes the equation. He’s not just enabling — he’s collaborating.”

Rossi’s jaw tightened. “A duet. Not a soloist.”

Reid had been silent until now, his long fingers tapping against a pen, his eyes distant as though reading something invisible across the air. Finally, he spoke. “It’s not a duet.” His voice was quiet, but it carried.

All three looked at him.

Reid continued, his words quickening as the pieces fell into place. “It’s polyphony. In music theory, two melodies that run separately, each distinct, but when played together they create something richer, something whole. It’s not one subsumed into the other. It’s two lines woven into a single composition.”

Emily tilted her head. “So you’re saying the warehouse tableau wasn’t just fusion for shock value. It was…”

“A demonstration,” Reid finished. His eyes were sharp now, his hands restless. “They wanted to show us what polyphony looks like in flesh. Two lives, sewn into one song. That’s what makes them more dangerous than ever before — because together, they don’t just multiply each other’s crimes. They multiply meaning.”

Rossi studied him, nodding slowly. “Polyphony. I can live with that. It fits.”

Hotch’s gaze didn’t leave Reid. “Meaning leaves patterns. If they’re writing a new composition, we need to learn the rules before the next movement begins.”

Reid flipped open a file, eyes scanning lines of text. “They’ll need a setting that can hold polyphony. Somewhere layered, historical, resonant. A place where past and present overlap.”

Emily’s brow furrowed. “A city that already carries the weight of ritual.”

Reid’s fingers stopped tapping. His eyes lifted, almost reluctant. “Yes.”

The silence that followed was heavy. No one said the name of the city aloud. But it hung in the room, undeniable, like a note struck and left to ring.

Rossi finally exhaled, rubbing his temples. “Then we’d better talk to Interpol. Because if I’m right, they’re already there.”

Hotch nodded once. “We’ll coordinate. But we don’t alert local law enforcement until we’re sure. The last thing we need is panic.”

Reid leaned back, his expression unreadable, though his eyes were sharp with thought. Outside the blinds, the wind rattled faintly against the glass.

The next movement had already begun.

The night air was cool, carrying the faint smell of rain on pavement. Streetlamps stretched their shadows long across the sidewalk as JJ, Emily, and Tara walked in step, their heels clicking against the quiet rhythm of the city. They didn’t speak for a while; the silence was companionable, worn smooth by years of late nights and long cases.

Finally, JJ broke it. “You ever feel like… we’ve been doing this too long? That some cases take pieces of us we don’t get back?”

Emily glanced at her, hands tucked into her coat pockets. “Every case takes something. The trick is convincing yourself you can afford the cost.”

Tara let out a soft breath, almost a laugh but not quite. “I stopped keeping score a long time ago.” She looked down the empty street, the glow of her phone screen briefly lighting her face before she slipped it back into her pocket. “But this one—Hannibal and Will—it’s different. They’re not just killers. They’re… something else. It’s like chasing ghosts that know we’re there.”

JJ nodded, pulling her jacket tighter. “Yeah. And the team feels it. Reid, especially. He carries too much.”

They walked in silence again for a block, passing shuttered shops and dim apartment windows. Then Emily said, “What do you think of the new guy?”

“Dexter?” Tara asked.

Emily gave a small nod.

JJ hesitated. “He’s… quiet. Polite. A little intense.” She tried to put it into words. “It’s like he’s always watching. Like he’s in the room but never fully in it.”

Tara arched an eyebrow. “Spooky but useful. Garcia swears he’s got an instinct for patterns no one else sees.”

Emily’s mouth curved faintly, a flash of dry humor breaking through. “Well… he is attractive.”

JJ turned her head, a look caught between exasperation and amusement. “That’s not the word I’d use first.”

Tara chuckled softly. “Can’t argue, though. Mystery has its appeal.”

Emily shrugged, unapologetic. “I’m just saying what you’re both thinking.”

JJ rolled her eyes, but her smile betrayed her. “Fine. Attractive. And mysterious. Which makes him twice as dangerous if he’s not who we think he is.”

The levity faded as the weight of her words settled. They reached the corner where their paths split — JJ toward the suburbs, Emily and Tara deeper into the city. They paused under the glow of a streetlamp, the three of them standing close in the stillness.

“Stay safe,” Emily said simply.

JJ managed a smile, but her eyes were tired. “You too.”

Tara reached out and squeezed JJ’s arm, a brief touch, grounding. Then they turned, each heading their own way, the sound of their footsteps fading into the night. For a while, the street was empty again — only the echoes of their voices lingering, carrying the weight of things unsaid.

The night had thinned to silence by the time Hotch and Dexter left the building, their footsteps steady on the pavement. The city lights were low, the air cool against their faces.

Hotch adjusted the strap of his briefcase, glancing at the empty street. “I should get home. Jack doesn’t sleep unless I tell him goodnight.”

Dexter gave a small, almost surprised smile. “Harrison’s the same way. He pretends he doesn’t need it, but if I miss it… he knows.”

They walked a few steps in silence, the rhythm of two men more used to command than confession.

“Funny,” Hotch said quietly, “how in all this… the only thing that matters at the end of the day is putting them to bed.”

Dexter nodded, his voice low. “Yeah. That’s when you remember who you really are.”

They reached the corner where their paths split. No handshake, no promise — just a brief look, one father to another. Then they turned, each heading home to their son, the night swallowing the sound of their steps.

The walk home was quiet. Streetlamps burned in measured intervals, their glow spilling across the pavement like watchful eyes. Dexter kept his hands in his pockets, his stride unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world.

He thought about the team. Garcia with her kaleidoscope office, colors bright enough to blind the shadows. Reid, restless and sharp, a mind that never slept. Hotch, carved out of stone, but softening when he mentioned his son. Even the women — JJ, Emily, Tara — walking together in a way that suggested they had long ago decided to be more than colleagues, something closer to sisters.

It was… domestic. Strange, but almost enviable.

His lips curved faintly as he thought of Hannibal and Will. Everyone else on the team saw monsters, killers to chase. But Dexter saw something else: two people who had done what he had never managed. They had found each other in the darkness. They had given their monsters a companion.

He envied them.

Not the art of their killings, not the spectacle — but the fact that their shadows touched and did not recoil.

He thought of the attempts he had made. Miguel Prado, who burned too hot, too reckless, mistaking bloodlust for brotherhood. Brian Moser, his true brother, who had understood the Passenger but had wanted too much, too openly. Both of them had been possibilities, both had failed.

He had offered pieces of himself, cautiously, as if testing whether the world could bear the weight of what he carried. But no one had ever held the whole.

Now, at fifty paces’ distance, he was part of a team that saw him as brilliant, quiet, useful. And yet, even here, even now — he was alone in the one way that mattered.

His shoes clicked against the pavement. He lifted his eyes to the night sky, a pale scattering of stars blurred by city light. Somewhere across the ocean, Lecter and Graham were walking together through a city older than memory, their shadows already overlapping on ancient stones.

Dexter’s hand brushed against the railing as he reached his building, fingers tightening for just a moment. “Lucky bastards,” he murmured under his breath, and allowed himself a smile that no one saw.

He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and the city closed behind him.

The apartment was dim when Dexter let himself in. Harrison’s shoes were in the middle of the hallway again, one tipped on its side as if he had kicked it off mid-flight.

Dexter bent to pick them up, setting them neatly by the door. “Eleven years old,” he muttered to himself, “and the laws of gravity still apply only selectively.”

From the bedroom came the muffled sound of pages turning. Harrison was curled on his bed, a comic book propped against his knees, the lamplight catching the gold of his hair. His brow furrowed in concentration until he looked up and saw his father standing in the doorway.

“You’re late,” Harrison said. Not accusing, just stating the fact.

Dexter stepped inside, loosening his tie. “I had to catch some very bad people.” He let the words hang there, ordinary to Harrison’s ears but carrying a resonance only Dexter could hear. “But I’m here now.”

Harrison set the book aside, watching him with that unblinking seriousness children sometimes have. “Did you win?”

Dexter smiled faintly, sitting on the edge of the bed. “It’s not about winning. It’s about making sure people don’t get hurt.”

Harrison considered that, then leaned back against the pillow. “That sounds like winning.”

For a moment, Dexter just watched him. So small still, though his limbs were already lengthening into something more adolescent. Eleven going on twelve, a stage balanced between boyhood and something more complicated.

He reached for the blanket and pulled it up over Harrison’s chest. The boy wriggled down beneath it, eyes heavy now.

“Dad?” he murmured.

“Yeah?”

“You’ll still be here in the morning?”

Dexter felt the words settle in his chest with a weight both familiar and sharp. He smoothed the blanket once more. “Yes. I’ll be here.”

Harrison’s breathing slowed, his lashes lowering. Within minutes, he was asleep, the book sliding from his hand.

Dexter stayed a while longer, watching him in the hush of the room. The city outside moved on — sirens in the distance, tires whispering across asphalt — but here, time was suspended.

He brushed the book aside, turned off the lamp, and sat in the darkness. In this moment, at least, the Passenger was quiet.

Reid’s apartment was silent when he unlocked the door. The kind of silence that felt heavier than noise. He stepped inside, leaving his satchel by the door, and was greeted by the familiar walls lined with bookshelves. Volumes in every color and size pressed close together, their spines a kind of wallpaper he had built over years.

He didn’t turn on the overhead light. Instead, he crossed to the lamp on his desk and flicked it on, its glow soft against the spines of books and the neat stacks of paper. The air smelled faintly of paper and dust.

He sat down without removing his coat, fingers brushing across a worn photograph pinned to the edge of the desk: his mother, smiling faintly at the camera, her eyes already distant. For a moment, he let the memory press against him — her voice, sometimes clear, sometimes scattered; the feeling of being a boy trying to anchor her to a world she kept drifting away from.

He had always lived with ghosts.

His eyes shifted from the photograph to the open file on the desk. Will Graham’s name stared back at him, bold against the header.

Will.

The memories came unbidden: Will sitting hunched over at a conference table, sleeves rolled to his forearms, his eyes never quite meeting anyone else’s. The way he would listen more than he spoke, but when he did speak it was in those quiet, incisive observations that left the rest of the room still. The faint smile he gave Reid once, when they had both stayed behind after a briefing, books scattered between them, realizing neither of them wanted to go home yet.

They had understood each other — not completely, but enough. Enough to recognize the loneliness, the sense of being set apart, cursed with too much empathy and too little rest.

Reid closed his eyes. He didn’t think Will had been corrupted by Lecter, not really. Will had always carried that darkness in him — a dormant killer waiting for the right spark. That was what unsettled Reid most: not surprise at Will’s descent, but recognition.

Because he knew his own mind too well. Knew how easily empathy could tilt into obsession, how thought could spiral into cruelty if untethered. Will had embraced his shadow. And some nights, alone in the quiet, Reid feared he might one day do the same.

The books on the shelves loomed, silent witnesses to his thoughts. He thought of calling his mother, just to hear her voice, to remind himself that not all bonds were corrupted. But he knew how the conversation would go: lucid for a moment, then lost again in tangents, leaving him lonelier than before.

Reid opened his eyes and reached for the book closest to hand, flipping it open at random. The words blurred and rearranged themselves until they formed nothing at all. He set it aside.

The apartment was silent, except for the faint tick of the clock on the wall.

Reid leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. For a long time, he didn’t move.

They had learned to make a life out of small certainties.

In the morning light of their second-floor bedroom, the house smelled of coffee and lemon detergent. Margot was in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, a small constellation of ceramic bowls on the counter. Alana stood at the window, a cup cupped in both hands, watching a delivery truck grow smaller as it turned the corner of their quiet street. A child’s laughter — high and surprised — came up from the street where a small dog chased a frisbee.

This was the slow choreography of safety: breakfast eaten at the table where the sun found the grain in the wood, shoes lined up by the door, the brief, contented argument over who would park by the curb on school mornings. It was ordinary and it was fragile, and both women treated it like an artifact.

Alana put her cup down and walked over to Margot. She rested her head briefly against the wide of Margot’s back and inhaled the faint scent of cedar and smoke. “He’s asleep late today,” she said, voice soft. “That’s good.”

Margot turned, the knife paused in her hand. When she smiled, it was exact and private. “Some mornings I would trade everything for more of them,” she said.

They moved through the house with a kind of practiced intimacy. Then Alana’s phone lit on the counter with a notification. She glanced at it absently, but the words rooted her in place: Grotesque tableau discovered in New Orleans warehouse — investigators stunned.

She didn’t open it at first. She let the headline sit like a pebble in her mouth.

Margot caught her hesitation, her eyes narrowing. “Is it… him?”

Alana pressed the phone facedown on the counter. “Not here,” she said. Her voice steadied the lie.

Later, when Margot was upstairs and the house had gone still, Alana opened the article. The text was vague — two bodies staged in an unusual arrangement… authorities withholding further details… FBI called in — accompanied only by a blurred photo of the warehouse exterior under police tape. The image was innocuous to anyone else. But Alana felt her throat tighten. She didn’t need details. She had seen Hannibal’s work before.

She closed the article quickly, but the weight of it lingered.

When Margot came in minutes later, she caught her by the shoulders and guided her to the couch. She did not offer explanations or theories. She offered instead an arm and a presence; a murmured question, “You want me to hold you?” and Alana accepted it without thinking.

They sat like that for a long time: two shapes in the afternoon light, a home around them humming with ordinary life. Alana thought of Will with the small, precise sorrow of someone remembering what was. She thought of his hands, rougher than she remembered, and of the quick, humane way he had listened to the world. She did not think of Lecter with the easy hatred old enemies inspire; she thought of the tremulous architecture of affection that had made both men terrible and beautiful.

Outside, a neighbor’s child rode past on a bicycle, bells chiming. Somewhere down the street, a woman called for her dog. The domestic noises pressed in around the quiet of the room, helpful and human.

On the kitchen table, Margot eventually reached for a folded envelope that had arrived while they’d been sorting laundry — unremarked, placed among utility bills and a circular from the PTA. There was no return address. Only a single line in handwriting the color of iron: Remember the stones.

Margot held it between her fingers for a beat that was too long and then put it in Alana’s hand. Alana’s mouth felt dry as she read the three words. She looked up at Margot, and in her face something private and fierce stilled.

They could have called someone. They could have taken the envelope to the police. Instead they folded it the way you fold something you cannot yet decide to burn or to keep, and slid it into a drawer with other small, undecided things: spare keys, an old interview transcript, a photograph of a beach where no storms had come.

They did not talk about the note’s meaning. There was no need to give it shape. The warning itself — ambiguous, intimate — seemed to be the point.

That night, when the child climbed into the shallow twin they had set side by side and sighed as children do when everything is safe again, Margot and Alana stood in the doorway watching. In the soft half-light, Alana brushed a fingertip across Margot’s knuckles and, for the first time in a long while, let herself imagine a life in which the simple acts of making breakfast and tucking in a small boy were not punctuated by letters or headlines.

And then she let the image go.

They turned out the lights together.

Outside, the house on the quiet street breathed with the hush of sleeping things. Somewhere far away, stones would remember. For now the stones on this block held only the footfalls of neighbors and the faint scratch of a cat’s claws along a fence. The future would decide whether their domestic rooms remained safe, or whether those rooms, too, would be folded into someone else’s composition.

The streets of Rome wound around them like a living labyrinth. Evening had fallen, and the city’s tempo had shifted from the rush of commerce to the slower rhythm of candles in windows and footsteps echoing off cobblestones. The air smelled faintly of roasted chestnuts and exhaust, the ordinary perfumes of a city that had endured centuries of blood and prayer alike.

They walked together without speaking, their shoulders brushing, their silence heavy with the unspoken purpose of the hunt. Rome was a stage, and they were its unseen composers, listening for the right notes, the right figures to pull into their opera.

Ahead, the basilica rose like a fortress of stone and shadow. Its façade was austere, columns darkened by centuries of smoke and weather, statues gazing down with the stern patience of saints who had seen everything and judged it all. The last trickle of parishioners moved down the steps, their murmured goodnights dissipating into the square.

Will glanced at Hannibal, then at the heavy doors. His voice was soft, almost reverent. “Let’s see what devotion looks like tonight.”

The basilica was nearly empty by the time they stepped inside. Evening mass had ended, leaving only the echo of incense clinging to the air and the faint shuffle of custodians moving chairs into rows. The vast stone columns rose like pillars of judgment, carved with centuries of devotion and silence.

They moved without hurry, their footsteps swallowed by the cavernous space. Will’s eyes scanned the small clusters that remained — a pair of nuns whispering, a tourist snapping one last photo, a man lighting a votive candle.

Then his gaze caught on two cardinals near the apse.

They walked in quiet conversation, their voices too low to carry, their red robes brushing in the shadows. One, tall and angular, silver showing beneath his zucchetto. The other, shorter and rounder, his gestures restrained but eloquent in miniature. They leaned toward one another now and then, as if their words required a kind of privacy even here, under the painted eyes of saints.

“Cardinal Vittorio Altieri,” Hannibal murmured, his voice pitched low so only Will could hear. “And Cardinal Tommaso Bellini. Old friends. Ordained in the same year. Their partnership is… legendary in certain circles.”

Will tilted his head, watching the pair move down the nave with measured steps, their pauses uncannily synchronized. “Legendary,” he repeated softly. “That’s one word for it.”

Hannibal’s mouth curved faintly. “The Church calls it devotion. Others whisper scandal. But what we see—”

“—is love,” Will finished. His voice carried neither mockery nor sentimentality, only recognition.

The cardinals stopped briefly before the altar, their silhouettes outlined in the golden glow of hanging lamps. Bellini inclined his head toward Altieri, who answered with the smallest touch at his sleeve — not unusual, not overt, but in the watching silence it felt weighted.

Will’s eyes narrowed, his breath steady. “They’ve built something together. Something only they inhabit.”

“And that cathedral,” Hannibal said, his voice velvet in the vastness, “is forbidden.”

They stood together in silence, watching as the two men moved toward the side door, their crimson fading into shadow.

When they were gone, Will finally turned, his gaze meeting Hannibal’s. “They’re perfect.”

Hannibal inclined his head, the faintest trace of approval in his eyes. “Yes. Soulmates in scarlet.”

The echo of footsteps died away, leaving only the hush of the basilica and the watchful eyes of saints painted on the ceiling. The city had offered them its next chorus. All that remained was to compose the aria.

Outside, when they stepped back into the Roman night, the bells of a distant church began to toll. Each note seemed to linger longer than the last, as if marking time for a performance not yet begun.

The basilica doors closed behind them, and the night air of Trastevere wrapped around their shoulders. The streets were still alive, but quieter now — narrow alleys threaded with laundry strung high above, the air fragrant with woodsmoke, garlic, and the faint sweetness of pastry cooling in shop windows.

Hannibal guided their walk with purpose. He knew the language of markets and specialty shops the way others knew scripture. At a delicatessen tucked beneath a crumbling arch, he chose pecorino romano aged until its scent carried a faint sharpness, and a bottle of wine from Montepulciano, holding it to the light with a nod of approval. At a bakery, he requested a fresh loaf still warm from the oven, its crust crackling. From a butcher, he selected lamb — trimmed perfectly, its marbling precise — with a smile that made the man behind the counter stand a little straighter.

Will trailed at his side, hands in his pockets, watching without comment. His gaze flickered sometimes from the displays to Hannibal himself, the deliberate pleasure he took in each choice, each gesture of discernment.

Back at the apartment, the rooms filled with scent: garlic blooming in oil, rosemary bruised under the flat of a knife, the earthy perfume of porcini mushrooms releasing into a pan. Hannibal moved with his usual grace, but there was no audience here, no need to impress. Only Will, sitting at the small wooden table, a glass of wine in hand, watching the dance of hands and knife and flame.

“You love this as much as the hunt,” Will said softly.

Hannibal didn’t glance up, but there was a curve to his mouth as he laid lamb shanks into the pan to sear. “The hunt feeds one hunger. This feeds another.”

Will sipped his wine, the candlelight catching the angles of his face. “And both require patience.”

Hannibal plated with care — roasted lamb with potatoes crisped in duck fat, fettuccine dressed with porcini, pecorino grated at the table, a salad of bitter greens with lemon. He set the plates down as though placing offerings.

They ate slowly, the silence comfortable. The only sounds were the scrape of cutlery against ceramic and the low clink of glasses. Will closed his eyes briefly as he tasted the lamb, savoring not just the flavor but the fact of the gesture: that this had been chosen, prepared, offered.

“This city suits you,” Hannibal said at last, his voice velvet-soft across the table.

Will met his gaze. “It suits us.”

After the table was cleared, the apartment settled into quiet. Hannibal rinsed the knives and laid them carefully to dry, his movements unhurried, precise even in routine. The scents of lamb and rosemary still lingered in the air, blending with the faint wax of the guttering candle. Will drifted toward the small shelf where Hannibal had stacked a handful of volumes. His fingers brushed along bindings until they came to rest on a Bible, its leather softened by years of handling.

He turned a few pages, the sound soft in the hush, and then returned to the table with it open. His voice was low, steady, when he began to read:

“And while he yet spake, behold a multitude, and he that was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them, and drew near unto Jesus to kiss him. But Jesus said unto him, ‘Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?’ When they which were about him saw what would follow, they said unto him, ‘Lord, shall we smite with the sword?’ And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear. And Jesus answered and said, ‘Suffer ye thus far.’ And he touched his ear, and healed him.”

The words lingered, their cadence strange in the quiet apartment — love, betrayal, violence, mercy all tangled in a single passage. Will closed the book with care, resting his hand on the cover as he looked across the candlelight at Hannibal.

Hannibal’s smile was faint, reverent rather than mocking. “A kiss as betrayal. Betrayal as a kiss. How intimate, that the sign of love and the mark of treachery should be one and the same.”

Will’s lips curved, but his eyes were shadowed. “Intimacy is always a risk. To know someone well enough to kiss them is to know them well enough to wound them.”

Hannibal tilted his head, studying him. “And yet you returned to me after your betrayal. Judas did not.”

“Because you wanted me to,” Will said quietly, his voice carrying no doubt.

Hannibal’s gaze softened, though it did not waver. “Because we wanted each other. Because betrayal was only the crucible, not the end.”

The candle burned lower, its flame bending. Outside, the bells of a nearby church struck the hour, the sound rolling through the narrow streets.

Will reached for the last of the wine, turning the glass in his hand. “So which of us is Judas?”

Hannibal lifted his own glass, the flame reflected in his eyes. “Both. Neither. We kissed and we betrayed, and yet we stand here still. Judas’s kiss ended a story. Ours began one.”

He sipped, savoring the words as much as the wine, then set his glass down. “They will call it blasphemy, of course. As they always do. Achilles and Patroclus. Zephyrus and his beloved. Judas and Jesus. They fear the parallels because they fear the truth: devotion is devotion, whether sanctified or condemned.”

Will leaned back, the Bible still at his elbow, his gaze steady. “And ours is both.”

The room fell quiet again, filled only by the faint creak of the building settling and the muted life of Trastevere beyond the window — a dog barking, a car slipping down a narrow street, a woman’s laughter trailing away.

Hannibal gathered the dishes into neat stacks, leaving them to dry. Will remained at the table, fingers brushing the edge of the book, as though reluctant to let go of the verse entirely.

Finally, he rose and joined Hannibal at the sink. For a moment, they stood side by side, their shoulders nearly touching, the domesticity of the act at odds with the weight of what had been spoken. Yet it was precisely in that juxtaposition — candlelight, scripture, clean plates — that their bond felt most absolute.

When the last glass was set to dry, Hannibal extinguished the candle. Darkness folded over the room, broken only by the pale spill of moonlight through the window.

Will’s voice was a whisper in the dark. “Then let our kiss be both.”

Hannibal turned his head slightly, his reply the faintest murmur: “Always.”

The city breathed around them, eternal stones holding secrets, while within their small refuge they had written their own scripture, bound by betrayal and love alike.

The bullpen felt like an airport terminal waiting for a flight that hadn’t been called yet — luggage leaning against desks, maps pinned with string, half-drunk cups of coffee on every surface. Everyone was moving, restless, waiting for Interpol’s signal.

Dexter stood at a side table with the crime scene photos spread out before him. His eyes moved over the details, noting angles, positioning, symmetry.

Reid came up beside him, file in hand. He looked down at the same photos, chewing lightly at his lower lip. “The positioning of the bodies… it’s too deliberate to be spontaneous. Every angle corresponds. It’s almost… geometric.”

Dexter gave the faintest of smiles. “That would be Lecter.” His voice was flat, as if stating the color of the sky.

Reid blinked at him. “You sound certain.”

“I’ve seen people like him,” Dexter said. “Control is the point. The blood, the death — those are just the tools.”

Reid turned a page, scanning. His voice was quicker now, like a stone skipping. “And Will. The victim selection… the resonance of it. That’s him. Hannibal composes, but Will… Will knows which notes to play. He’s the empathy that points the way.”

Dexter’s gaze lingered on the photographs. “Compass and conductor,” he murmured.

Reid looked up, brow furrowed. “What?”

“Nothing.” Dexter shrugged. “Just fits.”

Reid’s eyes narrowed. “I knew Will. He always carried something dark. Lecter didn’t make him. He just… let it out.” He said it quickly, as if speed would blunt the sting.

Dexter tilted his head, studying him for a beat too long. Then he looked back at the photos. “Sometimes people don’t need to be taught. Just given permission.”

They stood in silence for a moment, the hum of the team filling the gap — Rossi double-checking passports, Emily pulling files into order, Garcia rolling in a suitcase plastered with stickers.

Reid shifted, hugging the file closer. “Interpol gives us the green light, we’ll be on their ground. That changes everything.”

Dexter let out a short breath, almost a laugh. “Rome’s their city. We’re just visiting.”

Reid shot him a sharp look, unsure whether it was a joke or not. Dexter didn’t clarify.

Across the bullpen, Hotch’s phone buzzed. He listened, his face set, then raised his voice: “Wheels up in two hours. Interpol just cleared us.”

The bullpen came alive again. Reid turned toward the motion, but Dexter stayed still a moment longer, his eyes on the photos — the ordered carnage, the hidden code.

Finally he said, low enough only Reid could hear, “Sometimes to see people like this, you have to be willing to look at yourself.”

Spencer stayed silent.

His eyes kept sliding sideways. The motions Dexter made weren’t just neat; they were deliberate, almost ceremonial. Each fold and zip carried a weight beyond utility, as if it were part of something older.

Dexter noticed the look. “What?” he asked without pausing.

Reid blinked, startled. “Nothing.”

Dexter’s mouth twitched, just enough to count as a smile. “You look like you’re profiling my luggage.”

Reid ducked his head, flustered. “No. Just—just noticing.”

Dexter closed the bag with a clean zip. “That’s what you do.”

The moment passed, Reid looking back at his papers, Dexter resting his hands lightly on the bag as if the ritual were complete.

Later, as the team broke to regroup, Reid found himself walking out with Emily. The night air was cool against his face, the floodlights of the airstrip buzzing faintly overhead. He clutched a file to his chest like a shield.

“He’s… different,” Reid said abruptly.

Emily tilted her head. “Dexter?”

“Yes.” Reid’s words came faster, gathering speed. “He doesn’t move like the rest of us. It’s not just neatness, it’s… purposeful. Like ritual. It reminded me of Janus.”

Emily’s brow arched. “Two-faced?”

“No—two-sided.” Reid’s voice carried that insistent energy, tangling knowledge with intuition. “Past and future, beginnings and endings. Janus stood at every threshold, every doorway. When Rome shifted cycles, Janus was invoked. Watching Dexter pack — it was like watching someone honor a cycle, not just a task. Like blood feeding the soil in the old rituals, like balance had to be maintained.”

Emily smiled faintly, not mocking. “So you’re saying our new teammate is a Roman god?”

Reid pushed a hand through his hair. “I’m saying… he’s older. Not in years, but in weight. Biblical metaphors fit Lecter. Pagan ones fit Dexter. He doesn’t think in judgment, he thinks in ritual.”

Emily walked a few steps in silence, considering. Then she said dryly, “Well, let’s hope his ritual includes good aim and a clean suit.”

Reid gave a soft laugh despite himself. But his gaze lingered on the runway lights, his thoughts spiraling far beyond her joke.

The jet hummed steady against the night sky, its engines a low thrum beneath the quiet rhythms of conversation. Papers and laptops were stowed away for once, the case shelved until Rome. For a few hours, they were only themselves — not profilers, not hunters, just colleagues in transit.

Rossi, true to habit, had insisted on bringing food. From a neat parcel in his bag came containers of pasta al forno, still fragrant, and slices of bread brushed with oil and garlic. He set them out on the narrow table between the seats, his pride obvious.

“Better than airline food, eh?” Rossi said with a grin.

“Better than most restaurants,” Emily replied, helping herself.

Garcia clasped her hands in mock reverence. “Bless you, Patron Saint of Comfort Food.”

Laughter rippled through the cabin. Even Hotch’s expression softened.

Dexter sat slightly apart, a plate balanced carefully on his knee. He ate with quiet precision, listening more than he spoke. The warmth was palpable around him, but he felt its edges keenly — a circle he had not yet stepped into.

Reid, across the table, pushed his hair back and spoke suddenly to JJ, his voice soft. “I… I called my mother before we left.”

JJ looked at him gently. “How was she?”

“She’s… stable.” Reid hesitated, words gathering like stones in his throat. “But it’s always… temporary. I never know if it will last.”

JJ reached out, resting her hand briefly on his. “Stable is good, Spence. Take it when you can.”

He nodded, then after a pause, asked, “And you? Since… since Will.”

The air shifted, quieted. JJ’s smile was small but brave. “The boys keep me moving. Some days that’s enough. Some days it isn’t. But I get through.” She exhaled slowly, then gave him a look that was both weary and fierce. “He’d want me to.”

Reid’s eyes softened, and he gave a single, slow nod.

Across the cabin, Tara raised her cup in Rossi’s direction. “This really is better than most restaurants.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Emily teased. “His ego doesn’t need help.”

Rossi only smiled, pleased. “Hey, you’ll be glad of it when we land and all we’ve got is hotel food.”

The laughter rose again, warm, familiar.

Dexter watched them quietly, fork poised. He was used to teams that functioned, not families that endured.

Garcia, catching his silence, leaned over. “What about you, Dex? You always this quiet, or are you just scared of us?”

He looked up, expression unreadable, then allowed a small, dry smile. “Maybe both.”

It drew a ripple of laughter, easing the attention away from him. But Reid, sitting near, glanced at Dexter with that curious intensity of his, as if the silence itself was a puzzle worth solving.

Rossi leaned back with a glass of red wine and that particular look in his eyes — the look that meant a story was coming.

“You know,” he said, “the last time I was in Rome, I was about thirty years younger. Maybe more.”

JJ smirked. “That already sounds dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Rossi chuckled. “Try unforgettable. There was this trattoria near Piazza Navona — a little place with three tables, run by a man who swore in six languages and cooked like a god. I was there with a woman — beautiful, smart, Roman, the kind of woman who could make you forget your own name. We ate pasta carbonara and drank a bottle of Barolo that probably cost more than my first car. By the end of the night, I was ready to propose marriage just for another glass.”

Emily shook her head, laughing. “Of course you were.”

Garcia leaned forward eagerly. “So? Did you?”

“Propose?” Rossi grinned, eyes twinkling. “No. But I did wake up the next morning in her apartment with a view of the Colosseum. And let me tell you, there are worse ways to see Rome for the first time.”

The cabin erupted with laughter. Even Hotch let out a quiet huff of amusement.

Tara lifted her cup toward him. “To Rome, then.”

They all echoed it in their own way, glasses and cups raised.

The conversation in there — Reid telling JJ about calling his mother, JJ admitting how hard the last few months had been since Will’s death, Garcia teasing Emily about her nonexistent love life — were warm, familiar rhythms, touched with grief but never broken by it.

Dexter listened, the smallest of smiles tugging at his mouth. He let himself laugh once, quietly, at Rossi’s tale. But mostly, he watched — the easy way they folded memories into the present, the way loss was carried openly without being hidden. It was foreign to him. But something in it stirred.

Outside the window, the Atlantic stretched endless and black. Inside, the BAU shared food, stories, and a fragile peace before Rome.

The jet touched down just after noon. The Roman sky was pale blue, washed with thin clouds, and the city spread out beyond the airport like an endless tapestry of stone and history. The team moved briskly through customs, their FBI credentials clearing the way with Interpol’s pre-approval. Even so, fatigue clung to them, the weight of travel settling into shoulders and eyes.

A pair of dark sedans waited. Hotch and Rossi were directed into one; the rest of the team followed in the other. Interpol’s liaison office was in the city center, and the cars wound through Rome’s arteries — past palazzi with shuttered windows, narrow streets lined with scooters, fountains at unexpected corners.

When they reached Piazza Navona, traffic stalled. The cars edged forward, then slowed to a crawl. Rossi’s window was down, and the smell of roasting chestnuts drifted in from a vendor nearby. He leaned slightly, eyes catching on the fountains, on the swirl of tourists and locals weaving between cafés.

He smiled. “Haven’t been here in thirty years.”

Hotch glanced at him. “Good memories?”

“The best.” Rossi’s voice warmed. “Carolyn and I spent an afternoon right over there.” He nodded toward a café shaded by white umbrellas. “She ordered wine in flawless Italian, had the waiter wrapped around her finger. I tried to order in Italian too. Sounded like I was choking. She laughed so hard people turned to stare.”

The memory lit his face — not grief, not loss, but the kind of fondness that had aged into something golden. “We sat until the sun went down, and she told me she could live in Rome forever. I told her I’d buy her the whole damn city if she asked.”

Hotch’s mouth curved, faint but genuine. “And did she?”

“She didn’t have to,” Rossi said softly. “I would’ve anyway.”

Silence stretched for a moment, the hum of the square filling it. Then Hotch spoke, quieter, his gaze fixed ahead. “Haley loved Florence. She wanted to go back. We talked about it. We never got the chance.”

The words were simple, stripped of sentiment, but the ache in them was undeniable.

Rossi inclined his head, his tone gentler now. “She’d have loved it. The colors, the pace. You’d have loved it too.”

Hotch didn’t answer right away. He watched a boy chase pigeons across the cobblestones, his laughter rising above the din. Finally, he said, “Jack still talks about her that way. As if she’s… waiting somewhere.”

Rossi rested his hand briefly against the back of Hotch’s seat, not quite a gesture of comfort, but of solidarity. “In a way, she is. They always are.”

The traffic cleared. The car rolled forward again, pulling them toward the Interpol office, where work and formality waited. But the piazza lingered behind them — a reminder of love that had shaped them, and the lives they carried even in their absence.

The hotel sat just off a narrow Roman street, its stone façade softened by climbing ivy. Not luxurious, not cheap — the kind of place frequented by tourists in summer and foreign officials in winter, a place where law enforcement could blend in without drawing notice. The lobby smelled faintly of lemon polish and strong espresso.

The team checked in quickly, Interpol’s paperwork smoothed by Hotch and Rossi’s signatures earlier that afternoon. Keys and room numbers were handed out, bags rolled across the tiled floor.

Upstairs, the corridors echoed with the domestic sounds of arrival: zippers tugged open, suitcases thumping onto luggage racks, drawers sliding shut. Garcia groaned dramatically at the lack of wardrobe space; Derek teased her until she swatted his arm. Tara claimed a corner chair and pulled off her shoes with a sigh of relief. Rossi poked his head into the adjoining room. “Coffee machine’s passable. Won’t kill you, anyway.”

“High praise,” Emily muttered, unpacking with military precision.

Reid sat cross-legged on his bed, already surrounded by open books and notes, scribbling lines into a notebook. JJ perched on the edge of the desk, phoning her boys to let them know she was safe. Hotch stood by the window, phone pressed to his ear, speaking quietly to Jack back home.

Dexter unpacked more slowly, folding clothes into the small hotel drawers. He hadn’t spoken much since they landed, but when Garcia asked lightly if he had any “domestic rituals” of his own, his reply surprised them.

“My wife used to hate hotels,” he said evenly, placing a shirt on the shelf. “Rita. She liked routine. Familiar places. A strange room would keep her awake for hours.”

The room stilled for a moment. Rossi, leaning in the doorway, nodded gently. “She sounds like she knew what she wanted.”

“She did,” Dexter said. His tone was quiet, matter-of-fact, but something in it held weight. “She made things… normal. For me. For Harrison.”

JJ’s eyes softened at the name. “Your son?”

Dexter inclined his head. “Yeah. He’s with his grandparents right now. Florida. Safer that way.”

The team absorbed it quietly, their own griefs resonating in the silence. Rossi and Hotch exchanged a look — both men carrying the ghosts of their wives, both recognizing another man marked by loss.

Emily broke the heaviness with a gentle smile. “Then we’ll just have to make this place bearable, for Rita’s sake.”

The moment passed, chatter resuming, suitcases zipping, laughter rising again.

That night and the following ones, the rooming was simple: Reid and Dexter, Hotch and Rossi, JJ and Emily, Tara and Garcia, Derek and Luke. Two to a room, practical and efficient.

Later, the corridor was quiet, the team scattered to their rooms. Reid and Dexter crossed paths near the vending machine, both reaching for water bottles. For a moment, they stood in the hum of fluorescent light, two solitary figures.

Reid broke the silence first, his voice halting. “I… I had someone. Maeve.” He glanced away, his throat tight. “She… she was killed before we even met in person. We used to talk on the phone. For months. She understood me in a way no one else did. And then—” He stopped, swallowing. “Then she was gone.”

Dexter regarded him quietly, bottle in hand. His face gave nothing away, but his voice was softer than usual. “I’m sorry.”

Reid nodded quickly, as if embarrassed. “I just… thought you should know. Since you told us about Rita.”

Dexter’s gaze lingered a moment. “It doesn’t go away. The loss. You just… learn how to carry it.”

Reid’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Yeah.”

They stood in silence a moment longer, then walked back down the corridor in opposite directions. Neither looked back, but something unspoken had passed between them — recognition, fragile and unfinished, but real.

That night, the hum of the city filtered through the open window: scooters rattling down cobblestone streets, laughter spilling from a late café, the fountain in the piazza murmuring like a steady breath.

In their shared room, Reid had claimed the bed nearest the desk, already surrounded by his books and notes. His lamp cast a pale pool of light, the pages reflecting against his glasses. Dexter, across the room, folded his clothes with the same precision as before, placing them neatly on the chair before pulling back the blanket.

The silence stretched, but it wasn’t uncomfortable — more like two men unused to sharing space, adjusting.

“You always do that?” Reid asked suddenly, his voice cutting through the quiet.

Dexter looked up. “Do what?”

“Fold everything before bed. Shirt, pants, socks. Even the tie.” Reid’s eyes flicked toward the chair where Dexter’s clothes lay stacked like offerings.

Dexter’s mouth curved faintly. “Habit. Keeps things… orderly.” He slipped beneath the blanket, lying on his back. “You should try it.”

“I’d rather read,” Reid said simply, turning a page. His voice was softer now, as if afraid to disturb the rhythm of the city outside. “But I get it. Ritual. It helps.”

Dexter glanced at him in the dim light, catching the way Reid’s hand lingered on the book’s spine. He thought of what Reid had told him earlier, about Maeve. About loss. The word ritual sounded different on his lips — not just habit, but survival.

For a while, the only sound was the turning of pages and the faint drip of the bathroom tap.

Then Reid spoke again, almost absently, as though to himself. “The Romans believed sleep was a threshold. Somnus, the god of sleep, was twin to Mors, the god of death. Every night was a passage. That’s why dreams mattered — they were messages from beyond the threshold.” He closed the book softly, his eyes distant. “Sometimes I think grief is like that. Crossing the same threshold over and over.”

Dexter didn’t answer right away. He lay still, staring at the ceiling. Then he said, very quietly, “You cross it enough times, and it becomes home.”

Reid turned off his lamp, letting the room fall into darkness. “Maybe,” he murmured.

The city sounds filled the silence between them, two men lying awake, each carrying their own ghosts.

Rome at night was a tapestry of sound and shadow — scooters rattling across stone, voices rising from trattorias, the scent of wine and basil carried in the air. Hannibal and Will walked together through Trastevere, their presence sharpened by the knowledge that the Bureau was now in the city.

“The hunters are here,” Will murmured.

Hannibal’s reply was calm, almost amused. “Then let us give them something worthy to hunt.”

The Cardinals were predictable. Each evening, when duty was done and prayers concluded, they retreated together to a modest chapel near the Piazza Venezia. Their companionship was discreet, hidden in brief touches and long silences. To others, invisible. To Hannibal and Will, unmistakable: men divided, living half for the Church, half for themselves.

That night, the chapel was silent, candlelight flickering against stone. The knives moved with precision. The struggle ended in seconds. Blood traced the seams of marble.

Then the artistry began.

Hannibal cut with surgical grace, bisecting the bodies cleanly — the left half of one Cardinal, the right half of the other. Will steadied the remains, his hands sure, his eyes alight. The halves were sewn together, sinew joining sinew, until a single figure emerged: grotesque, unified, complete.

The fused body was raised on a wooden cross, arms outstretched in parody and hymn. The other halves were wrapped, set aside for later consumption, a communion reserved for two.

Before the crucifix, the silence held. Hannibal studied their work with luminous calm. Will stepped closer. His gaze traced the stitched lines, the sagging head, the lips parted in eternal silence. Then, almost tenderly, he bent and pressed his teeth into the ear of the Cardinal. Flesh tore. Blood smeared his mouth.

He did not speak. He simply left the mark.

Hannibal’s eyes lingered, approval unspoken. The act needed no explanation. It was memory revived, signature reborn.

The bells of midnight tolled, filling the chapel with iron resonance. The crucifix stood: two men halved and fused, testament to lives divided, now made whole in death.

Hannibal and Will departed into the Roman night, leaving behind their gospel of flesh and blood — and a mark the hunters would know as his.Outside, beneath the heavy silence of the Roman night, Will seized Hannibal by the collar and kissed him hard. The taste of blood lingered on his lips — iron, salt, sacred and profane. Hannibal drew it in without hesitation, savoring the mingling of flesh and devotion. The Cardinal’s blood was communion, and on Will’s mouth it became something greater: intimacy sanctified in violence.

The halves of the Cardinals, wrapped with the same precision as relics, were carried without notice — the late-night city too accustomed to secrets to question two men slipping through its veins.

At the apartment, the freezer opened with a low hiss; cold air breathed against their faces. Together, they lowered most of the remains inside, arranging them with care, as though storing rare vintages or sacred texts. Yet Hannibal kept aside a smaller parcel, swaddled in linen, fresh and warm.

In the kitchen, he unwrapped it with reverence. The knife moved with the same artistry as in the chapel, cutting not for spectacle now but for nourishment. The skillet hissed with olive oil, garlic, and sprigs of rosemary. Soon the air was alive with a scent both rich and disquieting, a fusion of earth and iron.

Will sat at the table, his eyes never leaving Hannibal’s hands.

When dinner was served, it appeared like any other Roman plate: thin slices seared to perfection, laid beside braised artichokes and bread glossed with oil. They ate slowly, deliberately, each bite an act of intimacy.

“They lived as halves,” Will said, cutting neatly into the meat. “For their God, for each other. Never whole.”

Hannibal savored a bite, the corner of his mouth curving. “We gave them wholeness in death.” He gestured faintly toward the freezer. “And in life, we partake of them. Nothing is wasted.”

Will’s jaw tightened as he chewed. “The Church denied them. We consume them. Which of us is closer to communion?”

Hannibal raised his glass of wine, eyes gleaming. “We are the sacrament.”

They ate in silence after that, the taste lingering like a benediction.

When the plates were cleared, Will did not hesitate. He rose, braced a hand against Hannibal’s chair, and kissed him hard, mouth still tinged with the iron of flesh. Hannibal drew him in, tasting the Cardinal on his lips, savoring it as he savored the man himself.

Will pulled him upright with a force that brooked no refusal, hands firm, commanding. Hannibal yielded, pleased to yield.

“You won’t resist me,” Will murmured against his mouth.

“There is nothing to resist,” Hannibal replied, reverent.

Their intimacy unfolded as their meal had — deliberate, inevitable, an extension of their violence. By the time they lay side by side in silence, Rome’s night had gone still. In the freezer, two halves waited, preserved. In their bodies, the Cardinals’ love lived on.

The chapel was sealed by Interpol before dawn, its courtyard hushed beneath the sweep of blue lights. The heavy doors, once meant to keep out the world’s chaos, now guarded the horror within.

Inside, the air was dense — iron and smoke, the wax of half-melted candles still guttering in their sconces. Decay seeped through every breath. The crucifix dominated the altar, towering above them like an unholy relic, candlelight flickering across its grotesque shape.

Two bodies. Or one.

The left half of one Cardinal sewn to the right half of the other, raised on the cross as though a single man had died there. The seam was jagged but sure, stitches drawn with terrible confidence. Their robes hung in tatters, heavy with dried blood, the crimson pooling darker than any liturgy had ever allowed. The weight sagged against the wood, head lolling as though in mockery of piety.

The BAU stood in silence, every breath caught by the sheer audacity of the display.

JJ broke first, voice strained and trembling past the constriction in her throat. “It’s… obscene. It’s not just murder. It’s desecration.”

Emily’s voice followed, cool but edged with disgust. Her gaze lingered on the seams of flesh, on the precision that spoke not of frenzy but of art. “Two men divided in life, forced into union in death. Whoever did this wasn’t trying to hide. They wanted this found. They wanted us to read it.”

Tara’s eyes swept over the altar, the fractured robes, the twisted posture of the crucified form. Her tone was grim, clinical. “A parody of sacrifice. But also intimacy. This isn’t just about the Church — it’s about them. About forcing us to see a bond.”

Rossi exhaled hard through his nose, shaking his head as if to dislodge the weight of memory. “Rome’s seen crucifixions before,” he muttered. “But not like this. Not in a chapel. Not with Cardinals.”

Hotch moved closer, his jaw set, his gaze narrowing as he studied the seams, the wood, the way the bodies had been raised and positioned. “They’re escalating. This isn’t Lecter alone.” His voice was flat, but beneath it lay the steel edge of certainty.

Dexter’s eyes traced the cuts, the stitch-work, the confidence of the hand behind them. His words were quiet, detached — the voice of a technician, though inside something older stirred, a flicker of recognition at the ritual. “The bisecting was clean. No hesitation. Whoever held the knife knew exactly what they were doing.” He tilted his head, observing as though it were a specimen. “Surgical. Reverent.”

Luke swore under his breath, his eyes fixed on the fused torso. “It’s like… it’s like they were trying to make one man out of two.”

Garcia hovered at the threshold, unable to force herself closer. Her voice was small, thick with horror. “This isn’t just murder, this is… theater. Like they wanted to write their names in blood.”

Derek’s hand came down gently on her shoulder, steadying her without words. His eyes stayed on the cross, hard and unreadable. “Yeah. And they wanted us here to see it.”

Reid had moved forward without realizing it, drawn like a moth to flame. His posture was tense, his shoulders tight, his breathing shallow. He didn’t focus on the grotesque fusion, but on the head sagging against the seam. His eyes narrowed, studying the torn edge where flesh had been ripped away.

He leaned closer, his stomach twisting, and his breath caught.

Hotch noticed. “Reid?”

Reid’s voice was tight, trembling with recognition, the weight of memory crashing down on him. “The ear,” he whispered. “One of the ears has been bitten off.” He swallowed, his throat working as he turned to face the others, his eyes wide now, fever-bright with certainty. “We’ve seen this before.”

Rossi frowned, his voice low, wary. “When?”

Reid swallowed again, the name tasting bitter. “Abigail Hobbs. Will Graham was sent her ear in the mail. Previously, Lecter forced him to eat another. It was the reason the Bureau believed he killed her — why he was convicted.”

The words dropped into the silence like stones into water, ripples spreading through the team.

For a long moment, no one moved. They stood beneath the cross, the grotesque figure looming above them, its stitched halves proclaiming a gospel of intimacy and defiance. One ear gone, the mark left behind not for them to interpret, but to recognize.

It was no longer a question of who they were hunting. It was a question of how to stop them.

And in that silence, each of them felt it: the hunt had become personal.

The silence in the chapel stretched, heavy as the stench of blood and wax. Then Dexter stepped forward, slow and deliberate, his eyes sweeping the altar floor, the dark wood of the crucifix, the faint arcs of red across the walls.

He crouched, studying the droplets. “They moved fast,” he said. His voice was calm, analytical. “See here? The spray is arterial. A clean strike to the carotid. The size of the mist — smaller than a millimeter. That’s high velocity. No hesitation. They knew exactly what they were doing.”

Morgan muttered under his breath, “Jesus Christ.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw, his eyes hard on the cross. “I don’t care how fast it was — cutting a man in half isn’t surgical, it’s butchery.”

Dexter’s head tilted slightly, as if he were considering the distinction. “Surgical butchery, then. You don’t get edges like that with chaos. It’s practiced. Precise.”

Reid, tense, edged closer. “You make it sound like something to admire.”

Dexter didn’t look at him. His gaze traced the seams of the fused body, the careful stitches. “I admire skill. Not motive.” He rose smoothly to his feet and pointed to a streak of drying red on the crossbeam. “Here. That’s a hand smear. One held the halves steady while the other worked. You can see the drag downward — they didn’t rush. They took their time raising it.”

Morgan swore again, louder this time. “Son of a bitch.” He turned away, raking both hands over his scalp. “They crucified two Cardinals and stitched them into one body — and you’re telling me they did it like they were hanging a goddamn painting.”

“Not hanging,” Dexter corrected softly. “Performing.”

The word hung in the air like a blade.

Rossi’s eyes narrowed, watching him closely. “That’s an interesting choice of word.”

Dexter’s face was impassive. “You all see the psychology. I’m just telling you what the blood says. And the blood says this wasn’t staging. It was ritual. Every drop followed intent.”

Hotch’s jaw was tight, but he nodded once, slow. “Two killers. One cutting, one holding. That matches what we already know.”

Dexter met his gaze, expression neutral. “It doesn’t just match. It confirms. You can’t fake spatter like this. Two sets of hands were at work. Always in tandem.”

Garcia shuddered visibly and looked away, pressing closer to Tara for comfort. “This is too much. It’s like… like they’re rewriting scripture in blood.”

Tara’s voice was low. “That’s exactly what they want us to think.”

Reid stood rigid, his arms crossed, his gaze locked on Dexter as though trying to solve him instead of the scene. His voice was sharp, defensive. “Precision doesn’t make it less grotesque.”

Dexter finally looked at him then, his expression unreadable. “Precision makes it more grotesque. Because it means they chose every cut.”

The chapel fell quiet again. The fused body sagged against the cross, stitches gleaming in the candlelight. And beneath it, the team stood divided between revulsion and recognition, each of them seeing something different.

For Dexter, it was the elegance of intent written in blood. For the rest, it was a horror they could never unsee.

They left the chapel in silence, the dawn creeping over Rome like a shroud. Outside, the air was cooler, but it carried no relief. Garcia lingered near the stone steps, her hands shaking as she tried to light a candle at the small votive stand by the entrance. Her fingers fumbled, the match sputtered out, and suddenly the tears she had been holding back broke free.

She pressed both hands over her face, her shoulders trembling. “God, Derek… they didn’t just kill them. They mocked everything those men believed in. It’s like they ripped faith out of stone and smeared it in blood.” Her voice cracked, small and broken. “I can’t… I can’t look at that and still believe there’s light in people.”

Morgan was there instantly, his arm sliding around her, pulling her close against his chest. “Hey, hey, come on, Baby Girl.” His voice was low, steady, warm against her storm. “Don’t let them take that from you. Don’t you ever let those bastards take your light.”

She buried her face in his jacket, her sobs muffled. “But it’s too much, Derek. I’ve seen pictures, autopsy files, but this—this was holy ground. And they turned it into… into that.”

He held her tighter, one hand stroking her hair, the other firm on her back. “Yeah. It’s ugly. It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen too. But you don’t fight it by crying alone in the dark. You fight it by being you. By being the light. That’s what we need. What I need.”

She sniffled, leaning back just enough to look at him through tear-reddened eyes. “You really believe that?”

“Believe it?” He smiled, soft but fierce. “I stake my life on it every damn day.”

For a moment she just looked at him, then gave a watery laugh, the sound fragile but real. “You always know what to say.”

He kissed the top of her head, squeezing her once more. “That’s what I’m here for. You see the worst, but you give us the best. Don’t forget it.”

Together, they stood there while the others spoke quietly with Interpol nearby. The city stirred awake around them — footsteps, murmurs, bells tolling morning mass — but for Garcia and Morgan, the world was narrowed to the warmth of a hug and the quiet insistence that even in the face of blood and desecration, light had to endure.

The hotel room was dim, curtains drawn against the Roman dawn. The clock on the nightstand read just past six, but it felt like days had passed since they’d been pulled from their beds and rushed into the chapel.

JJ sat on the edge of one bed, still in yesterday’s clothes, her hair falling in tired strands across her face. She rubbed at her eyes, but the image of the crucifix wouldn’t fade.

Emily emerged from the bathroom, damp hair twisted up, her expression lined with fatigue. She paused when she saw JJ staring down at her hands. “You’re not even trying to lie down.”

“I can’t,” JJ admitted, her voice thin. “Every time I close my eyes I see it again. The stitches, the blood…” She shook her head, swallowing hard. “Those men gave their lives to the Church. And that’s how it ended.”

Emily crossed the room and sat down beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched. “You’re not the only one. I keep hearing the bells. That sound when we walked in…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “It’s not something you shake off in a few hours.”

For a long moment, neither spoke. The muffled hum of Rome waking up filtered through the window — scooters, footsteps, the first café shutters opening. Life continuing while their world was heavy with blood.

JJ exhaled slowly. “I thought I was ready for anything. But this… It felt like walking into a nightmare.”

Emily’s gaze softened. “It was a nightmare. And it’s not your fault you feel it. If you didn’t, that would scare me.”

JJ looked up, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “Does it ever get easier?”

Emily gave a tired, crooked smile. “No. But you get stronger. And when you can’t, the rest of us carry you.”

JJ gave the faintest laugh, watery but real. “You always know how to say it.”

Emily squeezed her hand. “Come on. We need sleep, even if it’s only a few hours.”

They didn’t bother with separate beds. JJ slid under the blanket, and Emily followed, both lying on their sides, facing each other. The closeness was instinctive, natural. JJ’s head rested against Emily’s shoulder, and Emily’s arm curled protectively around her waist.

In the dim quiet, just before sleep pulled them under, JJ whispered, “Thank you.”

Emily’s reply was low, steady, almost a promise: “Always.”

Within minutes, exhaustion claimed them both. The city outside carried on, but in that room, two friends slept pressed close, their trust in each other the only shield against the memory of the cross.

By the time Hotch and Rossi reached Interpol headquarters, Rome was alive. Traffic surged past the old stone façades, horns cutting through the hum of scooters. Vendors opened their stalls along narrow side streets, setting out baskets of fruit, loaves of bread, gleaming bottles of olive oil. Life carried on in bright tones, but for the two men climbing the marble steps of the glass-walled headquarters, the memory of the chapel’s crucifixion still clung like smoke.

The conference room was stark and modern, a contrast to the city outside — steel and glass, blinds pulled against the Roman sun. At the long polished table sat a collection of authority: Director Bianchi of Interpol, flanked by agents from France, Germany, and the U.K.; several Carabinieri officers in crisp dark uniforms; and, incongruously but unavoidably, a Vatican representative in plain black clerical garb.

Coffee steamed in white porcelain cups, the only concession to fatigue. No one looked as though they had slept.

Bianchi began without ceremony, his Italian accent cutting hard into English. “You have seen the chapel. You understand the scale. But let me make one thing clear: Italy will not be the stage for an American takeover. This is our soil. These are our dead.”

Rossi leaned back, his posture deceptively relaxed, his voice gravelled with age and experience. “With respect, Director, they’re ours too. You call him Il Mostro di Firenze. We call him Hannibal Lecter. Either way, he’s not new. He’s hunted on both sides of the Atlantic.”

The Carabinieri colonel bristled. “Then perhaps he should never have left Florence. Perhaps if the FBI had done its job—”

Hotch cut in, voice even but sharp. “Lecter escaped under our watch, yes. And now he has returned to yours. Assigning blame won’t bring back the dead.”

The Vatican emissary’s voice was smooth, but the steel beneath it was unmistakable. “The Holy See requires absolute discretion. Two Princes of the Church have been desecrated. The world must not know.”

Emily’s words from the chapel still echoed in Rossi’s ears: parody of sacrifice, but also intimacy. He fixed the emissary with a hard look. “You can’t bury this. If you try, he’ll hand you a worse scandal in a week.”

“Perhaps,” the emissary countered, “but scandal is preferable to sacrilege paraded in headlines.”

The tension in the room knotted. Hotch leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “We want discretion as much as you do. But Lecter isn’t hiding anymore. If you try to contain this for the sake of appearances, you’ll only embolden him.”

Bianchi’s jaw tightened. “And who says it is only Lecter?”

Hotch and Rossi exchanged a look — silent agreement. Then Hotch slid a file across the table. Inside: photographs from the chapel, the grotesque crucifixion.

“There were two sets of hands,” Hotch said. “The forensics are conclusive. The blood patterns confirm it.”

Rossi’s voice carried weight, each word deliberate. “Lecter has a partner. Not an accomplice. An equal.”

That sparked a ripple of murmurs. The French agent scribbled something in his notes; the German leaned forward, skeptical. The Carabinieri shifted, visibly uneasy.

“A partner?” the colonel scoffed. “Lecter does not share.”

“He does now,” Rossi said flatly.

The Vatican emissary paled, whispering sharply in Italian, but Bianchi silenced him with a raised hand. His dark eyes pinned Hotch. “If this is true, then Rome faces not one Mostro, but two.”

Hotch didn’t blink. “That’s the reality. You can’t afford denial.”

Bianchi drummed his fingers against the tabletop. Finally, he gestured to an aide, who slid forward a set of grainy stills. CCTV captures, timestamped the night of the murders. Two figures, blurred but unmistakably side by side, walking calmly through the narrow streets near Piazza Venezia.

“They were seen leaving the area before dawn,” Bianchi said. “No faces, no identifiers. But two men. Walking as if they owned the city.”

Rossi leaned closer, squinting at the images. “Not fleeing. Not hiding. Just… going home.”

“Exactly,” Bianchi said. “Which means they know Rome better than you do. Better than any of us.”

The Vatican emissary made the sign of the cross under his breath.

Hotch’s voice was quiet but firm. “That’s why we need a joint task force. FBI, Interpol, Carabinieri. If we work separately, Lecter will divide us. He always does.”

The room fell into debate again — heated words in Italian and English, jurisdictional pride colliding with fear. At one point, the Carabinieri insisted Lecter was an Italian monster, their responsibility. Rossi pushed back with the weight of memory.

“I’ve been here before,” he said, voice low. “I remember Florence when the Mostro killings were still fresh. People looked over their shoulders in daylight. I know what it did to this country. If you think he belongs to you, fine. But he’ll take pieces of you, of all of us, until nothing is left.”

Silence followed.

Bianchi nodded once, curtly. “Very well. A joint task force. But understand — this is not Quantico. You will share everything. You will play by Italian law.”

Hotch inclined his head, composed. “Agreed. Our goal is the same.”

Two hours later, signatures inked the page. Agreements scrawled in tired hands, fragile as paper in the face of the killers they sought.

When Hotch and Rossi stepped out into the sun, the city was awake in full — vendors shouting prices, church bells marking the hour, tourists clustering in piazzas with guidebooks. Rome gleamed as though untouched by blood.

Rossi exhaled, his gaze narrowing on the skyline. “Il Mostro di Firenze. To them, he’ll always be that ghost.”

Hotch adjusted his tie, eyes hard. “Ghost or not, he’s flesh and blood. And he’s in this city. We find him before the next opera begins.”

The shutters in the Trastevere apartment bled thin slivers of dawn across the tangled sheets. The air was heavy with layered scents: wine, iron, sweat, and the faint sweetness of citrus from the bottle Hannibal had opened the night before. The room bore witness to their excess — linen twisted to knots, clothes draped across the floor, a chair tipped askew.

Will woke first. His body ached with a mixture of violence and tenderness, each breath reminding him of the night. His shoulder bore the imprint of Hannibal’s teeth, not broken skin, but deep enough to bloom purple by evening. On his ribs, faint crescents where fingernails had dug in. He reached down, brushing his fingers against a bite on his thigh, and smirked faintly.

Beside him, Hannibal stirred, eyes opening to the soft light. His gaze swept over Will with unhurried reverence, lingering on the constellation of marks across his body — signs of possession, signs of yielding, and yet signs of Will’s dominance as well: the raw bite Will had pressed into Hannibal’s collarbone, the deep red streaks across his back.

“You’ve left your signature,” Hannibal murmured, his voice velvet in the early hour. “I am almost unrecognizable.”

Will turned, propped on an elbow, his hair mussed, his eyes still heavy with sleep. “You wear me well.” His lips curled, wry and intimate. “I like seeing myself on you.”

Hannibal reached up, his fingers tracing the fresh bruise at Will’s throat, pausing at the pulse beneath it. “And I like seeing myself in you.” His words were low, reverent, the line between devotion and hunger blurred.

They shared the silence for a moment, the faint noise of the city rising outside: scooters buzzing down cobbled streets, the murmur of voices, the distant bells of early mass.

Will leaned down, catching Hannibal’s mouth in a kiss, not urgent but claiming. The faint copper tang lingered still, and Hannibal tasted it, his tongue savoring the ghost of blood. He smiled against Will’s lips. “Even in sleep, you are mine.”

Will pulled back just enough to look into his eyes. “No. I’m yours because I choose to be. And you’re mine because you want to be. Don’t forget that.”

Hannibal’s hand slid to Will’s jaw, tilting his face so that the dawn lit his eyes. “I could never forget it. Every mark on my skin reminds me. Every scar we leave on each other is a promise.”

Will exhaled softly, resting his forehead against Hannibal’s. “Then promise me again.”

Hannibal pressed his lips to Will’s temple, whispering: “Always. In flesh, in blood, in hunger, in love.”

Will closed his eyes, letting the words sink in, before shifting onto his back, drawing Hannibal with him. They lay entwined, skin against skin, bruises pressed to bruises, their bodies a map of the night’s dominion.

The city stirred outside — the rattle of shutters, the buzz of scooters, bells tolling early mass — but within the apartment, the world was narrowed to bruises and breath.

Yet silence could not hold forever. Will’s voice came first, quiet, threaded with thought. “They saw it. The crucifix. The seams. The ear.”

Hannibal’s smile was faint, indulgent. “Of course they did. They are not fools.”

“They’ll know it’s me.” Will’s eyes darkened, though his tone carried no fear. Only inevitability. “They’ll put my name beside yours now. No more guessing.”

Hannibal turned onto his side, resting his head on his hand, studying him with calm intensity. “Good. You have always been misjudged, accused without reason. Now the world sees you as you are — an equal. My equal.”

Will let the words hang, feeling their weight. “Hotch will tighten the net. Spencer will see the patterns. Dexter will taste the blood the way you do.” He exhaled, the names leaving his lips like a litany of hunters. “They’ll close in.”

“And yet,” Hannibal said softly, brushing a finger across a fading bite mark on Will’s jaw, “they will never catch us in time. They chase order, reason. We give them chaos. They will always arrive too late.”

Will’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Until they don’t.”

Hannibal bent to kiss the corner of his mouth, the gesture almost tender. “If that day comes, we will choose how it ends. Together.”

Will closed his eyes, leaning into him, feeling the press of their bruises align. “Then we make Rome our stage until it burns.”

Outside, the bells rang again, bright and holy. Inside, the two men lay marked and entwined, bound by vows etched in teeth and blood, already turning their minds toward the next act of their opera — knowing the hunters were closer now, and savoring it.

The Roman sun crept higher, finding its way through narrow gaps in the hotel curtains. The building was still hushed, a mixture of tourists sleeping off wine and jet lag, and agents who had been dragged into a nightmare chapel only hours before. But gradually, the BAU stirred.

JJ and Emily were the last to move. Still wrapped in the same bed, tangled beneath a single blanket, they shifted only when the bells of a nearby church broke through the quiet. JJ groaned softly, rolling toward Emily. “Six hours ago we were staring at a cross that’ll haunt me forever,” she murmured, her voice husky with sleep. “Now we’re supposed to just… sleep? Wake up? Pretend it’s another day?”

Emily, eyes still closed, wrapped an arm tighter around her waist. “We don’t pretend. We adapt. And we make sure nobody faces it alone.” Her voice was firm, though her body pressed close for comfort. For another ten minutes, neither moved. Then, reluctantly, they peeled themselves from the bed to wash and dress, already carrying the bond of shared resilience into the day.

Across the hall, Tara and Garcia had risen first. Tara was efficient: shower, pressed blouse, hair tied back. Garcia, on the other hand, had declared war on the hotel hair dryer.

“This thing,” Garcia groaned, her pink-and-orange scarf slipping from her shoulders, “was forged in the deepest pits of hell to make me look like I lost a fight with a thundercloud.”

Tara arched a brow in the mirror, eyeliner in hand. “It’s a hair dryer, Penelope. Not a demon.”

Garcia whirled on her, eyes wide with mock horror. “Not a demon? Tara, look at me. This is sabotage!”

Tara chuckled, the sound low and warm. “Then consider it resistance training. If you can survive that, you can survive anything.”

By the time Garcia finally tamed her curls with Tara’s calm coaching, the two of them were laughing, shoulders brushing as they left the bathroom. The sound spilled into the hall — a fragile kind of normalcy returning.

Reid, meanwhile, had been awake long before the others. He sat cross-legged on his bed, his hair mussed, glasses slipping low on his nose, bent over a battered Italian translation of Dante he’d borrowed from the lobby. His mind had refused him rest. Every time he tried to close his eyes, the image returned: flesh stitched to flesh, a parody of unity. He had catalogued it all in his head, the way he always did, but knowledge brought no peace.

Dexter still slept in the other bed, utterly still, his form precise and unmoving beneath the covers. Reid envied his silence.

A knock broke the quiet. Reid rose quickly and opened the door.

Luke stood there, holding two steaming cups. “Figured you’d be up. Coffee,” he said with a faint smile. “Not bad, for hotel vending.”

Reid blinked, then accepted one. “Thanks. You didn’t have to.”

“Didn’t want you starting the day without it.” Luke leaned against the doorframe, watching him. “You look like you’ve been up all night.”

Reid shifted uncomfortably, his thumb tracing the rim of the cup. “I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw them. The seams, the cross. The way the air smelled.”

Luke’s grin faded. He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Same here. It doesn’t leave you easy.” He tilted his head. “But you don’t have to carry it alone, you know.”

Reid looked at him, uncertain, then down again. “Sometimes it feels easier when I do.”

Luke didn’t push. He just reached out, clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Well, I’m here anyway. Whether you need me or not.”

Reid’s lips twitched — not quite a smile, but something near it.

From down the hall, Garcia’s triumphant cheer rang out. “Victory! My curls are restored!” Tara’s dry reply followed, something about miracles of Rome.

Reid’s faint smile grew a little stronger. “It’s good… hearing that. Normal things.”

Luke grinned. “That’s what we do best. Finding normal in the middle of hell.” With that, he left to change, leaving Reid standing with the cup warming his hands.

He closed the door softly, glancing once at Dexter — still asleep, silent as stone — then sat back on the bed, book in hand. He let the ordinary hum of the team waking seep into him like light through cracks.

Elsewhere in the hotel, Rossi and Hotch were already up, though in their own ways. Rossi sat at the small desk, scribbling in his leather notebook, his fountain pen scratching the page. He always wrote after nightmares, and last night had left more than enough. Across the room, Hotch stood by the window, tie already knotted, eyes hard on the Roman skyline.

“You ever get used to it?” Hotch asked suddenly, without turning.

Rossi didn’t look up. “The blood? The spectacle? No. But you learn how to carry it without letting it crush you.”

Hotch was quiet, his silhouette tense against the glass. “My son deserves a father who’s not haunted.”

Rossi capped his pen, finally looking at him. “Jack’s lucky. He’s got you. And one day, when he asks why you were gone, you’ll tell him you were stopping monsters. That’s something worth being haunted for.”

Hotch didn’t answer, but the line of his shoulders softened.

By the time the whole team began to trickle into the hotel’s breakfast room, the mood was still heavy, but lighter than the chapel’s shadow. Tara carried her laptop, Garcia her bright scarves, Luke two croissants tucked into his pocket for later. JJ and Emily walked in together, their steps almost in sync. Rossi ordered espresso in flawless Italian, earning a grin from the waiter.

And at the edge of it all, Spencer sat with his coffee cooling in front of him, listening to the warmth of voices around the table. For the first time since they had landed, he felt not alone but tethered. The nightmare of the crucifix still haunted him, but so did the laughter of his team, the clatter of plates, the smell of fresh bread.

Family, even here.

Garcia, wrapped in a riot of pink and orange scarves, poked at a croissant as though it might bite back. “If this wasn’t Rome, I’d say let’s all go back to bed and forget last night ever happened. But since it is Rome…” She sighed dramatically. “At least the carbs are holy.”

Morgan smirked. “Everything with you comes back to food, Baby Girl.”

“Food and fashion,” she shot back, though her smile faltered when she caught Reid’s distant stare.

Rossi set down his tiny cup of espresso, the dark liquid barely touched. His voice brought the table back to the case. “Interpol released the Cardinals’ names this morning. Cardinal Vittorio Altieri and Cardinal Tommaso Bellini. Both from Florence originally. Old friends, inseparable for decades.”

Tara leaned forward, hands wrapped around her coffee mug. “Friends, yes — but more. Interpol hinted their closeness had raised eyebrows in the Vatican for years. Two men who shared not just work, but homes, holidays. Their bond was… intimate.”

JJ’s lips pressed into a thin line. “So Lecter and Graham saw them as mirrors.”

“Exactly,” Rossi said. His eyes darkened. “Two lives divided between the Church and each other. Two halves stitched into one.”

Emily stirred sugar into her coffee, her tone crisp. “So they chose Cardinals who were already whispered about. It’s a parody — faith and intimacy crucified together. And the missing ear…” Her eyes flicked to Reid. “They wanted us to know.”

Reid swallowed, his voice quiet but steady. “It was a direct message. They’re not hiding Graham anymore. They’re presenting him.”

Dexter had been silent until now, his fork neatly dividing a piece of bread into exact quarters. He set it down, his voice calm. “The stitching wasn’t just symbolic. It was careful. Every seam had to hold under the weight of the cross. Whoever did it wasn’t just making a point. They were making sure the point lasted.”

Morgan muttered, shaking his head. “Son of a bitch.” He pushed his plate away, appetite gone. “They’re showing off.”

Hotch’s voice cut through, steady as steel. “They’re escalating. And they know we’re here.” He glanced around the table, meeting each set of eyes in turn. “That means they’re preparing their next move. We can’t afford to be two steps behind.”

The table fell into silence for a moment, the weight of his words pressing down. Even Garcia, usually quick with levity, sat quiet, her scarf bright but her face pale.

Finally, Rossi leaned back, his gaze distant. “Altieri and Bellini… they were loved. Respected. People will grieve them, quietly or not. Lecter and Graham know that. They’re not just killing — they’re desecrating.”

JJ’s voice was soft but sharp. “They’re desecrating love.”

Across the table, Reid’s fingers tightened around his coffee cup. He said nothing, but the look in his eyes — haunted, calculating — told the rest.

Tara leaned forward, breaking the silence. “We know Lecter never wastes. He doesn’t kill for spectacle alone. Which means the crucifix was only half the performance.”

Reid nodded slowly. “The halves we saw were for us — the public stage. But the other halves…” He hesitated, his gaze dropping into his coffee. “They kept them.”

Morgan frowned. “Kept them for what? Don’t tell me—”

“Food,” Dexter said evenly, before anyone else could answer. He didn’t flinch as the table shifted uncomfortably around him. “The cuts were surgical, deliberate. They preserved what they wanted. The meat was taken with care.” His eyes flicked to Rossi, then Hotch. “They’ll eat it. Lecter always does.”

Garcia pressed a hand to her mouth, eyes wide with revulsion. “Oh God. No. No, no, no.”

Emily’s jaw tightened, her voice low but controlled. “It’s not just consumption. It’s communion. They’re binding themselves through the act.”

Hotch’s gaze swept the table. “Then we assume they still have the halves. Which means they have storage. Freezers. A kitchen. Somewhere private enough to butcher and prepare.”

Rossi tapped a finger against his cup, his mind turning over the city’s geography. “Rome’s dense. Too many eyes in the historic center. They’ll want space, privacy. Trastevere, maybe. Narrow streets, apartments above shops, no one asking too many questions.”

“Or outside the center,” Tara suggested. “A villa, countryside. But Trastevere makes sense. It’s old, tight, anonymous. You disappear into the noise of it.”

Reid finally looked up, eyes sharp now. “Wherever they are, they chose it long before the crucifixion. This wasn’t improvisation. This was rehearsed.”

Morgan swore under his breath, leaning back in his chair. “So what? They’re sitting in some apartment right now, cooking Cardinals for breakfast?”

No one answered at first. Then Rossi’s voice, quiet, grim: “Yes.”

The silence that followed was broken only by the scrape of cutlery at another table, the chatter of tourists oblivious to what haunted the FBI.

Hotch leaned forward, his tone decisive. “We start there. Interpol will sweep for recent rentals in Trastevere. Anyone paying in cash, anyone foreign, anyone secretive. They’ll need refrigeration, space. We narrow it down.”

JJ’s voice was softer, but carried its own edge. “And when we find them?”

Hotch’s eyes hardened. “We end it.”

Around the table, the team fell into silence again, each mind replaying the crucifixion, imagining the unseen halves locked away in cold storage, waiting.

After breakfast, the team scattered back to their rooms to prepare for the day’s briefings with Interpol. Morgan excused himself quietly. Nobody asked where he was going; maybe they knew, or maybe they respected the look in his eyes that said don’t follow me.

The chapel had been sealed, cordoned off with tape and guarded by Carabinieri, but Morgan’s credentials and FBI badge earned him a silent nod past the officers at the door. Inside, the air was still thick with incense and decay. The crucifix loomed above the altar, now stripped of its grotesque burden. Only faint stains remained on the wood, dark against the grain, and a heavier shadow on the stone floor where blood had soaked into the cracks.

Morgan moved slowly down the aisle, the echo of his boots loud in the hushed space. He stopped at the foot of the altar, staring up at the empty cross. For a moment, rage rose in him — a hot, bitter surge at the thought of what had been done here, of the arrogance it took to desecrate holy ground. But then the rage softened into grief, and he sank to one knee.

He bowed his head, clasped his hands.

“Lord,” he whispered, his voice carrying just enough to echo faintly off the walls, “receive the souls of Cardinal Altieri and Cardinal Bellini. They served You as best they could. Take them now, whole again, in Your mercy.”

He swallowed, his throat tightening. “And forgive us, for seeing them like that. For walking into Your house and finding it defiled. For carrying that image in our hearts.”

His hands trembled, but he forced them still.

“I don’t know if I’m praying right anymore. Been a long time. But I remember enough. I remember what my mother taught me: you never stop asking for strength, even when you don’t feel it.”

He lifted his gaze to the wooden Christ above, arms stretched wide, face carved in agony. The resemblance to the mutilated Cardinals struck him again, and he forced himself not to look away.

“Give me strength. Give all of us strength. Because I swear to You, Lord — I’ll stop them. I don’t care what it takes. I’ll stop them before they do this again.”

For a long moment he stayed there, the silence thick and reverent. Then he crossed himself slowly, the motion instinctive, and rose.

As he turned to leave, one of the Carabinieri at the door looked at him with faint surprise, as though not used to seeing FBI agents pray at their crime scenes. Morgan gave him a curt nod, then stepped back into the Roman morning, steadier than when he’d entered.

The city was waking — bells ringing, voices echoing through narrow streets — but for Derek Morgan, the vow he’d made at the altar burned louder than all of it.

Later, back at the hotel, Emily was leaning against the wall near the elevators, flipping through a file. Morgan joined her, waiting for the lift.

She glanced up — and caught the faintest scent. Incense, smoky and sweet, clinging to his jacket. Her brows lifted.

“You went back,” she said softly.

Morgan didn’t answer right away. The elevator chimed, doors sliding open, but neither of them moved. Finally, he gave a small nod. “Had to.”

Emily studied him for a moment, her eyes gentle but unwavering. “You prayed for them.”

It wasn’t a question.

Morgan exhaled, rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I did. Someone had to. Somebody needed to stand in that place and remember they were men of faith, not… pieces of a show.”

Emily’s lips curved faintly, but her eyes stayed serious. “That wasn’t just for them.”

“No,” Morgan admitted quietly. “It wasn’t.”

The elevator doors slid shut, then opened again. Emily stepped in first, then waited for him to follow.

As the doors closed around them, she rested a hand briefly on his arm. “I’m glad you did.”

Morgan didn’t answer, but he met her eyes — gratitude unspoken, steady as the vow he’d left behind in the chapel.

The shutters were open wide to the morning, letting in pale shafts of light that spilled across the small kitchen. Trastevere was alive outside — voices drifting up from the street, a fruit vendor shouting prices, the rattle of scooter engines weaving through cobbled alleys.

Inside, the world was still.

Hannibal moved with unhurried precision, a linen napkin folded over his arm, arranging breakfast as though he were in his own kitchen in Florence. He had found figs at the market the evening before, ripe and purple-skinned; he halved them carefully, setting them beside slices of pecorino and a small dish of olives. The bitter scent of espresso filled the air. Even here, even hunted, he refused disorder at the table.

Will sat at the wooden table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, his hair still damp from the shower. One hand cradled his cup of coffee, the other idly tracing the rim of the saucer. He watched Hannibal without speaking, eyes following each movement as though the ritual itself steadied him.

They ate in silence at first — bread torn, olives bitten, the scrape of cutlery softened by the hum of the city outside. The quiet between them was companionable, but charged, the kind that needed no filling.

It was Will who broke it.

“I miss them.” His voice was low, almost absentminded.

Hannibal looked up, arching a brow. “Them?”

“My dogs,” Will said. His thumb traced the edge of the saucer again. “I miss waking to the sound of them clamoring on the porch. All that chaos, fighting for attention, tripping me if I didn’t watch my step.” His mouth curved faintly. “It was noisy. Demanding. But it was good. It kept me human.”

Hannibal slid the plate of figs closer to him, waiting.

“And teaching,” Will continued. His tone softened, wistful. “I liked watching them catch on, the students. That moment when something clicked in their eyes. Like you’d passed on more than facts, like you’d helped shape the way they thought. There’s a… steadiness in that.”

He broke a piece of bread, chewing slowly. For a long pause, only the sound of traffic seeped in from below. Then, almost reluctantly:

“And fishing. I miss that most of all.” His gaze dropped into his cup. “The waiting, the quiet. The patience of it. Hours spent alone with the water, not knowing when or if something will take the line. That silence felt sacred, like a prayer.”

Hannibal watched him closely, his own food untouched for a moment. He heard every word, but he was listening more to the silences, to what had not been spoken. No mention of Molly. No mention of Walter. The family Will had once tried to weave himself into had already dissolved in his memory, left outside the circle of what he mourned.

A curl of satisfaction rose within Hannibal, dark and quiet. He did not press, did not name the absence. He let it rest like an indulgence between them.

“You miss the patterns that steadied you,” Hannibal said at last, voice smooth. “The creatures who relied upon you alone. The rituals of patience and solitude, the sense of reward that came from them.”

Will’s lips curved, faint and sardonic. “That’s one way to put it.”

Hannibal reached across the table. His fingers brushed lightly against Will’s wrist, over the faint bruise left by his teeth the night before. His touch lingered there, a reminder and a claim.

“And now,” Hannibal murmured, “you have new patterns. New dependents. New silences, shared.”

Will’s gaze lifted, meeting his. For a long moment, there was nothing but the sound of bells ringing faintly in the distance.

“Shared,” Will said, voice low, certain. “That’s the only way I want it.”

Hannibal’s eyes gleamed. “As do I.”

They ate a while longer, unhurried, the sun warming the table, the city carrying on beyond their walls. When Will finished his coffee, he leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. “They’ll be closer now,” he said at last. “The crucifix was too loud. Too public.”

“They will chase harder,” Hannibal agreed, spearing a fig with the tip of his knife, the juice running dark. “But they will also stumble. Desperation clouds judgment.”

Will’s mouth curved again, but not with humor. “I don’t think desperation has ever clouded Aaron Hotchner.”

“No,” Hannibal admitted. “Nor Rossi. Age has sharpened him. And Spencer…” He paused, savoring the name as though tasting it. “Spencer will think too much, and in thinking, he will find us.”

Will’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Then we’ll be ready.”

Hannibal leaned forward, placing the halved fig onto Will’s plate, a gift, a communion. “Always.”

For a time, they said nothing more. Hannibal read in Will’s face the shadows of what he missed — dogs, classrooms, rivers — but not the life he had tried to build with another. And Will, in turn, read in Hannibal’s silence the pleasure he took in that omission.

By the time they rose from the table, the city was fully awake. To Rome, they were only two men leaving a quiet apartment. But at the table they had shared, in words and silences, they had already bound themselves tighter still.

By late afternoon, the apartment in Trastevere had grown stifling. The alleys below were crowded, tourists pressing shoulder to shoulder, shopkeepers shouting over the din. It was anonymity in plain sight, but anonymity was thinning. Too many eyes, too much noise.

Will stood at the window, watching a line of scooters snake past, his reflection faint in the glass. “We can’t stay here.”

Hannibal closed the leather case he had been sorting, precise hands folding shirts into crisp lines. “No. They will already be narrowing their search. Apartments rented in cash. Foreign tenants. Couples. Trastevere will be the first place they look.”

Will turned, his gaze sharp. “So we stay in Rome, but not among them.”

A smile touched Hannibal’s mouth, quick and pleased. “Precisely.” He set the case aside. “There is a farm. Caffarella. I know it well. Goats, sheep, chickens. The owners have gone south for the summer. They entrusted the place to silence.”

Will’s brow furrowed, curious. “You checked?”

“I always check,” Hannibal said, as though it were obvious.

The next morning, they left Trastevere with little ceremony — a few bags, the freezer contents concealed within Hannibal’s careful packing. They crossed the city by car, the streets thinning as they approached the wide green of Parco della Caffarella. The ancient aqueduct loomed in the distance, arches cutting against the sky.

The farm was exactly as Hannibal had described: stone walls, faded shutters, a garden grown wild in the summer heat. Chickens clucked freely in the yard, goats shifting lazily in their pen. The animals paid them no mind, as though accustomed to strange caretakers.

Will walked the grounds slowly, boots stirring dust, eyes scanning the tree line. He stopped at the barn, resting his hand against the rough wood of the door. The smell of hay and animal musk seeped out, mingled with the faint sweetness of rot.

“This will work,” he said.

Hannibal joined him, standing close enough that their shoulders brushed. “It is perfect. A place of life, soon to host death. A pastoral stage for our next act.”

Will’s lips curved, sardonic. “A farm in the city. Sheep grazing beside ancient stones. It already feels like a parable.”

“Then we shall make it one.” Hannibal’s hand lingered on his back, a touch both grounding and proprietary.

They moved through the house, noting the spaces — the wide kitchen with its heavy wooden table, the cellar cool and dry, the loft above the barn that would serve for solitude or for violence. Every corner promised utility.

That evening, they sat beneath the veranda with a bottle of red wine, the city distant behind them, the park stretching quiet and green ahead. Will watched the goats shift in their pen, their bleating faint.

“Dogs I miss,” he said, almost to himself. “Goats… not so much.”

Hannibal chuckled, pouring the wine. “They will serve their purpose.”

Will turned his head, watching him. “And what purpose is that?”

Hannibal raised his glass, eyes glinting in the low sun. “To remind us that even in the pastoral, the slaughter is never far away.”

They drank, the quiet broken only by the rustle of animals and the distant hum of Rome. In the fading light of Caffarella, the farm became theirs — a sanctuary, a larder, and a stage.

The farmhouse in Caffarella was hushed when they lay down together. Outside, goats shuffled in their pens, the occasional cluck of a chicken breaking the silence, but within the old stone walls there was only the faint scent of hay and dust, of sheets clean but rough against their skin.

They shared the larger bedroom upstairs, its ceiling beams uneven with age, shutters cracked enough to let in a pale wash of moonlight. Hannibal undressed with his usual precision, folding his clothes neatly on the chair. Will stripped without care, letting his shirt fall, collapsing heavily into bed. Their bodies aligned under the thin blanket, the rhythm of their breathing falling into sync.

Sleep came easily. Peace did not.

Will’s dream took him back to Wolf Trap. The porch sagged under the weight of his dogs, but they were grotesquely wrong: bodies sewn flank to flank, staggering as they barked, blood bubbling at their mouths, paws smearing crimson across the wood. He tried to call to them, but what left his throat was not his own voice — it was Hannibal’s, smooth and resonant, alien in his mouth.

The dogs scattered, and Alana Bloom stood in their place, her hand outstretched, her palm dripping with blood. “You’ve ruined everything,” she whispered. Behind her appeared Margot Verger, her hand resting protectively on her belly, the swell grotesquely stitched closed, as though life itself had been bound and silenced. Her eyes burned with contempt. “You kill what you touch.”

The two women melted into Abigail Hobbs, half her face missing, one ear gone, smiling with that strange, trusting warmth. She leaned close, her ruined cheek against his, whispering: You were always meant to kill me. You’ll kill them all.

Behind her rose a crucifix, but it bore no Christ. Instead, his dogs hung there, fused together, howling like men. In his hands he felt the weight of a knife, slick with blood, though he could not see whom he had killed. Across the porch stood a mirror image of himself — blank-eyed, mouth smeared red, grinning as he tore flesh from a dog’s flank with his teeth.

Will jerked against the sheets, twisting in his sleep.

Beside him, Hannibal dreamed of Florence. He walked the Uffizi alone at first, its galleries bathed in silence, paintings radiant in the dark. Then the canvases began to bleed. Caravaggio’s saints wept crimson, Botticelli’s Venus was torn to ribbons, her pale body shredded like butchered flesh.

The Pietà loomed at the center of the gallery, but Christ’s face was Will’s. His body sagged, ribs split, half-eaten, gnawed to ash. Hannibal stepped forward, hands drenched in blood, realizing it was his own hunger that had done this. Yet when he tried to eat, the flesh dissolved into grit on his tongue, and Will’s hollow eyes condemned him.

From the shadows came laughter — Jack Crawford’s booming, Alana’s sharp, Clarice’s mocking. Their voices became a chorus: You failed. You failed. Hannibal lifted his scalpel, but the blade bent like tin, useless. His knives dulled in his hands, impotent.

Will turned from him, stepping into the arms of a faceless figure, whole and alive, disappearing into the bleeding gallery while Hannibal was left alone in ruins. The laughter swelled until it cracked the walls, canvases splitting apart as blood rained from the ceilings. He reached desperately for Will, but his hands closed on air.

Hannibal woke with a gasp, chest heaving. At the same moment, Will tore himself upright, sweat slicking his body, sheets twisted tight around his legs.

For a moment neither spoke, only stared at the other, eyes wide, breath ragged. Hannibal reached first, his hand seizing Will’s shoulder, grounding him. Will clutched it like a lifeline, his palm slick with sweat.

“Nightmares,” Will muttered, voice raw.

“Yes,” Hannibal admitted, quieter than he intended. “Unworthy of us.”

Will gave a humorless, broken laugh. “Mine were worse.”

They faced each other in the dark, sweat-slick and shaken, the moonlight painting them both pale. Then Hannibal leaned close, pressing his forehead to Will’s, his breath slow but uneven. “You are here,” he whispered. “Not with them. Not in their laughter. Here.”

Will’s voice cracked. “And you’re not left behind in ruins.”

They held onto each other until the tremors softened, until their breathing steadied into a rhythm once more.

Outside, the goats shifted in their pens, the farm drifting deeper into silence. Inside, the two men clung to each other, bound by the terror of their dreams and the fragile solace of waking together.

Will woke first. His head throbbed from restless sleep, his body still damp with sweat, but the warmth beside him anchored him. Hannibal was stretched half on his side, his hand resting over Will’s ribs as if even in sleep he refused to release him.

For a moment, Will lay still, listening to Hannibal’s breath, steady but heavier than usual. Then Hannibal shifted, slowly, a grimace flickering across his face. He pressed a hand to his side, just below his ribs, and moved to rise.

A faint sound escaped him — not quite a groan, but close.

Will’s eyes narrowed. “Something hurts.”

Hannibal froze for an instant, then straightened with deliberate care. “A remnant.”

“From the fall,” Will said, sitting up now, watching him closely.

Hannibal inclined his head, as if admitting it cost him something. “Yes. The cliff took more than blood. The bruises faded, but not the ache.” He pressed his palm against his side, firm. “A reminder of our descent.”

Will’s mouth curved — not quite a smile. “And of our rising.”

Hannibal’s eyes flicked to him, reading the quiet fierceness there. Slowly, he lowered himself back onto the bed, letting Will’s hand slide over his. For a moment, they stayed like that, pressed palm to palm against the ache.

Silence held them, until Will murmured, almost idly: “I dreamed of them last night. Alana. Margot. Abigail.”

Hannibal’s brow arched slightly, but he did not interrupt.

“They were all there,” Will continued, voice low. “Accusing. Condemning. Reminding me of what I’ve touched, and ruined.” His gaze drifted to the shuttered window. “They’re alive, Alana and Margot. Together. Safe. But in the dream…” He swallowed. “They weren’t.”

Hannibal studied him for a long moment, then said gently, “You did not mention Molly. Nor Walter.”

Will turned his head sharply, meeting his gaze. “No.”

The word hung between them, final, unadorned.

Hannibal let it settle, his lips curving with the faintest satisfaction. “Then it is not they who haunt you. Only those who remain tied to us. To me.”

Will leaned closer, his hand brushing Hannibal’s cheek, fingers rough against smooth skin. “And you haunt me most of all.”

Hannibal’s answering smile was small but genuine. “As you do me.”

For a while they sat in the pale morning, listening to the stir of goats outside, the distant toll of bells drifting from the city. Their bodies still bore the sweat of nightmares, Hannibal’s ribs still ached from the cliff, but in that moment the pain felt like proof — of what they had endured, of what they would continue to endure, together.

The hotel was quieter than usual. After a day of briefings and surveillance planning with Interpol, most of the team had turned in early. The corridors hummed with muted voices, doors shutting, the occasional laugh from tourists drifting down the hall.

Reid sat cross-legged on his bed, papers spread around him in neat but teetering stacks. Case notes, photographs of the crucifixion, clippings on Lecter’s history. His glasses had slid down the bridge of his nose, his hair falling into his eyes. He muttered as he scribbled something on the margin of a report — a line about ritual precision.

Across the room, Dexter had been silent for hours. He sat at the desk, the dim lamp casting sharp angles over his face, turning the pen in his hand like a blade. He wasn’t reading — just watching Reid work, the methodical rhythm of the young man’s mind made visible in the scatter of paper.

Finally, Dexter spoke, his voice calm, almost casual. “You work like a tide.”

Reid glanced up, startled. “What?”

“Coming in, pulling out. Piling up details, letting them go. Always moving. It’s… almost hypnotic.”

Reid blinked, caught between confusion and curiosity. “That’s an unusual way to describe it.”

Dexter’s mouth curved slightly. “Unusual fits you.”

For a moment, neither spoke. Reid adjusted his glasses, focusing on the page in his lap, but Dexter could see the faint color rising in his cheeks.

“You’ve been with this team for years,” Dexter continued. “You’ve hunted dozens of killers. What makes these two different for you?”

Reid exhaled, setting his pen down. His voice came out softer than he meant it to. “Because I knew one of them.”

Dexter tilted his head. “Will Graham.”

“Yes.” Reid’s gaze dropped. “He was brilliant. Too brilliant, maybe. He could look at a crime scene and feel it — not just see it, but become it. And I think… in the end, it consumed him.” His fingers drummed against the paper. “He had a darkness in him, always. I think he knew it better than anyone.”

Dexter’s eyes lingered on him, sharp behind the calm. “And you’re afraid of that darkness in yourself.”

The words landed too cleanly. Reid stiffened, looking up. “Why would you say that?”

Dexter shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Because you’re fascinated. You’re not just cataloguing facts. You’re chasing something in him. It feels… personal.”

Reid’s lips pressed into a thin line. He didn’t deny it. Instead, his voice dropped lower. “Maybe I see how close the line is. Between understanding and becoming.”

For a long moment, they studied each other — the genius who feared his mind might betray him, and the predator who wore normalcy like a mask.

Dexter broke the silence first, his tone lighter. “And what about Lecter? What do you see in him?”

Reid pushed his glasses higher, grateful for the shift. “Lecter sees himself as more than human. A god, almost. The world is his stage. He curates chaos like an art form. Graham… Graham was his equal. They reflected each other until there was no line between them.” His voice grew quieter. “Two halves of a whole.”

Dexter smiled faintly. “That sounds almost… romantic.”

Reid looked at him sharply. “It is. In its own grotesque way.”

The silence that followed was heavier, but not uncomfortable. Dexter leaned back in the chair, arms crossed, watching Reid wrestle with his thoughts.

Finally, Reid asked, almost tentatively, “And you? What do you see, Dexter? You’ve only been here a short time, but you watch. You’re always watching.”

Dexter paused, choosing his words with care. “I see patterns. Rituals. People needing control, or meaning. Some find it in prayer. Some in numbers. Some in blood.” He let that last word hang a beat too long, then smiled faintly to soften it. “It’s all about what keeps you steady when the tide pulls.”

Reid studied him, brow furrowed, as though sensing more beneath the words but unable to name it.

Dexter stood, stretching, breaking the tension. “You should get some sleep. We’ll need it.”

Reid didn’t argue, though his mind still whirred. He gathered the papers into neat stacks, set them aside, and lay back on the bed. Dexter turned off the lamp, the room sinking into shadow.

But even as sleep crept in, Reid couldn’t shake the words: Some in blood.

And Dexter, lying silently in the dark, felt a flicker of something rare — recognition.

The night stretched wide across Rome, a skin of lights over ancient bones. Dexter walked beneath it, hands in his pockets, his steps unhurried but purposeful.

The BAU’s hotel was a cage. Briefings, surveillance, paperwork — always someone nearby, always eyes watching. A month had passed since he had fed the Passenger, and though the discipline had held, the hunger gnawed now, sharper each night.

He moved through the streets like a shadow, letting the city pour past him — tourists laughing outside trattorie, students clinging to bottles of wine, men with sharp hands tugging women too close. His gaze measured each of them automatically, weighing cruelty, guilt, weakness. His mind charted patterns in their movements, imagined the line of a blade, the neat corners of a plastic sheet.

But none of them were enough. Not worthy.

He turned into a narrower alley, the noise of the street fading. The stones were damp, the air cooler here, carrying the tang of mildew. His footsteps echoed, too loud in the hush.

“Looking for something?”

The voice was familiar. Dexter froze, his breath catching, though he knew before he turned what he would see.

Brian.

His brother leaned against the wall, the same half-smile on his face, the same easy mockery in his eyes. He looked alive, too alive — hair falling into his forehead, jacket rumpled, casual as if they were boys again.

Dexter said nothing. He simply stood, pulse steady but quickened, watching the ghost with the same stillness he gave to crime scenes.

“You’ve been busy playing good cop,” Brian drawled, tilting his head. “All that paperwork, all those late-night strategy sessions. But you can’t keep the Passenger on a leash forever.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. “I’ve kept it this long.”

Brian laughed softly. “And you’re starving for it. I can feel it. You want to kill. You need to kill. Sooner or later, you’ll break.”

Dexter didn’t answer. His eyes scanned the alley walls, the dark mouths of doors, as though a real target might step out and save him from this conversation.

But Brian followed, his smile widening. “And then there’s him.”

Dexter stilled.

“Your little roommate,” Brian said, voice sharp with amusement. “The genius with too many words. Spencer Reid.”

Dexter turned to face him fully now, his face unreadable.

Brian stepped closer, his voice dropping. “Don’t fool yourself. He’s not your Will. He’s not your companion in the dark. He’s just another fragile little moth circling the flame. And you’ll burn him alive if you let him too close.”

The words coiled in Dexter’s chest, heavier than he wanted to admit.

“He’s not like us,” Brian whispered. “No one is.”

The alley darkened as though the walls had closed in. Then Brian was gone, leaving Dexter alone with his breath and the sound of dripping water.

He walked back toward the hotel, the Passenger restless, unsatisfied, the echo of his brother’s voice gnawing at him.

⸻

Upstairs, Reid sat by the window of their shared room, a lamp burning low beside him. The case files lay spread across his bed, but he wasn’t reading. His pen tapped absently against the paper, rhythm breaking, thoughts drifting.

The city lights shimmered against the glass, distorting into halos, and his eyes kept straying from the files to the empty desk. Dexter’s desk. The chair pushed back just slightly, the absence marked.

He told himself it was habit, the way his eyes wandered there — the need to fill a gap in the scene. But when he pictured Dexter sitting there earlier, the way his body had seemed so contained, precise, it left Reid strangely unsettled.

He shifted, pushing his glasses up, trying to return to the notes. But his attention broke again, drawn to the sound of footsteps in the corridor. Too heavy to be tourists, too measured. Dexter returning.

Reid leaned back against the headboard, letting his pen fall silent. He didn’t name the thought pressing faintly at the edge of his mind. He wouldn’t. It was easier to file it away as noise, background static.

Still, when Dexter entered the room quietly a moment later, shutting the door with the care of a man who never made excess sound, Reid found himself listening to the rhythm of his movements, tracking them even as he forced his gaze back to the files.

He told himself it was nothing.

The unease remained.

The room was dim when Dexter returned, his key card sliding the lock open with a soft click. He stepped in quietly, shutting the door with care.

Reid was awake. He sat against the headboard, papers gathered into stacks now, his glasses catching the lamplight. He looked up immediately, his gaze sharper than Dexter expected at this hour.

“You were gone a long time,” Reid said, his tone calm but edged with curiosity.

Dexter slipped out of his jacket, hanging it neatly on the chair. “I needed air.”

“For hours?” Reid’s brow furrowed slightly. “You missed the curfew briefing.”

Dexter offered a faint smile. “I don’t do well being caged. Thought a walk might help.”

Behind Reid, a shadow shifted. Brian leaned against the wall casually, arms crossed, his grin wide. “Nice. Simple. Too simple. He’s not going to buy it.”

Dexter ignored him, lowering himself into the chair with deliberate ease. “The city’s… alive at night. It helps me think.”

Reid tilted his head, studying him. His gaze lingered longer than Dexter expected, and Dexter felt it — the weight of a mind that could unspool a person thread by thread.

Brian chuckled. “He’s dissecting you already, brother. Pulling you apart without a knife. He’ll see it, sooner or later.”

Dexter forced his attention back to Reid, his expression steady. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”

Reid hesitated, fingers tapping the edge of a file. “I wasn’t worried. Just… curious. You don’t strike me as the type who takes long walks without reason.”

Dexter’s smile deepened a fraction. “Maybe I’m unpredictable.”

Brian leaned closer, his voice a whisper meant only for Dexter. “Unpredictable? You? Please. You’re ritual wrapped in skin. He’ll see the cracks, and then what? He’s not your Will, he never will be.”

Reid shifted, setting his papers aside. “What did you see?”

Dexter blinked. “See?”

“Out there. While you walked.” Reid’s tone softened, thoughtful. “Did it give you anything useful?”

Dexter leaned back, the lamplight sharp across his face. He let the silence stretch just enough. “Patterns. People. You can learn a lot watching strangers move.”

Reid nodded slowly, though his eyes lingered. “I suppose that’s true.” He adjusted his glasses, then, almost too quietly: “Still, it seems lonely.”

Dexter felt Brian’s grin widen behind him. “There it is. He’s reaching for you. Poor boy doesn’t even know what he’s reaching toward.”

For a moment, Dexter considered answering honestly, admitting how much the hunger gnawed at him, how the streets had offered him temptation after temptation, none of them enough. But instead, he only said, “Lonely isn’t always bad.”

Reid’s gaze flicked to him again, searching, unsettled. Then he looked down at his files, ending the moment.

Brian leaned against the headboard now, directly behind Reid’s shoulder, smirking down at him. “He’ll never understand you. But it’s cute that he tries.”

Dexter exhaled slowly, rising from the chair. “Get some rest. Tomorrow will be worse than today.”

Reid didn’t argue. He slid down into his sheets, turning off the lamp. Darkness pooled through the room.

But Dexter lay awake long after, listening to Reid’s steady breathing across the space between them — and to Brian’s voice in the shadows, relentless.

“You’ll break, brother. And when you do, he’ll see you for what you are.”

Evening settled over Caffarella Park, the sky deepening to violet, the fields cooling with shadow. Hannibal and Will walked the path near the old farmhouses, the air heavy with the smell of grass and dust.

A man approached from the opposite direction — late thirties, neatly dressed, his step unhurried. He let his eyes linger openly on Hannibal as they drew near.

“Buonasera,” he greeted, his smile broad, lingering. His gaze dipped once, appraising, before he added lightly, “Difficile non fermarsi davanti a tanta bellezza.” Good evening. Hard not to stop in front of so much beauty.

It was meant half as a compliment, half as flirtation. Hannibal inclined his head politely, voice even. “Buonasera.” Nothing more.

Will said nothing at all. His hands slid deeper into his pockets. His expression didn’t shift. They walked on, leaving the man behind with his smile.

But Will’s silence was heavy, his jaw tight, his gaze hard on the path ahead.

The park emptied further as dusk thickened. The same man cut across a quieter trail, humming softly to himself, his steps light.

He didn’t notice the figure slipping from the trees until it was too late.

Will struck with sudden violence, shoving him against the rough stone wall of an abandoned sheep pen. His knife slid under the ribs, fast and merciless, then again, deeper, the blade twisting until the man gasped wetly, choking on his own blood.

Will’s face was taut, his eyes cold. He pressed the man down as the strength drained out of him, dragging the blade higher, ripping muscle and bone apart. When the man sagged lifeless in his grip, Will let him slide to the ground. Blood seeped into the earth, staining the weeds.

For a moment, the rage that had burned in him eased, replaced by a dark calm. Hannibal was his. His alone.

Then, movement.

On a distant path, across the field, a tall figure passed through the twilight. Will stilled. Even at a distance, even in shadow, he knew who it was.

Dexter.

For the briefest second, Will felt something almost alien to him in Hannibal’s orbit: fear. The man moved with a predator’s economy, and though he gave no sign of noticing, Will couldn’t shake the thought — what if he had?

Dexter paused once, head turning faintly, as though scenting the air. The faint tang of blood carried poorly on the breeze, but something primal stirred in him. He frowned, then walked on, vanishing into the trees.

Will’s breath steadied again. He wiped his knife clean on the dead man’s shirt, then turned back toward the farmhouse, blood streaked down his arms, drying sticky against his skin.

Hannibal was on the veranda when Will returned, a lamp burning behind him. He rose as soon as he saw the stains — shirt soaked, hands slick, crimson flecks across Will’s throat. His eyes sharpened with real surprise.

“Will,” he said, stepping forward. “What happened?”

Will stopped at the foot of the steps. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t soften it.

“There was a man,” he said evenly. “He flirted with you. Just a few words. A look.” His jaw tightened. “I followed him.”

Hannibal’s gaze swept over him, dark and intent. “And?”

“I shoved him against a wall,” Will said. His voice was low, almost a growl, but steady, clinical in its detail. “I drove the knife under his ribs. Again. Twisted. Pulled it up through his chest until he stopped breathing.”

He stepped closer, the blood glistening under the lamplight. “Then I let him fall. He won’t look at you again.”

For a moment, Hannibal was silent, his expression unreadable. Then something flickered — not judgment, not reproach, but something closer to awe.

Will’s eyes burned as he seized Hannibal’s collar and crushed their mouths together. The kiss was violent, bruising, the taste of iron still hot on his tongue.

When he pulled back, his voice was raw, feral. “You’re mine. Only mine.”

Hannibal’s lips curved slowly, indulgent, as though savoring the words. “Always.”

Will kissed him again, harder, as though each bite, each press of his mouth could bind them tighter in blood.

The night after the blood in Caffarella, Dexter stood alone on the balcony of his hotel room, phone pressed to his ear.

“Dad?” Harrison’s voice crackled across the line, small and bright.

Dexter smiled despite himself. “Hey, buddy.”

The boy talked quickly — about school, about a new video game, about how he wanted pancakes for dinner instead of pasta. Dexter let him ramble, holding the sound close like a fragile treasure.

“Do you miss me?” Harrison asked suddenly, his voice going softer.

Dexter’s throat tightened. “Every day.”

There was silence, full of faith.

“Then come home soon.”

Dexter promised he would. It was a lie measured in weeks, not days, but Harrison believed it. When the call ended, Dexter stayed with the phone pressed to his ear until the screen went black.

Harry’s voice came from the corner of the balcony, as calm and firm as always. “Don’t get attached. Protect him by keeping him away from this side of you. That’s the only way.”

Brian leaned against the doorframe, smirking, arms folded. “Sure, brother. Be the noble father. Meanwhile, you’re out here prowling Rome while someone else tucks him in. You and I both know where you belong.”

Dexter closed his eyes, letting the two voices clash and fade.

The next morning, Hotch briefed them briefly in the hotel lobby. Four days had passed since the Cardinals’ crucifixion. No new leads, no new murders. Interpol had nothing fresh.

“Rest. Stay sharp. We’ll move when we have something,” Hotch said. Then he dismissed them.

The team scattered back toward their rooms. Dexter waited until Reid appeared, his shirt sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows, hair as untamed as always. No stack of files in his arms this time, just himself.

“Hey,” Dexter said, tone almost casual. “You asked me the other night if I’d seen anything useful while I was out.”

Reid blinked at him. “Yes.”

Dexter hesitated — deliberately. “Want to see for yourself?”

Reid tilted his head. “See what?”

“The patterns,” Dexter said. “How people move. How the city breathes.”

Reid studied him for a moment, as if weighing whether the invitation was strange or significant. Then he nodded. “All right.”

They stepped into Rome’s streets together, the heat already rising off the cobblestones. The air was alive with cicadas, mopeds buzzing past, the smell of espresso clinging to the corners of cafés. Tourists clustered around fountains, splashing their faces, while locals walked briskly in short sleeves, their pace slower than the city’s usual urgency.

Dexter wore a light shirt, the fabric loose but close enough to show the cut of his arms, the easy strength in his shoulders. Reid noticed — not consciously at first, but enough that his gaze lingered a second too long before he pulled it back to the street.

“See that?” Dexter said, nodding toward a deliveryman unloading crates. “Left-handed. New limp. Probably recent injury. The way he shifts his weight, it’s not congenital.”

Reid followed his gaze, lips pressing together. “You’re profiling strangers.”

Dexter’s smile was faint. “So are you. Just with more words.”

They crossed into a smaller piazza, the stone pale and hot beneath their shoes. A couple argued at a café table, their voices muffled by distance but their hands sharp and agitated.

“Rehearsed conflict,” Dexter murmured. “Not their first fight. Won’t be their last.”

Reid’s eyes lingered on him rather than the couple. “You notice details most people ignore.”

“Occupational hazard.”

They walked in silence for a while, slipping through alleys where the shade cooled the air, then back into sunlit streets where children chased each other past shuttered shops. Rome was loud, chaotic, full of rhythms only those who listened could hear.

At one point, Reid caught Dexter watching him. The intensity unsettled him — not malicious, but measuring, weighing, as if Dexter were cataloguing him like any other pattern. Reid shifted his hands behind his back, pretending to study a crumbling façade.

Dexter said nothing. He only let the corner of his mouth tilt upward, then kept walking.

By midday, the city’s heat had grown heavy. They paused near a fountain, where water streamed from a carved lion’s mouth.

Dexter gestured. “You’re supposed to drink from those. Rome makes it easy not to die of thirst.”

Reid leaned down awkwardly, mimicking the locals — catching the arc of water in his mouth. Dexter did the same, effortless, droplets sliding down his jaw. For a moment, Reid looked away too quickly, pretending to wipe his face on his sleeve.

They walked back slowly, the noise of the streets pressing around them. Neither spoke of Hannibal or Will. Neither spoke of blood.

And yet, when they reached the hotel again, the silence between them felt heavier than words.

Harry’s voice was sharp in Dexter’s mind: Don’t get your hopes up. Keep the mask. Protect yourself.

Brian’s laugh followed, rich and mocking: Too late, brother. He’s already under your skin.

Dexter said nothing at all.

There were still no orders. Four days since the Cardinals’ crucifixion, still nothing new from Interpol. DNA labs worked slowly; informants dried up.

Hotch, weary of restless agents circling their hotel rooms, gave the rarest directive: “Take the day. Stay close.”

So they went together — the entire team, all at once — out into the Roman summer, toward the wide fields of Caffarella.

The park stretched endless beneath the sun. Cicadas whined from the trees, sheep grazed in the distance, and the stones of ancient farm walls baked warm enough to burn a hand. Families picnicked under olive trees, dogs darted through tall grass, children shouted near the fountains where cold water poured from carved stone mouths.

Garcia spread a checkered cloth with dramatic flair. “Voilà. Roman feast à la hotel buffet.”

Sandwiches unwrapped, fruit piled high, a bag of cookies dumped in the middle.

Morgan laughed. “You raided the breakfast bar, didn’t you?”

“Liberated it,” Garcia corrected, fanning herself with a napkin.

Rossi pulled the cork from a bottle of red wine, producing paper cups with a flourish. “It’s no Brunello, but it’s drinkable.”

“Not for me,” Reid muttered, launching into a tangent about Roman vineyards and soil acidity. “You know, Caffarella has been farmland since antiquity. Some of the aqueduct systems feeding Rome passed near here, but—”

JJ leaned sideways, laughing, “Spence, breathe. You’re scaring the pigeons.” She shushed him playfully, and Emily reached over to tug JJ’s ponytail with a grin.

“I vote we let him lecture. It’s better than listening to Rossi tell us for the hundredth time how he once drank Barolo with Sophia Loren.”

Rossi grinned. “She was charming, and it wasn’t a hundred times. Ninety-nine, maybe.”

“Sibling energy,” Tara teased, before smacking at Luke’s shoulder. “Hold still. You had something crawling on you.”

Luke flicked at his shirt nervously. “Spider?”

“Just a fly,” Tara deadpanned. Then: “Your mom sent it.”

Luke groaned. “You’re worse than Morgan.”

The team dissolved into laughter, loud enough to draw glances from passing locals.

Rossi raised his cup finally, looking around at them with the soft weight of pride. “Family picnic,” he said warmly. “Not a bad way to fight evil.”

They clinked cups, paper against paper, smiling despite themselves.

Hotch sat slightly apart, his own cup in hand, his gaze sweeping the group like a quiet guardian. Not smiling outright, but content.

For a moment, they weren’t profilers, weren’t chasing monsters through Rome. They were a family — loud, bickering, alive.

The sirens shattered it.

Two police cars jolted down the gravel road, lights flashing blue in the heat. They stopped near a cluster of trees, officers spilling out, waving curious tourists back.

The team rose as one.

“Another body?” Tara’s voice dropped low.

“Looks like it,” Emily answered, already scanning the scene.

They crossed the field, flashing badges. The nearest officer frowned sharply, his voice edged: “FBI? Americani? Perché siete qui?” Americans? Why are you here?

Rossi stepped forward, his Italian smooth. “Collaboriamo con Interpol. Siamo parte di un’ indagine.” We’re collaborating with Interpol. We’re part of an investigation.

The officer hesitated, skeptical, but gestured them through.

The body slumped against the wall of an old sheep pen, half-shadowed, half-baked in the sun. Male, late thirties. His shirt was soaked, his chest and stomach punctured with stab wounds. A bag of groceries lay spilled: apricots rotting in the dirt, a loaf of bread trampled, a bottle of wine cracked open and seeping into the dust.

JJ pressed her fist to her mouth. “God.”

Morgan crouched low, his jaw tight. “This is brutal. Somebody went at him hard.”

Emily leaned closer, studying the entry wounds. “Messy. No symmetry. No staging. This doesn’t fit.”

“Not Lecter,” Rossi said firmly. “Not Graham. Wrong style.”

Hotch’s gaze was ice, focused. “Still, someone killed him. And he’s ours until we’re sure.”

Dexter lingered slightly apart, eyes tracing the knife wounds, the precision behind the rage. The cuts were controlled, deliberate, not wild slashes but purposeful stabs. His chest tightened with recognition, the Dark Passenger whispering approval.

Spencer noticed Dexter watching, silent and intent. He said nothing, but his brow furrowed faintly.

Tara straightened. “Nearest property?”

One of the officers gestured toward a farmhouse visible across the field. “There. Belongs to a family away on holiday. Vacant.”

They crossed the grass, the sun burning high overhead. The farmhouse stood quiet, shutters closed, a lock heavy on the door.

Morgan peered through a dusty window. “Empty. Nobody’s been here in days.”

Rossi frowned, voice low. “Farmhouses don’t stay empty. Someone usually watches the land.”

Hotch nodded once. “Log it. No detail gets ignored. But for now—it’s just another body.”

They stood for a moment, the farmhouse looming still and silent behind them, cicadas shrilling in the heat.

The hotel lounge smelled faintly of old wood and polished leather, the air heavy but cooler than the Roman sun outside. After the long day at Caffarella — picnic, laughter, and then the shock of stumbling across another corpse — no one wanted to retreat to their separate rooms just yet. They gathered instinctively, gravitating toward each other like planets finding their orbit again.

Garcia was the first to flop down into a deep armchair, dramatic as always, her scarf fluttering like a flag. “You know,” she announced, “most people come back from Rome with gelato photos and Vespa rides. I get corpses in the grass. I’m starting to think I angered the vacation gods.”

Morgan, settling beside her with a grin, nudged her knee. “Baby girl, you anger the gods on purpose. It’s half your charm.”

She gave him a theatrical gasp and pressed a hand to her chest. “Rude! And true.”

The group chuckled, the sound low at first but growing, bouncing comfortably around the room.

Rossi arrived with a bottle of wine he’d coaxed from the concierge, mismatched glasses clinking in his hands. He poured without ceremony, distributing them like a benevolent host. “To Rome,” he declared, raising his glass. “And to the fact we haven’t been run out of it yet.”

Emily smirked, clinking against his. “Yet being the operative word.”

Tara took her glass and sniffed. “This isn’t half bad. What strings did you pull?”

“Charm,” Rossi said smoothly. “And maybe a promise to keep Morgan from flirting with the man’s daughter.”

Morgan barked a laugh. “Yeah, right. That girl wasn’t looking at me — she had her eyes on Pretty Boy over there the whole time.”

Reid’s head jerked up from the newspaper in his lap, startled. His ears flushed pink. “What? No, she wasn’t—”

JJ smiled softly, patting his knee. “Don’t argue, Spence. Just take the compliment.”

The group chuckled, Reid burying his face back in the paper, and for a moment even he couldn’t hide the faint, awkward smile tugging at his lips.

On the couch, Reid had folded himself into a corner, knees tucked awkwardly, eyes unfocused on the local newspaper lying limp in his lap. He looked exhausted, though the kind of exhaustion that never really came from the body. JJ slid down beside him, her hip brushing his, and without a word he let his head tip sideways, resting lightly on her shoulder.

She adjusted without hesitation, as if they’d done this a hundred times before. “You holding up?” she asked softly.

Reid hesitated, his voice quieter than the others around them. “It’s strange. The body today. Wrong wounds, wrong staging… but my brain still wants to connect it to them.”

“You’re wired to connect dots,” JJ reminded him gently. “It’s what makes you who you are. But not every knot is yours to untangle.”

He exhaled slowly, eyes shutting for a moment. Her presence grounded him — not pulling him into laughter like Garcia or Tara might, not challenging him like Emily could, but steady, like family.

On the other side of the room, Tara and Luke were deep into a ridiculous contest involving sugar packets stacked into a wobbling tower.

“Don’t breathe,” Luke warned, tongue caught between his teeth in concentration.

“I’ll do worse than breathe,” Tara countered, leaning forward just enough to make the structure tremble.

When it collapsed under his turn, she leaned back with a satisfied grin. “Victory. Your mom would be proud.”

Luke groaned, covering his face. “Your mom jokes? Again?”

“Some things never go out of style,” she said smugly.

Derek clapped his hands, laughing hard enough to shake his shoulders. “Man, I taught you too well.”

Through it all, Dexter sat slightly apart, his glass of wine untouched on the table in front of him. He was quiet, but not entirely withdrawn; he watched the laughter ripple from one corner of the room to the other, how effortlessly they shifted from teasing to comfort, from sarcasm to warmth. It struck him in ways he hadn’t expected.

For years, he had learned to mimic this — small talk, smiles, moments that passed for connection. He had practiced laughter in the mirror once. But here, with this team, it wasn’t mimicry. They weren’t performing at each other; they were family.

He caught Garcia’s gaze at one point, bright and intent. She leaned forward, singling him out with a finger. “And you, quiet one. You look like you’re plotting something.”

Dexter tilted his head slightly, almost smiling. “Always. It’s in the job description, isn’t it?”

The table laughed, and even Hotch’s mouth twitched at the corner.

“See?” Emily said, pointing. “He can be funny.”

Dexter lifted his glass finally, not drinking, just holding it like he was part of the ritual. “I’m learning,” he said simply.

Something softened in the room at that. They didn’t push him, didn’t demand more than he gave. But for the first time, he didn’t feel like he was only on the outside looking in.

The afternoon stretched warm around them, wine glasses emptying, voices lowering. The laughter quieted into murmurs, stories half-told and drifting off. Rossi leaned back with the ease of someone entirely at home, watching them like a father who knew his children were safe for one rare moment.

And Dexter, silent as ever, let himself imagine — just for a second — that maybe he belonged here too.

They left before the sun had fully risen, the sky washed in a bruised gray. The fields of Caffarella lay quiet behind them, mist rolling low over the grass, as though trying to swallow the evidence of what Will had done.

The car door groaned as Will shoved a bag inside, his shirt still stiff with drying blood. He glanced at Hannibal, who was folding a jacket with meticulous care before setting it in the back seat. “Three nights,” Will said flatly. “That’s all we managed. I thought we’d at least get a week before I ruined the lease.”

Hannibal arched a brow, lips curving faintly. “Landlords do so hate stains on their property. Blood never quite comes out of stone.”

Will smirked. “Guess I won’t be getting my security deposit back.”

“Consider it a down payment,” Hannibal replied smoothly, slipping into the driver’s seat. “On our continued freedom.”

Will climbed in beside him, shaking his head. “You’re really not angry?”

“I am flattered,” Hannibal said without hesitation. His voice was velvet, edged with amusement. “Though if every admirer I attract meets such a fate, we may need a new country by next week.”

That earned a sharp huff from Will, the corner of his mouth twitching. “At least this time I didn’t wake up in restraints.”

“Progress,” Hannibal agreed, eyes glittering. “Though I must admit, you wear jealousy well. Scarlet suits you.”

Will gave him a sidelong glance, then let out a low laugh, dark and rough. “You make it sound like a fashion choice.”

Hannibal’s smile deepened. “All the best choices are.”

The car rolled forward, bumping over the dirt road toward the city beyond. The farmhouse shrank in the rearview, swallowed by fog.

For a while, silence stretched between them, broken only by the hum of the engine. Then Will said, almost lightly, “You know, if you keep attracting attention, I’m going to need a bigger knife.”

Hannibal chuckled, low and rich. “I’ll buy you one. Consider it a token of my gratitude.”

Will’s grin spread, sharp and feral. “Not just bigger. One engraved. Something I’d wear at my belt every day. Everyone would see it, and know what it meant.”

Hannibal’s gaze lingered, his imagination quick and indulgent: the blade at Will’s hip, steel as vow, visible to anyone who looked. A promise carried openly, sharpened daily.

Will tipped his head, eyes gleaming. “Our kind of vow.”

“If you like.” Hannibal’s voice lowered, tender and wicked all at once. “Till death do us part.”

They laughed together then — not loudly, but with the quiet, knowing mirth of men who had shed every pretense but this: their love, their violence, their absurdity.

They fled the dawn not with shame, but with a joke between them, dark and intimate, a secret comedy only they could ever share.

Parioli folded itself like an invitation — cool limestone façades, clipped hedges, the hush of a neighborhood practiced in discretion. Their apartment sat behind a high wall, a neat dark rectangle of glass and stone. It was the kind of place that pretended not to notice storms happening elsewhere. For Hannibal and Will, it was intimacy with curtains.

Hannibal moved through the kitchen with the same patient economy he took to his knives: coffee measured, a small slice of bread toasted until the edge caught and browned, figs arranged like punctuation. Will stood by the tall window, watching the street for a long moment as if he could read other people’s intentions off the way the light fell on their shoulders.

“Paper,” Hannibal said, placing the folded sheet on the table. He wore the silver signet on his hand — a simple oval, a stag in relief above a slender H — and watched the world as one watches a delicate insect through a loupe. There was a small, satisfied smile in the shape of his mouth when Will ruffled the pages open.

The column was light in type but heavy in tone. A Roman music-and-ink man, a columnist with a polite cruelty, had decided to name the crucified Cardinals for what, in his opinion, they were: not art but spectacle; not sacrament but “a grotesque carnival of gore.” He accused the killers of mistaking macabre display for meaning, of dressing slaughter in the language of aesthetics and passing it off as profundity. He gave the piece a closing line that would have been remembered in any salon: a sneer packaged as civility.

Will read with the steady chew of someone folding hurt into something else. His jaw worked. For a long minute he said nothing.

Hannibal sipped his coffee. “He is small,” he said, more observation than contempt. “He mistakes the absence of nuance for moral superiority.”

Will’s hands closed on the paper, the knuckles blanching. “He calls it ‘spectacle.’ He calls us… ‘carnival.’” His voice kept its level, but the room felt as though someone had opened a door to a winter wind. “He strips it. He removes the meaning and leaves only the bloody dress.”

Hannibal set the cup down with deliberate care. “Words are interesting things,” he murmured. “They can wound — or they can be rearranged into something that finally makes one stop speaking.” He watched Will watch him. “Is he loud in the paper because he thinks he is brave? Or because he needs an audience to feel larger than he is?”

Will’s breath left him in a short, sharp exhale. “He smirks from the safety of ink,” he said. “He calls us pretenders. He calls our pause a pretense. He offers himself as judge.”

“Then judge him,” Hannibal said simply. The suggestion was neither command nor plan; it was a tasting note, offered and received with the civility of a sommelier passing a glass.

Will looked at him, and for a faultless moment the apartment shrank to the size of their attention. There was a hunger in Will’s face — not the Patient’s small doggedness but a sharp, territorial heat. “I want him to understand,” he said. It was not a request for punishment so much as a wish that the man be rearranged mentally until the column’s smugness would be impossible.

Hannibal’s smile did not altogether meet his eyes. “Understanding,” he said, “can be taught in many languages. The problem with print is that once it is set, it becomes permanent. So the lesson must be permanent, or at least memorable.”

Will’s first reaction was to imagine the simplest brutal arithmetic — to react, to teach. He pictured, for a breath, the rudeness burned from the man’s mouth. But Hannibal shaded that impulse with a softer cruelty. “We are not merely performers. We are curators,” he said. “One does not scold a child for tearing up a canvas when one might rather show him what the canvas becomes.”

Will listened. His fingers flattened the paper; the column left a faint grease where the ink had pressed. He thought of the knife at his hip, the metal that had been joked about and half promised the morning they fled Caffarella — the idea of the blade now had a different weight. Not simply a tool, but as Hannibal had murmured the night before, a symbol worn openly: a vow.

They drank more coffee. Outside, a dog barked twice, then fell quiet.

Hannibal folded the paper, smoothing it flat. “He is a man who draws his confidence from his audience,” he said. “If we remove the audience, the performer collapses. We need not crush him beneath spectacle; we need only make the spectacle of him impossible. Make him look, and not be able to look away.”

Will’s mouth moved; his laugh was small and edged. The laugh that followed had less the note of joy than of agreement, as if two musicians had decided on a rhythm to play against. “We will teach him to shut up,” he said. “We will make him listen.”

Hannibal nodded, and when he did it was with the calm of a man picturing a meal to be cooked precisely. He tilted his head, thinking of plates and stages and the way light falls on flesh when one wants the viewer to see everything without giving everything away. “We shall make it taste like a lesson,” he said. “A course. Perhaps we will send him the bill in a form he can read at leisure.”

Will studied him. “You always make it sound so pretty.”

“Because beauty disarms,” Hannibal answered. “And only when one is disarmed can one supply the correction of taste.”

There was a moment of silence between them, a private weighing of language. They were not conspirators in a hurry; they were collectors at a calm auction, choosing the next work with care.

Will folded the paper and tucked it into his pocket, not to preserve the insult but to carry the source of it near his pulse. “He calls us pretenders,” he said again, softer now. “He belittles what we are trying to be.”

“You are not the only one to be misread,” Hannibal said. “Reading is a dangerous art. It is performed by those who are both lazy and proud.” He set his signet hand on the table, the silver catching the light. The stag’s antlers gleamed like a tiny crown. “We will give him an experience he cannot reduce to a paragraph.”

When Will looked at him, there was no longer only the heat of possessiveness; there was the coolness of a plan that might be elegant, the shared delight of taste recognized and affirmed. They moved through the rest of the morning arranging small things: clothes folded into travel bags, calls made in voices that did not betray, a map folded and refolded in which the letters and lines meant only what they chose to let them mean.

They had no need to speak names aloud. The journalist would continue to print his pride. That pride would draw him out — not as bait, but as natural consequence. Hannibal liked natural consequence. Will liked the idea that consequences fit the crime, that insult could be answered with a grammar of its own rather than with mere retribution.

Before they left the apartment, Hannibal paused by the window and watched a woman watering her geraniums across the lane. Children ran, a scooter complained, life kept its ordinary pace. It soothed him, this banal rhythm; he loved the contrast between it and what they did.

“Do you ever think about being obvious?” Will asked suddenly, and the question held no scorn. It was curiosity, half-hope. “Carrying it where anyone could see — letting the world know exactly what you are?”

Hannibal’s fingers closed slowly around the signet. “It would make as much of it as it was willing to see,” he said. “We can make our vows private, or we can make them a parade. I prefer the private oath, but the public spectacle is useful on occasion.”

Will grinned, a small, savage light in the corners of his mouth. “Private is nice. Private makes it ours. But the occasional parade does help the lesson.”

The hotel still carried the hush of morning. Pale light filtered through half-drawn curtains, catching on the glass bottles Rossi had set out like trophies the night before. The team’s bags sat open, clothes folded with military neatness in some rooms, in others tumbled into heaps that betrayed exhaustion.

Garcia padded barefoot down the hall, a bright silk robe thrown over her shoulders, muttering about bad Wi-Fi and worse pillows. Derek followed with two coffees in hand, one pressed into hers before she could complain further. Tara was already at the table in the lounge, reading over Italian newsprint she couldn’t quite parse, her lips moving silently on unfamiliar words.

“Good morning to you too,” Rossi grumbled, stepping out of his room with his hair still damp from the shower. “Any chance someone made real coffee, not the machine’s idea of coffee?”

Luke tossed him a small packet. “Instant. You want real, wait for Rome to open its cafés.”

The mood was softer here, domestic in a way few cases allowed. JJ sat with Emily by the window, heads bent together over her phone. Emily was laughing quietly at something JJ said, while JJ, for once, looked like a weight had been lifted — at least for the moment.

Dexter sat slightly apart, his posture relaxed but his eyes never still, moving between teammates like he was still learning the grammar of their family. An open book rested in his hands — something Reid had lent him the night before with a quiet, almost awkward insistence that “you might like this one.” He had read most of it already, the pages turned with the same careful precision he brought to everything. He listened more than he spoke, absorbing, filing away. There was an ease about the others that he envied, a comfort of years built on shared griefs and victories.

The peace was broken by the shrill of the hotel phone. Hotch was nearest; he crossed the lounge and lifted the receiver. His face was impassive, but his tone sharpened. “Hotchner. Yes.” A pause. “Carabinieri?” Another pause, longer. “Name?”

The others looked up as his eyes narrowed. He scribbled something on the pad by the phone: Alessandro Rinaldi — journalist.

Hotch’s voice dropped. “Yes, we know of him. What makes you think…?” Another pause, silence gathering in the room. His jaw set. “We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

He hung up.

“What is it?” Rossi asked, already half-rising.

“Alessandro Rinaldi,” Hotch said. “Columnist. He was found dead this morning.” His tone was clipped, but the faintest edge of something darker cut through. “The Carabinieri believe it may be Lecter and Graham. They say something was left at the scene.”

Garcia’s hand flew to her mouth. “Something?”

“They didn’t specify,” Hotch said. “Only that it was… deliberate. A message.”

Silence settled. For a moment no one moved. Then the team shifted almost in unison, the habits of years pressing them into motion. Files were gathered, jackets pulled on, shoes laced.

Reid shoved his notebook into his bag, his mind already reaching ahead, imagining but not yet allowing himself to articulate. JJ placed a hand on his shoulder briefly, grounding him. Dexter stood last, closing the book with quiet finality and setting it neatly on the table, his eyes flicking once toward Hotch, measuring the weight of what was unsaid.

The ride through Rome was quiet, the city awake and bright in contrast to their mood. Scooters weaved through traffic, tourists laughed too loudly on sidewalks, a vendor called out the day’s fruit. Normalcy, loud and sunlit, pressed against the tinted glass of their car as they drove toward the place where the morning’s peace had been broken.

When they arrived, Piazza Mincio was cordoned, the Carabinieri’s red and blue lights painting the walls. Uniformed officers moved like shadows, holding the crowd back. Cameras flashed — local reporters sniffing the irony that one of their own had become the story.

An officer met them at the line, saluting Rossi first, as though the oldest carried the most authority. “You are the FBI?” he asked in accented English.

Hotch answered. “We are.”

The officer’s expression tightened. “Then you come. It is… important you see for yourselves.”

And with that, the team followed him across the square, toward the sealed street where the journalist’s final column had been written not in ink, but in blood.

Piazza Mincio spread out before them, the strange architecture of Quartiere Coppedè looming like something out of a fever dream. Arches patterned with grotesques, balconies heavy with ornament, mosaics glinting in fractured light. At its center, the Fountain of the Frogs — usually a playful curiosity — churned black.

The water had been dyed, ink spilling over stone until the frogs looked as though they leapt from shadow. Children sometimes climbed its lip to splash in summer; now the square was cordoned off with Carabinieri tape, uniformed officers posted grimly at every corner. A crowd pressed against the barrier, murmuring, crossing themselves.

The team stepped out together, the heat already building, the air heavy with the scent of iron and paper.

Garcia, trailing at the back, whispered, “Oh my God…” before Derek shifted closer, shielding her view.

The others had already seen.

Alessandro Rinaldi sat propped against the central basin, his body draped like a grotesque statue. His veins were dark, running like rivers beneath the skin — not the red of blood but the oily sheen of ink. It webbed through him, stark against pallor, as though someone had emptied him of life and refilled him with words.

His mouth bulged with rolled papers — his own columns, soaked through, letters bleeding black down his chin. Ink-stained fingertips clutched a pen jammed between stiff fingers, posed as though he were still writing, still passing judgment.

Emily’s throat worked once before she spoke. “They turned him into his own profession.”

JJ’s arms folded tight across her chest, as though holding herself in. “Not just that. They made him empty. Bloodless. All he is now is ink.”

Rossi’s eyes narrowed as he studied the fountain itself. “A parody of life. The fountain should be water, vitality. They’ve made it false. Just like they thought his words were false.”

Reid stepped closer, his gaze flitting over every detail, brain moving faster than his voice. “It’s a critique. A grotesque commentary. He wrote about morality. Lecter and Graham didn’t think he was qualified. So they made him what he worshipped — ink, not life.”

Luke muttered a curse under his breath. “Jesus Christ.”

Hotch stood at the edge of the fountain, arms crossed, silent for a long moment. His voice, when it came, was steel. “This was deliberate. They wanted us here. Wanted us to see exactly what happens to anyone who presumes to define their morality.”

Tara nodded slowly. “It’s escalation. Each kill is more theatrical, more symbolic. They’re not hiding anymore. They’re putting on a show.”

Dexter’s eyes lingered on the black veins, the precision of the staging. He spoke evenly, but something tightened behind his calm. “They drained him clean. Every vessel, every artery. And then they filled him again. Whoever did this knew anatomy. They weren’t experimenting — they were composing.”

Morgan swore low, shaking his head. “This isn’t just murder. It’s mockery.”

The team stood in silence, the murmur of the crowd just beyond the cordon, the fountain’s trickle now thickened with ink.

For a long moment, it felt less like a crime scene and more like stepping into a cathedral desecrated — every detail a sermon, every stroke of cruelty a doctrine.

And at its center, Alessandro Rinaldi sat as the lesson.

The Carabinieri insisted the body be moved quickly, away from the piazza, away from the crowd pressing closer with every minute. By mid-morning, Rinaldi lay on a stainless steel table in a converted morgue, the shutters drawn, the air cool and sterile. The ink still seeped faintly from his veins, staining the sheets beneath him in blotches that looked more like spilled words than blood.

The team stood in a semicircle, some closer than others. Garcia lingered near the door, pale, her fingers tight around Derek’s hand. Emily and JJ leaned together, their eyes sharp but shadowed. Reid had his notebook open, though the pen in his hand hovered uselessly above the page.

Dexter stepped forward. He’d pulled on gloves with the same unthinking rhythm that he once reserved for his own rituals, and now he moved with an unsettling ease — professional, yes, but also personal. He bent low, eyes narrowing, the room narrowing with him.

“The exsanguination was complete,” he said, his voice level. “Jugular, femoral — both opened cleanly. Not a spill. They drained him systematically.” He lifted one of Rinaldi’s arms, tilting it under the light. The veins stood out, thick with residue. “Then they reintroduced the ink. Probably through the same vessels. That’s why it fills the system so evenly. It’s not surface paint. It’s inside him.”

Rossi grimaced. “So they made him into a pen.”

Dexter glanced up, meeting Rossi’s eyes briefly, then returned to his work. “No. A pen bleeds truth. This is a parody. They wanted to show us that his words were hollow. Empty of blood, of life.” His fingers lingered a fraction too long on the torn paper at Rinaldi’s lips, before he eased it out with clinical precision. “They even chose his own columns. Forced him to consume his voice.”

Tara exhaled slowly. “So it’s not just about killing him. It’s about erasing him. Making sure he can’t speak again.”

Dexter nodded once, carefully folding the sodden paper and setting it aside. His tone remained calm, almost detached, but his eyes glittered faintly, betraying something deeper. “Every cut was deliberate. No jagged edges, no wasted motion. Whoever did this wasn’t experimenting. They knew exactly how to make a body into a message.”

Morgan swore under his breath, the words harsher in the sterile silence. “Sick bastards.”

Hotch’s voice was quiet, but iron. “They’re escalating. Every kill is theater. And the audience…” His eyes swept the team. “…is us.”

Dexter peeled off his gloves, methodical, his expression unreadable. He didn’t speak again, but his gaze lingered on the blackened veins, the perfection of it. To the others, it looked like clinical focus. To him, it was something else — recognition, and an itch beneath the skin.

They stripped off their gloves and gowns, one by one, before following the Carabinieri into the adjoining room — a plain chamber with whitewashed walls and a long table that smelled faintly of disinfectant. Coffee sat cooling in paper cups. It felt less like a strategy session and more like a wake.

Hotch set his file on the table and remained standing, his posture a wall. “We don’t need to discuss whether this was Lecter and Graham. Every detail of the staging confirms it. The question is why Rinaldi, and why this way.”

JJ leaned forward, elbows on the table, her tone tight. “He mocked them. His columns dismissed what happened in New Orleans, dismissed the Cardinals. He called it self-indulgent artifice, not real violence.”

“Lecter doesn’t take insults lightly,” Rossi said. He rubbed his temples, weary but sharp. “They punished him by making him into his own insult. Hollow words, hollow man.”

Tara nodded. “It’s layered. The ink in his veins, the fountain turned black — it’s a declaration. He wasn’t qualified to judge them, so they turned him into the very thing he worshipped. His pen.”

Emily folded her arms. “Then it’s more than punishment. It’s a warning. They’re telling us not to dismiss them. Not to reduce them to commentary.”

Reid had been quiet, eyes distant, fingers twitching over his notebook. Finally, he spoke, voice soft but precise. “It’s also about permanence. Ink stains. You can’t wash it out. They’ve stained him. Made him an eternal reminder of their morality. Or their rejection of his.”

Garcia shuddered. “That’s… twisted poetry.”

Hotch’s gaze swept the table, his expression unreadable. “Every kill escalates. Every tableau is sharper than the last. Which means the next one will be even more pointed. We need to anticipate, not follow.”

Morgan leaned back, hands pressed to his jaw. “How do you anticipate crazy?”

Dexter spoke quietly, almost to himself. “Not by calling it crazy. By accepting it as design.” His eyes flicked to the others, steady. “They’re not improvising. They’re composing. And composers follow structure. Patterns. Themes. If we find the theme, we’ll know where they’ll strike next.”

Silence followed, heavy but electric.

Rossi exhaled through his nose, finally breaking it. “Then we better learn to read their music before they finish the next movement.”

The others filtered out, their voices fading down the corridor. Files shuffled, chairs scraped, the Carabinieri murmured low. Dexter lingered a moment in the debrief room, then turned without a word and retraced his steps into the morgue. No one stopped him. He was, after all, the blood man.

The door shut behind him with a pneumatic sigh.

Rinaldi lay as he had before, ink pooling faintly beneath his body. The fluorescent lights carved the veins in sharp relief, a map of black rivers running through pale skin. Dexter pulled on fresh gloves, slow, deliberate, then leaned in.

“The exsanguination was total,” he murmured, his voice for no one but himself. His scalpel traced the line of the jugular incision without cutting. “They knew how to drain every ounce without collapse. Precision pressure, controlled flow.” His breath caught faintly, a shiver of recognition. “Clean. Elegant.”

He slid the scalpel lower, pausing at the femoral artery. “Here, too. Symmetry. Not sloppy. Like an artist who doesn’t waste brushstrokes.” He bent closer, studying the ink-dilated vessels. “But where’s the real blood? They didn’t just pour it into the fountain. That ink is too thick, too complete. The volume doesn’t match.”

The morgue seemed to shift around him. He felt the familiar prickle at the back of his neck, the whisper in the silence.

“Jesus Christ, Dex.” The voice was sharp, angry, too familiar. Debra. She stood at the far end of the table, arms crossed, her glare acid enough to burn. “You sick fuck. You love this, don’t you? Look at you. All giddy ‘cause somebody else painted with blood before you got the chance.”

Dexter’s jaw flexed, but he didn’t look away from the body. “I’m analyzing. That’s all.”

“Bullshit,” Debra snapped. “You’re savoring it. The neat cuts, the drained veins, the black fountain out there. Admit it — this isn’t repulsive to you. It’s inspiring.”

He turned slightly, the scalpel still glinting in his hand. “They’re sloppy in ways you can’t see. They make it grand, but it’s too exposed. Too loud. I’d never be so careless.”

Another voice joined then, cooler, paternal, heavy with disapproval. Harry stepped into the light, hands folded behind his back. “Careless or not, they’re predators like you. That’s what draws you. You’re not just studying them. You’re coveting them.”

Dexter’s eyes narrowed. “I want them on my table.”

Harry’s voice was firm, a mantra. “Protect yourself. Don’t get attached. The Dark Passenger doesn’t care about company. It only cares about survival.”

But Debra laughed harshly, bitter. “Survival, my ass. Look at you. You want their artistry. You want their intimacy. You’ve never had that. Not with Brian, not with Miguel, not with anybody. And now you see it in them. And it kills you.”

Dexter closed his eyes for a moment, breathing in the sterile air, the faint metallic tang beneath the ink. “They don’t kill for the same reason I do. I have rules. Structure. Purpose.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Debra hissed. “But when you peel all that shit back, it’s the same thing. You want the kill. You want the blood. And you want someone to share it with.”

Harry’s voice cut back in, sharp, almost desperate. “Don’t confuse yourself. They’re not partners. They’re a fire. You get too close, and they’ll consume you. Don’t let fascination become weakness.”

Dexter opened his eyes again, staring down at Rinaldi’s hollowed body, the ink glistening like a mockery of blood. For the briefest moment, he imagined Lecter’s throat beneath his blade, Graham’s pulse stilled by his hand — the neat plastic, the perfect tableau. A true composition.

His fingers tightened around the scalpel.

“I’ll find them,” he whispered. “And when I do, they’ll be mine. My design. My table.”

Debra shook her head, disgusted. “Yeah, keep telling yourself you’re in control. But I see it. You’re already halfway theirs.”

Harry said nothing, only watching, his silence heavier than words.

The morgue light buzzed overhead, steady, sterile, while Dexter stood rooted between ghosts and corpse, hunger gnawing deep.

The door creaked open. Reid stepped inside. He paused, just for a moment, watching. It looked almost like Dexter was holding a conversation with thin air. Reid’s mind flickered toward recognition — he had seen it before, in family, in patients, in mirrors. But he let it go, filed it away with the same care he brought to any fragile fact.

Dexter looked up then, his face smooth, unbothered. He reached for a file on the counter, his gloved hands neat, deliberate. “The exsanguination was total,” he said, as if he had been speaking to Reid all along. “But the numbers don’t match. What they drained doesn’t all end here.”

Reid stepped closer, pulling his jacket tighter against the cold. “Not in the body. Not in the fountain outside.” His eyes followed the dark threads through Rinaldi’s skin. “So where?”

“They collected it,” Dexter said. His voice was flat, but something moved in the undertone. “Not by accident. Transported. Preserved.”

Reid considered. “Collected for what purpose? Storage? Disposal?” He shook his head almost immediately. “No. Not disposal. Not with them. They keep what they use.”

Dexter’s eyes narrowed, his focus absolute. “Which leaves ritual. Transformation.”

Reid’s gaze lingered on the corpse’s ink-filled veins. “Consumption, maybe. Drinking it.” He said it carefully, not as revelation but as hypothesis.

Dexter tilted his head, letting the words settle. “Drinking it,” he repeated softly, as though testing the sound of it. “It fits. It would make the act complete. Their communion extending beyond the tableau.”

The silence pressed in, thick. Reid wrote a single word in his notebook, almost without looking: Communion.

He shut the book again. “It’s a hypothesis. Nothing more yet. But it explains the missing volume.”

Dexter peeled off his gloves, the snap sharp in the sterile room. “And if it’s true, it tells us something about escalation. They aren’t just staging bodies. They’re altering themselves. Integrating their crimes.”

Reid’s eyes flicked to him, searching, thoughtful. “If that’s the case, then the next step isn’t just a murder. It’s a ritual. And it won’t be subtle.”

They stood there, two men in the hum of fluorescent light, the body between them blackened with ink, the air heavy with implication.

Finally, Reid broke the silence, voice low. “We should tell Hotch.”

Dexter nodded once, precise. “Yes. But carefully. It’s still theory.”

They moved to the door together, leaving the morgue behind. The black veins of Alessandro Rinaldi remained, silent testimony, while outside Rome burned in sunlight, oblivious.

Hotch’s office at the temporary field headquarters was stripped down to essentials: a desk, three chairs, a lamp, files stacked like fortifications. Rome hummed outside, oblivious. Inside, silence pressed heavy.

Dexter and Spencer entered together. Spencer clutched his notebook, its corners frayed; Dexter’s hands were empty.

Hotch didn’t look up immediately. He finished writing something in the margin of a file before placing the pen in perfect alignment with the paper’s edge. Only then did he lift his gaze. “You said you had something.”

Dexter began, voice measured. “Rinaldi’s body was more about what wasn’t there than what was. The ink in his veins was spectacle. But the blood itself? It wasn’t destroyed. It was taken.”

Spencer’s words followed, faster, sharper. “Not spilled, not wasted. Preserved. Which means they intended to use it.”

Hotch’s expression stayed unreadable, but he leaned back slightly, listening.

Dexter’s hands clasped together. “You don’t drain a man that carefully unless you mean to keep what you take. That’s not medicine. That’s intention.”

Spencer flipped open his notebook, pen tapping against the page. “They’ve moved beyond parody of sacrifice. This is transformation. They’ll ingest it. Drinking blood would close the circuit — not just killing, not just displaying, but incorporating. They become the act.”

The words hung in the air, sharp and cold.

Hotch finally spoke. “So you’re saying the next step is ingestion.”

Dexter nodded once. “They already consume flesh. This is the next logical escalation. Blood is continuity.”

Spencer added, quieter, “It’s only a hypothesis. But it explains the missing volume. It fits their pattern. They’re building communion.”

Hotch studied them both. His gaze lingered on Dexter’s precision, on Spencer’s restless intensity. “Most killers build distance between themselves and their crimes. These two erase it.” His voice dropped, weighted with understanding. “And you see that because you know what erasure feels like.”

Dexter stilled, a flicker in his eyes — caught between acknowledgment and deflection. Spencer shifted in his chair, lips pressed thin, as though Hotch had read him out loud.

Neither argued. Neither needed to.

Hotch went on, calm, low, almost clinical. “This isn’t just staging anymore. It’s absorption. They’ll find a way to do it in secret, but it will leave residue. You two focus on identifying where they could make the ritual sustainable. If they’ve started drinking blood, it won’t be a one-time act. It will become a need.”

Spencer scribbled a single word in his notebook: Need.

Dexter’s gaze didn’t leave Hotch. “And if it’s a need, then eventually they’ll slip.”

Hotch inclined his head. “Eventually. And that’s when we take them.”

The meeting ended with no further words.

Dexter rose with that same surgical ease. Spencer shut his notebook with a soft snap. Together they stepped into the hall, leaving Hotch alone with his files.

For a long time he didn’t move. The lamplight caught the edge of his profile, hard and shadowed. He had seen offenders who consumed, offenders who transformed. What set Lecter and Graham apart wasn’t their appetite — it was their unity.

And unity, he knew, was harder to break than hunger.

The apartment in Parioli was shuttered against the Roman sun, curtains drawn to let the room hold its shadow. The air was thick, perfumed with iron and salt.

A porcelain tub had been carried in — not meant for this, not meant for the obscene weight it now held. The blood of Alessandro Rinaldi filled it almost to the brim, black-red, viscous. It smelled of copper and ink, sweet rot and something darker.

Will stood by the rim, shirtless, watching it catch the dim light like liquid garnet. His breath was steady, but his hands flexed as though they wanted to seize and break.

Hannibal approached, calm, bare-chested, his ringless hand trailing across Will’s shoulder. “Do you know the tale of Erzsébet Báthory?” His voice carried the soft cadence of a lecturer, a man who had taught hundreds, seduced with stories.

Will’s eyes flicked to him, guarded, curious.

“She was a Hungarian countess,” Hannibal continued, “sixteenth century. It is said she bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her beauty. Four hundred girls, perhaps more. Their blood became her mirror, her cosmetic.” He paused, his gaze lowering to the tub. “History records her as a monster, though I’ve always thought her guilty only of vanity… and of being caught.”

Will’s lips curved, sharp as a knife. “You admire her?”

“I recognize her.” Hannibal dipped his fingers into the bath, the red clinging, sliding down his skin like lacquer. “She understood what others feared to admit: that blood is more than life. It is permanence. To be consumed, absorbed, worn.”

Will leaned closer, his breath warm against Hannibal’s ear. “We’re not bathing for vanity.”

“No,” Hannibal agreed, turning toward him, their faces close enough to share breath. “We’re bathing to become.”

Together, they stepped into the tub. The blood lapped against their skin, thick, clinging. It coated them, streaked their torsos, painted their throats. Hannibal closed his eyes as it touched him, savoring the immersion. Will watched him, something feral flickering in his gaze.

The heat of it seeped into them both — not warmth, but the illusion of life. The smell was overwhelming, almost choking, and yet it steadied them.

Hannibal opened his eyes, crimson droplets running down his chest like jewels. He regarded Will through the haze of iron and memory. “Do you feel it?”

Will’s mouth curved into something between a smile and a snarl. “I feel you.”

They leaned into one another, foreheads touching, the blood rising around them like a consecration.

It clung to their skin like a second flesh, sliding thickly down ribs and arms, pooling in the hollows of collarbones. Hannibal’s hand rose slowly, deliberately, until it cupped Will’s face. His thumb traced the line of a cheekbone, smearing a crimson streak across pale skin. Will didn’t flinch. He leaned into the touch, his breath catching in his throat.

Carefully, Will removed his glasses, setting them on the marble sink behind them. Without them, his eyes seemed more naked, stripped of their guard. He closed them for a moment, as if surrendering sight made the other senses sharper — the metallic sting of iron, the press of Hannibal’s palm, the sound of blood dripping down porcelain.

“Bathory,” Hannibal continued softly, his voice resonant in the small room, “was accused of horrors so great they bordered on myth. She lured girls with promises of service, then drained them. Torture, they said. Needles, knives. But what terrified her judges most wasn’t the cruelty. It was the implication that she sought to inherit youth, vitality, strength. To wear the lives of others on her skin.”

His hand slid to Will’s jaw, holding him gently, firmly. “The world calls it monstrosity when it is done openly. When kings do the same in wars, it is called conquest.”

Will opened his eyes again, the feral gleam returning. “And when we do it?”

Hannibal’s mouth curved, almost tender. “Art. Always art.”

Will’s hands rose, gripping Hannibal’s shoulders, pulling him close until the blood between them pressed warm, sticky, binding. Their bodies touched, skin against skin, not with hunger but with certainty — the certainty of belonging, of choosing.

The story of Bathory hung in the air, thick as the scent of iron. Hannibal let it linger, savoring it, before adding, almost reverently: “They bricked her into a chamber when they caught her. No trial, no defense. Just walls closing in. Yet her legend escaped. They could not contain her name. Blood is difficult to silence.”

Will’s lips parted in a grim smile.

They stayed like that, foreheads pressed, blood seeping into every crevice, holding each other in the silence, bound not by lust but by ritual, by history, by something darker and more permanent than either could name.

The water ran cool from the tap, chasing away the heavy smell of iron down the drain. Hannibal guided Will out of the tub with a hand at his elbow, leaving bloody footprints across the tiles. Ritual faded into routine.

He filled a basin and motioned to the stool by the sink. “Sit,” he said simply.

Will lowered himself onto it, bare and dripping, his glasses still abandoned on the counter. Hannibal poured water through his curls, red streaks running down his neck in rivulets. He worked his fingers through the tangles, slow, methodical, as if washing away more than blood.

“You’ve stopped wearing that atrocious aftershave,” Hannibal said at last, tone casual, almost conversational.

Will cracked an eye open, smirking. “You waited until now to bring that up?”

“It was intolerable,” Hannibal replied gravely. “Synthetic musk, vulgar sandalwood. An assault on my senses every time you entered a room.”

Will barked a laugh, tilting his head back so Hannibal could rinse the soap out. “Fuck you.”

Hannibal’s mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but close. “You’ve improved immeasurably since.”

Will snorted. “Guess murder cured me of bad cologne. Add that to the list of benefits.”

Hannibal wrung out the curls gently, then wrapped a towel around Will’s shoulders, drying him with the same meticulous care he applied to polishing silver. Will rolled his eyes but didn’t pull away.

By the time Hannibal was done, the bathroom smelled of soap and cotton instead of iron. The horror of the bath had dissolved into something absurdly domestic: one man fussing over the other’s hair while insults and laughter passed between them.

Will reached for his glasses, slipping them back on. “Better?”

“Infinitely,” Hannibal said, smoothing the towel once more before stepping back.

Will gave him a crooked grin. “Still smells like soap. But better than whatever the hell you just called it — vulgar sandalwood.”

Hannibal inclined his head in mock seriousness. “Progress, then.”

The exchange ended with silence, comfortable and steady, the kind that felt stranger — and truer — than words.

The team had scattered after the morgue. Garcia had retreated behind her fortress of laptops, fingers flying as though she could bend the city’s data to her will. Hotch and Rossi were locked in talks with the Carabinieri, voices low but urgent. JJ and Emily were combing through statements, Tara and Luke comparing notes. For once, Dexter and Spencer weren’t needed — at least not for now.

The Roman light had begun to turn amber, gilding the facades of Parioli. Cicadas droned against the heat, and the cobbled streets shimmered faintly under the last weight of the sun.

Dexter and Spencer left the hotel side by side, silent at first. The air carried jasmine from the gardens and diesel from passing Vespas. It was quieter here than in the piazzas, an elegance of moneyed silence.

“Thank you for the book,” Dexter said finally, slipping a hand into his pocket where Euripides’ The Bacchae rested, its paperback cover already bent. “Not my usual reading.”

Spencer’s eyes brightened. “Most people avoid it. Too strange, too violent. But it seemed… fitting.”

Dexter glanced at him. “Fitting how?”

Spencer walked with his long, restless stride, his gaze mostly on the pavement. “It’s about restraint. Pentheus tries to deny what can’t be denied. He thinks he’s in control, but the god he refuses—” Spencer’s voice thinned on the word—“consumes him.”

Dexter let silence linger. The god inside. The one I feed.

“Sounds familiar,” he said.

Spencer tilted his head, catching the dryness but not the depth. “It’s also about disguise. Dionysus passes among mortals unnoticed. Until it’s too late.”

Dexter’s lips curved faintly, more self-aware than amused. “You really do know how to pick a vacation read.”

They passed under a canopy of pines, the shade lacing the ground like veins.

“You don’t have to say,” Spencer continued softly, “but you’ve carried something since Miami. Since your lobed ones’ deaths. People wear grief differently. But yours feels—sharper. Like it’s waiting to cut.”

Dexter’s chest tightened. Harry flickered at his side, shaking his head. Don’t let him in. Keep the mask on.

Before Dexter could answer, another figure slid into view just behind Reid’s shoulder, grinning wide.

Brian. His brother. His shadow.

He sees it, Dex. He’s not saying it, but he sees it. Don’t you feel how close he is?

Dexter ignored him, saying instead, “Grief has edges. That’s all.”

Spencer nodded, though his eyes lingered a beat longer than comfort allowed.

They crossed into a busier street, neon signs starting to blink alive. A vendor sold roasted chestnuts even in the heat; their scent mingled with gasoline.

“You know,” Spencer said, “most people think The Bacchae is about the danger of excess. I think it’s about what happens when you deny yourself too long. When you refuse to acknowledge the thing that’s already inside you.”

Brian leaned against a lamppost now, smirking at Dexter, then looking at Spencer. He’s a damn good profiler, this boy. He’s talking about you. About us. About what you’ll never admit to him.

Dexter paused for half a beat, the words like a blade sliding clean. He looked at Reid — at his earnest face, his unknowing precision.

“You might be right,” Dexter said softly. “And sometimes what’s inside doesn’t go quietly.”

Spencer glanced at him curiously, as though weighing whether to ask more, but then let it drop.

They resumed walking. The streets narrowed, buildings leaning closer, laundry strung between balconies. Children’s laughter echoed from an unseen courtyard.

Brian fell in step beside Dexter, invisible to Reid. You know you want him. Not like that, not yet. But as your mirror. Your Will. The one you’ll never get, because you’re you, and he’s too smart to step into the dark. Unless…

“Dexter?” Spencer’s voice broke through, unaware. “You looked like you were miles away.”

“Just thinking,” Dexter replied quickly.

They turned a corner into a piazza where a fountain burbled, pigeons scattering at their approach.

A few old men played cards at a café, but otherwise the square was still. Dexter and Spencer settled onto a worn bench, the wood hot beneath them from the day’s sun.

Spencer leaned forward, elbows on his knees, thoughtful. “Rome is a city built on layers. Each century piling over the last. Sometimes I think people are like that, too. We bury things, but they’re still there, just under the surface.”

Dexter smirked faintly. “Sounds like an excavation project I wouldn’t want to start.”

“Sometimes,” Spencer said softly, “you don’t get to choose.”

Dexter’s reply stalled on his tongue. Because across the piazza, lounging against the fountain’s edge, Brian was watching them with a smile too wide, too knowing. He rose, casual as a shadow, and began walking toward them.

Look at him, Dex. So earnest. So breakable. Don’t you wonder what it would take to pull him under?

Brian’s hand, in Dexter’s vision, brushed over Spencer’s shoulder as he sat beside them on the bench. Dexter flinched, his muscles tightening, eyes darting toward a presence that only he could see.

Spencer turned his head. “Dexter?” His voice was careful, curious.

Brian leaned closer to him, close enough that Dexter swore he’d feel the warmth. He’d fit, you know. Smarter than most. Fragile where it counts. All it would take is one cut, one night, one truth you can’t take back.

Dexter’s fists curled against his thighs. “Not now,” he muttered under his breath, almost inaudible.

Spencer tilted his head, studying him. For a brief moment, he thought of his mother — of the times he’d seen her stare into nothing, speaking to shapes no one else could see. Recognition pricked, unspoken. He didn’t press. Not yet.

Instead, Spencer said gently, “You seemed… somewhere else. I didn’t mean to push you.”

Dexter forced a breath, the phantom weight of Brian’s hand lifting as suddenly as it had appeared. “Just… tired,” he said.

But Spencer’s eyes lingered on him, full of quiet thought. He knew more than he was saying.

The fountain gurgled. The city hummed around them. And Dexter felt, for the first time in years, that his ghosts weren’t content to stay behind him — they were circling closer, threatening to touch the living.

They parted ways at the hotel. Dexter vanished into his room without a word, and Spencer lingered in the corridor, the image of his vacant stare replaying in his mind. He’d seen that look before — in his mother, in patients at Bennington — eyes fixed on a presence no one else could touch.

He filed it away, quietly, like a note scribbled in the margin of a case file. Dexter sees things. Or thinks he does. Maybe fatigue. Maybe more.

Later, in the low-lit lounge, he found JJ. She was curled into an armchair with tea, her exhaustion softened only by the warmth in her eyes when she looked up.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

Spencer shook his head, lowering himself into the chair across from her. “Not exactly.” He hesitated, then added, “I think… Dexter’s not sleeping much. He says he walks the city at night. Hours, every night. It might explain… things.”

JJ tilted her head. “Things?”

Spencer chose his words carefully. “He seems… distracted. Like he’s seeing something the rest of us can’t. I don’t think it’s deliberate. I think it’s exhaustion, maybe hallucinations. Sleep deprivation can cause that.”

JJ considered this, stirring her tea slowly. “That’s not great. But he’s smart. He’s capable. He’s a grown man — if he needs help, he can ask for it. He’s got a lot of strengths.” She paused, then added evenly, as though it belonged to the same list, “He’s also attractive.”

The word slid in so naturally that for a moment Spencer wasn’t sure he’d heard it. He shifted in his seat, ducking his gaze.

JJ only sipped her tea, as if she hadn’t said anything unusual at all. “Point is,” she went on, “don’t carry all that worry yourself. We’ll watch out for him as a team.”

Spencer nodded, his mind still snagged on the quiet afterthought.

JJ’s words lingered long after they’d parted. Spencer returned to his room quietly, the corridor hushed except for the low hum of air conditioning.

“Attractive.” She’d said it so casually, as if it belonged in the same category as capable or intelligent. Spencer replayed it, uncomfortable with how the word snagged in his chest.

Inside, Dexter was already there. He had set his book aside — the one Spencer had lent him — and was stretched back on his bed, legs crossed at the ankle, eyes closed but not quite asleep. The lamplight threw shadows across the sharp lines of his shoulders, the steady rise and fall of his chest.

Spencer slipped into his own bed quietly, but restlessness kept him perched on the edge of the mattress. He glanced across the room once, then again, as if he couldn’t help himself. Dexter’s frame was cut from the same mold as Derek’s: broad, solid, unshakable.

Spencer had always recognized Derek’s physicality, admired it even, in the way one admires strength that feels unreachable. Derek was protective, teasing, loud with his laughter. Attractive, yes, but in a way that never blurred their friendship.

Dexter was different. Same stance, same quiet authority — but there was a restraint in him, a watchfulness, as though every gesture cost him thought. Morgan had worn his confidence openly; Dexter wore his like armor.

Spencer leaned forward, elbows to his knees, staring down at his hands. JJ hadn’t been wrong. Dexter was attractive. And acknowledging it — even silently, with him lying just a few feet away — unsettled him more than he wanted to admit.

Dexter shifted then, rolling onto his side, eyes opening just enough to catch Spencer watching. For a breath, Spencer thought he’d have to explain himself. But Dexter only gave the faintest ghost of a smile, like a man who knew more than he said, and closed his eyes again.

Spencer exhaled, trying to lose himself in the quiet. He reached for The Bacchae on the nightstand, but JJ’s voice still threaded through his thoughts, steady and unshakable:

“He’s also attractive.”

The meeting was held in a side chamber of the Palazzo delle Finanze, all marble floors and fluorescent lights that gave no warmth. Hotch and Rossi sat across a long oak table from senior officers of the Carabinieri’s ROS (Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale), their Italian counterparts in counter-terrorism and organized crime. Interpol liaisons hovered along the edges, papers in hand, eyes sharp but cautious.

The crime at Piazza Mincio had already begun to stir the waters of Roman politics. A journalist cut in half, drained, displayed in a fountain — it was spectacle, and spectacle in Italy was never just crime. It was theater, and theater meant politics.

Colonel Ferrante, the ROS commander, leaned forward, his hands clasped. “Signori, you must understand — we are not only dealing with serial killers. We are dealing with a crisis of perception. The public believes this is a failure of the state. The press will spin this as the return of chaos. Rome remembers the Anni di Piombo — the Years of Lead. Every headline of blood in the streets conjures the specter of terrorism. We cannot afford that.”

Rossi’s jaw tightened. “With respect, Colonel, this isn’t terrorism. Lecter and Graham aren’t sending a message to the state. They’re sending one to us.”

Ferrante shot him a look edged with impatience. “Perhaps to you, sì. But to the Italian voter? To the Vatican? To the Partito Democratico fighting for stability after years of Berlusconi’s shadow? To the Lega Nord crying about crime and immigration? Every dead body is political currency. If we mishandle this, we hand ammunition to the wrong people.”

Hotch spoke then, his voice flat, even. “We’re not here to play politics. We’re here to stop them.”

“Then you must also understand the Vatican,” Ferrante replied. “Two murdered cardinals already shook the Curia. Now a journalist — and not just any journalist, but Alessandro Rinaldi, who built his career criticizing Vatican influence in Italian politics. Do you see? This is a symbolic war.”

Rossi leaned back, his eyes narrowing. He knew Italy; he’d been here decades before, chasing mobsters. The game was always the same — symboli, the optics. In the U.S., you could at least pretend law and politics were separate. Here, they were fused like marble veins.

An Interpol officer, a Frenchman named Duval, cleared his throat. “The Director-General in Lyon has made it clear — the operation is joint, but Italy leads. Sovereignty issues are sensitive. The Ministero dell’Interno will expect progress reports daily.”

“Daily?” Hotch repeated, not as a question but a judgment.

“Daily,” Duval confirmed. “And you will be expected to appear at a parliamentary commission if the murders continue.”

Rossi’s lips twisted. “So while we hunt Lecter and Graham, we’re also on trial in the Camera dei Deputati.”

Ferrante spread his hands. “Welcome to Rome.”

Silence stretched for a moment, thick with bureaucracy and unspoken resentment.

Hotch finally said, “Then we need access to full Carabinieri files. All unsolved homicides in Lazio over the last six months. And unrestricted access to Piazza Mincio. Lecter and Graham aren’t finished. If they staged one body there, they’ll stage another elsewhere. You know this as well as I do.”

Ferrante hesitated. In his eyes was the calculus of politics: give too much, and the Americans claim credit; give too little, and the blood keeps flowing.

Duval smoothed it over. “Compromise. The BAU gets operational freedom within Rome. But major decisions — targets, arrests — must pass through the Carabinieri chain of command. Non-negotiable.”

Hotch nodded once, curt. He’d dealt with worse bureaucracies.

Rossi looked between the Italians, then said in Italian, his accent rough but serviceable: “La politica è un teatro. Noi recitiamo il nostro ruolo. Ma alla fine — contano i morti.” Politics is theater. We play our roles. But in the end — it’s the dead who count.

Ferrante gave a small, grim smile. “Bene. At least we understand each other.”

The meeting adjourned, but the lines had been drawn: one of blood, one of politics. And both, in Rome, would not be easy to cross.

The hotel’s conference room had been stripped down into something that resembled Hotch’s old office in Quantico — but only just. A fold-out table was buried in files and maps, photographs of the Cardinals’ crucifixion and the journalist’s fountain displayed on a whiteboard, red marker lines connecting names and locations across Rome. It was late, the kind of hour when exhaustion made the air heavy, but the whole team was packed inside.

Hotch stood at the head of the table, tie loosened but posture rigid, the echo of the meeting with the Carabinieri still in his voice. Rossi sat beside him, silent for once, nursing a paper cup of bitter hotel coffee.

“They’ve made it clear,” Hotch said, his tone clipped. “We are here at their invitation. The Carabinieri will run the investigation. We provide support. And if they decide our presence is no longer useful—” he let the thought hang in the air.

JJ shifted in her chair, arms crossed. “So we just sit here and wait for them to throw us scraps? We’ve been here almost ten days. How long before Interpol decides we’re tourists?”

Emily leaned forward, elbows on the table. Her dark eyes were sharp, even in fatigue. “She’s right. We can’t profile from the sidelines forever. But if we push too hard, we’ll be on the next flight back to D.C.”

Spencer, hunched over with his hands laced, spoke in that fast, matter-of-fact rhythm that came when he’d been turning the problem over in his head. “Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter are American citizens. Jurisdictionally, the murders here fall under Italian law, but eventually they’ll make their way back to the States. It’s inevitable. Which means our involvement here may not change the ultimate outcome.”

Derek swore under his breath, shaking his head. “Pretty boy, you’re basically saying we just pack it in and wait for them to show up back home? That’s not good enough. We don’t let two psychopaths tear up Rome just because of some red tape.”

“Derek.” Tara’s voice cut through, calm but firm. “It’s not red tape. It’s sovereignty. We’re outsiders here. If this were happening in New York and the Italians showed up demanding control, we’d say no too.”

Luke leaned back, his chair creaking, and muttered, “Except in New York we’d probably have an actual shot at catching them.” He glanced around at the tense faces and offered a half-hearted grin. “What? Too soon?”

Garcia, perched anxiously with her laptop still glowing in front of her, shook her head. “This isn’t a joke, Luke. These monsters aren’t going to stop just because the Italians signed some papers. They’ll keep… making art.” Her voice broke on the word, and she lowered her eyes. “And if we’re not the ones who stop them, then who?”

Hotch’s silence stretched long enough that Rossi finally spoke, voice gravelly. “The truth is, we can’t strong-arm them. Not here. Not in Italy. We cooperate, we adapt. That’s how we stay in the game. If we walk out of this room thinking we can play cowboys, we’ll lose.”

There was a pause, then Dexter, quiet until now, finally spoke. His voice was measured, almost too calm, but it cut through the noise. “Predators don’t always rush. They wait. They know when to move, and when to stay still. That patience is how they survive.” He let his gaze move deliberately over the photographs on the board. “If Lecter and Graham are still here, they’ll make another move. They can’t help themselves. That’s when we’ll catch them.”

For a moment the room was hushed, the weight of his words settling. Spencer watched him carefully, something flickering behind his eyes, but said nothing.

JJ exhaled, leaning back. “So what, we just… wait, then?”

Hotch straightened, the fatigue in his shoulders giving way to iron. “No. We don’t wait. We prepare. We stay alert. And when they move, we’ll be ready. Until then, we follow the Carabinieri’s lead.”

The team nodded, some reluctantly, some with grim resolve. They were tired, homesick, chafing under foreign authority — but united.

Rossi set his coffee down and managed a dry smile. “Welcome to Rome, ragazzi. Not the field office we’re used to, but it’ll do.”

There was a ripple of weary laughter. Even Derek cracked a grin. But when the noise faded, the tension remained.

Because outside the walls of that cramped hotel office, Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham were still free.

Rome slept uneasily. Streetlamps cast thin halos over the cobblestones, and the air still carried the hum of day’s heat even after midnight. Dexter walked alone, hands tucked casually into his pockets, the mask of a tired agent worn lightly across his face. Inside, the Dark Passenger stirred, restless. Ten days of waiting, of paperwork, of polite conversations with Interpol. Ten days without release.

He stopped at an intersection in Parioli, not far from a row of old apartment buildings with shuttered windows. Something drew him — not instinct exactly, but the subtle tug of a predator recognizing disturbance. His eyes swept the ground.

There it was.

Barely more than a pinprick against the pale stone curb. A splash, dried but unmistakable. He crouched, shielding it with his body from the occasional passing car, and pulled a cotton swab from the pocket of his jacket. He always carried them, out of habit more than necessity. The swab darkened as it lifted the stain. Blood.

His lips twitched in something close to a smile.

The morgue’s fluorescent lights buzzed faintly as Dexter bent over the scope. The smear had dissolved easily under reagent. Now, magnified and tested, the truth shimmered in red and black on his monitor.

Alessandro Rinaldi.

The journalist whose body had been staged like a grotesque exhibit, his veins filled with ink. His blood was here, on a quiet Roman street corner, far from Piazza Mincio.

Dexter leaned back, savoring the rush. It wasn’t contamination, wasn’t coincidence. Hannibal and Will had walked here. Bled here. This neighborhood was theirs.

A thrill shivered through him, sharp and clean. He could almost see them: Lecter in his immaculate suit, Graham restless and brooding at his side. Ghosts of killers leaving breadcrumbs just for him.

“Found them, little brother.”

Dexter’s head turned. Brian leaned lazily against the doorframe, arms folded, smirking like the devil he’d always been. “The blood doesn’t lie. You’ve tracked them straight to their den.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?” Brian pushed off the wall, circling him. “You’ve been dreaming of them on your table. Lecter, Graham, stretched out, plastic sheeting tight around them. You’d take them apart piece by piece. The Bay Harbor Butcher reborn.”

Dexter swallowed, pulse quickening. The images bloomed unbidden in his mind — Will’s sharp eyes dulled in plastic, Hannibal’s elegant hands bound and ready. The perfect trophies.

“But you won’t tell your team,” Brian went on, voice soft, coaxing. “Not Rossi, not Hotchner, not that boy genius who keeps staring at you like he sees the cracks. You’ll keep it. Because this… this is yours.”

Dexter pocketed the vial of dried blood, sealing it like a sacred relic. He rose, ignoring the phantom brother’s laughter echoing behind him, and left the morgue without a word.

The street was quieter now. The same curb, the same faint stain, washed out by Rome’s humidity but visible to his eyes. Dexter stood still, listening to the breath of the city, the whisper of the Dark Passenger thrumming through his veins.

Somewhere behind one of these shuttered windows, Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter lived. Ate. Slept. Planned.

They were close enough to touch.

Dexter smiled into the Roman night, the expression sharp as a blade.

“Not yet,” he whispered to himself. “But soon.”

Spencer was still awake when Dexter came back. The hotel corridors were hushed, curtains drawn against the Roman night. He’d been reading, or at least staring at the words, unable to push the journalist’s body from his mind.

Dexter moved quietly, but not quietly enough to fool him. “You’ve been gone a while,” Spencer said, closing his book.

Dexter froze, then turned, an easy smile plastered over his face. “I like walking the city. Helps me think.”

Spencer tilted his head. “You think best in morgues.”

Dexter blinked once. His friend was sharp — everyone knew that. But seeing those watchful eyes turned on him, dissecting him as easily as he dissected a crime scene, was something else entirely. “You’ve been watching me.”

“Observing,” Spencer corrected. He shifted on his bed, gaze steady. “You didn’t just walk.”

For a moment Dexter considered brushing him off, but the weight of the vial in his pocket was too much. The secret was too intoxicating. He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “You’re right. I found something.”

Spencer’s eyes lit with sudden intensity. “What?”

Dexter pulled the small vial from his pocket, holding it between thumb and forefinger like a jewel. “Blood. Near an apartment block in Parioli.”

Spencer frowned. “Parioli?” He took the vial, turning it in the lamplight. “You tested it.”

“I did,” Dexter said, unable to hide his pride. “Rinaldi’s blood. Not contamination. Not coincidence. They were there.”

Spencer’s breath caught, and for a moment he just stared at the vial as though it held the key to the whole case. Then he looked back at Dexter, his mind already spinning. “If they’re staying in that neighborhood—”

“They are,” Dexter interrupted. His voice was certain, almost predatory. “I can feel it.”

Spencer set the vial down carefully on the desk between their beds. “You didn’t tell Hotch.”

“No.” Dexter’s smile was quick, dangerous. “Not yet.”

“Why?”

“Because the second this goes public, the Carabinieri swarm it. Interpol locks it down. And we lose the only chance at surprise we’ll ever have.”

Spencer’s brow furrowed. It wasn’t like him to go rogue, to bypass the team, the structure. But the logic of it — the rare, impossible chance to get ahead of Lecter and Graham — gnawed at him. The team had been here ten days, and every step felt like they were chasing shadows.

He stood, pacing the narrow strip of carpet. “If we go now, just the two of us—”

“It’s insane,” Dexter finished for him, though his tone held no reproach. Only the faintest thrill. “But maybe insanity is what it takes to catch them.”

Spencer stopped, hands twitching at his sides. “The element of surprise,” he murmured. “That’s the only advantage we’d have. Against them.”

Dexter stepped closer, his presence filling the room. “We go together. Quiet. We see if they’re really there. And if they are…” He let the words hang, sharp and full of promise.

Spencer met his eyes. For a heartbeat neither spoke, the weight of the decision pressing down like the humid Roman night. Then, softly, Spencer said, “Then we bring them down.”

Dexter smiled, wide and genuine this time, though in his chest the Dark Passenger coiled in delight. Or I bring them to my table.

Behind him, Brian’s ghost lounged against the wall, grinning. “Atta boy, Spencie. You’ve just signed up for the hunt.”

The team slept scattered across their shared rooms, the weight of Rome’s silence pressing down on them all. But in one room, two men moved quietly, shadows stretching long across the carpet.

Neither spoke.

Dexter strapped his shoulder holster into place with practiced ease. The gun clicked into its home, but it wasn’t the weapon Spencer noticed. Spencer watched from his bed, leaning forward, his book forgotten on the nightstand, as Dexter slid a narrow roll of knives into his bag, their steel glinting when the lamplight caught them. And then, almost casually, Dexter tucked a slim black case inside. Syringes.

For a heartbeat Spencer’s breath caught. His mind ran through the possibilities — sedatives, paralytics, compounds designed to quiet a body without a struggle. He knew what they looked like. He knew what they did.

Dexter’s eyes flicked up and met his. He knew Spencer had seen.

The silence stretched.

But Spencer said nothing. He simply stood, pulled on his jacket, and holstered his own gun. They moved around each other in wordless understanding, the air taut but not hostile. Something darker, stranger — a pact formed in quiet.

When they slipped into the hallway, the floorboards gave the faintest groan beneath their steps. They did not speak. They did not need to.

Only when they pushed out into the Roman night, the city thick with the warmth of late summer, did Spencer finally break the silence. His voice was low, flat, but certain. “You’ve done this before.”

Dexter adjusted the strap of his bag, his expression unreadable. “Walking into danger? Yes.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Dexter didn’t answer. The cicadas droned from the trees, and the hum of the city wrapped around them.

They walked side by side through empty streets, their footsteps echoing on the cobblestones. The weight of their silence became its own language — not trust, not suspicion, but the narrow, electric space between the two.

By the time they reached Parioli, the neighborhood was asleep, shutters drawn tight, fountains burbling faintly in the distance. Dexter slowed at the corner, his eyes lifting to the façade of an apartment building, ordinary but not to him.

“This is where I found it,” he murmured, his voice threaded with hunger.

Spencer’s gaze followed his, the shadows stretching over pale stone and wrought-iron balconies. He felt the prickle at the base of his skull, the instinct he knew from too many hunts. Predators had passed here.

The blood was gone, washed by time and weather. But the place held its own tension, as if the street itself remembered.

They stood together, staring up at the dark windows.

Neither spoke.

Both knew.

The lobby smelled faintly of polish and dust, the kind of careful maintenance money bought. Marble tiles reflected the dim glow of a single lamp over the entrance, and the silence inside felt heavier than the heat lingering in the Roman night.

Dexter closed the door behind them, his movements quiet, deliberate. Spencer hovered near the desk, his gaze darting to the stairwell, then back to Dexter. Neither spoke. Neither needed to.

Dexter slid behind the desk like he belonged there, pulling drawers open in smooth succession. Files, envelopes, keys. Spencer’s throat tightened with every scrape of wood, expecting a door to open above, footsteps to come down, voices in Italian asking what two strangers were doing in the middle of the night.

He caught himself holding his breath. Dexter didn’t seem fazed at all.

The third drawer stuck halfway. Dexter leaned his weight, forcing it open. A ledger thumped onto the surface. His fingers flipped pages fast, scanning handwriting with predator’s patience. Spencer edged closer, drawn in despite himself.

There. A fresh entry. Handwritten, ink crisp, only days old. An apartment on the fourth floor.

Dexter’s eyes flicked up, catching Spencer’s, a silent confirmation.

Spencer whispered, barely audible: “If it’s them… we’re walking into a cage.”

Dexter tilted his head, the faintest curve of a smile. “Then we walk together.”

The words shouldn’t have reassured Spencer. But they did. Just barely.

They crossed the lobby side by side, their footsteps echoing in the stairwell like a second heart. Every step felt louder than the last. Spencer kept replaying the image of the crucified Cardinals, the black fountain, the taste of inevitability rising in his throat. And still, he climbed.

On the landing of the fourth floor, Dexter knelt without hesitation. The hall was quiet, lined with doors identical in design but not in weight. This one had a pulse. Spencer felt it.

Dexter pulled a pin from his kit, slid it into the lock. Spencer stood just behind, eyes flicking up and down the corridor. No voices. No footsteps. Just the small sound of steel against steel.

The silence was unbearable.

Spencer’s voice, hushed: “If they’re inside, and they’re armed—”

“Then trust me,” Dexter cut in, his tone low, steady. He didn’t look up from the lock. “Just like I trust you.”

Spencer stared at him, at the calmness in his profile, at the certainty. His own pulse thundered, but he didn’t move. They had no choice but to trust each other. Here, now, against what waited behind that door.

Click.

The lock yielded. The sound was soft, final.

Dexter pushed the door open a fraction. Darkness pressed out from the apartment, cool and stale, carrying a faint smell—old wood, metal, a tang he almost recognized.

Spencer swallowed. His hand hovered near his weapon.

Dexter eased the door wider. Together they stepped inside.

And then—

The sharp, unmistakable sound of a hammer pulled back.

Spencer froze, every nerve lit like wire.

From the shadows emerged Will Graham, gun raised, his eyes hollow yet burning with focus. He had been waiting, as if he had known they would come. His stance was steady, his finger curled tight on the trigger.

No Hannibal.

Only Will.

The silence swallowed them whole.

The apartment’s silence thickened until it felt like a wall pressing against them.

Dexter’s eyes locked on Will’s gun. He noted the steady grip, the absence of tremor. Will Graham wasn’t improvising. He’d been waiting, patient, focused, like a fisherman watching a line go taut.

Spencer’s breath was shallow, but his posture remained composed. He knew what Will was doing because he’d done it himself, a dozen times over in different rooms, different cities. Gun raised, heart steady, pretending the nerves were louder than the training.

Seconds bled by. No one moved.

Spencer swallowed, and when he finally spoke, his voice was level, professional, the voice of an agent who knew the rules of the stand-off.

“Will,” he said softly, almost like it was a greeting. His eyes flicked once toward Dexter, then back to the barrel of the gun. “This doesn’t have to end in a shot fired.”

Will’s finger stayed curled on the trigger. His lips twitched, and for a moment it looked like he might smile — but what came out was dry and sharp.

“Oh, good. The FBI’s finest,” he said, voice pitched with a brittle amusement. “Two men breaking into my home in the middle of the night. What’s next? You want me to make coffee, maybe? Talk about our feelings?”

Dexter’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. His silence made Will’s eyes glitter with a darker satisfaction.

Spencer didn’t flinch. “Three of us in this room, all trained. You know how this plays out if you pull that trigger.”

Will tilted his head, mock-considering. “Right. The math. My favorite subject. I kill one of you, the other kills me. Neat, tidy, clean. Except… I’m not sure either of you has it in you to shoot me.”

His tone was soft, almost teasing, but it dripped with barbed certainty.

Spencer kept his voice steady. “Don’t be so sure.”

Will’s gaze slid from Spencer to Dexter, lingering, cutting. “And you. You’ve been circling me since you walked through that door. Quiet. Watching. Like you’re here for something else entirely.” He arched a brow, sarcasm curling in his voice. “What is it, exactly? Autograph? Photo for the case board?”

Dexter said nothing, his face a mask, though Will’s words scraped against him with uncomfortable accuracy.

The air tilted dangerously — all sharp edges and unspoken truths, a balance measured in heartbeats and sarcasm sharpened into a blade.

Will’s mouth curved, just enough to show teeth, though it was nowhere near a smile. “You shouldn’t have come here. But since you did… I suppose I should thank you. It’s been far too long since I had guests.”

Spencer kept his gaze steady on Will’s. He didn’t lower his weapon, didn’t blink. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t need Hannibal to tell you who you are. You’ve always known. That’s why you’re dangerous — and why you don’t need him.”

Will let out a laugh, sharp and brittle. “Dangerous. Now you’re catching on.” His eyes gleamed with dark amusement. “But you’re wrong about one thing, Spencer. I don’t need Hannibal. I want him. There’s a difference.”

Spencer pressed on. “Then prove it. Prove you’re not just his shadow. Put the gun down. Show us that Will Graham still exists without Lecter whispering in his ear.”

For the first time, Will’s arm twitched — a fractional shift in the barrel, not enough to disarm him but enough to register. His smirk tightened, less confident, more defensive.

Dexter finally spoke, his voice low, almost conversational. “If you shoot us, Hannibal comes home to chaos. Cops outside, Interpol swarming. You won’t get a chance to explain. You’ll die without him. Alone.”

Will’s eyes snapped to Dexter, and for a heartbeat his sarcasm curdled into something rawer. “Alone? That’s rich, coming from you. Tell me — how’s life in the shadows treating you, Dexter? Do you tell them who you are when the lights go out, or do you keep smiling and nodding like the rest of the sheep?”

Dexter didn’t flinch, but the words cut clean. Will saw it, savored it, and let the silence stretch.

Then Spencer cut in again, his voice calm, deliberate. “You’ve already made your choice, Will. You chose Hannibal. Fine. But he’s not here now. So the question is — do you actually trust him? Or are you just gambling he won’t leave you behind?”

Will’s eyes locked on him, hard as flint. Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth curled into something too sharp to be a smile.

“Hannibal never left me behind,” he said, voice low, heavy with conviction. “Not once. Not when the world turned on me, not when the FBI wanted my head. He gave me the choice to end him — more than once. He would let me murder him. Do you understand what kind of trust that is?”

The words struck like a blow, not shouted but pressed with absolute certainty.

Spencer swallowed, but his gaze didn’t waver. “That’s not trust, Will. That’s surrender.”

Will barked a laugh, cruel and cutting. “Spoken like a man who’s never given himself to anyone. Not fully. Not without conditions. You think it’s weakness because you’ve never had the courage to do it.”

The silence that followed was suffocating. Dexter shifted slightly, his eyes flicking between Will and Spencer, reading the currents as though they were blood patterns at a scene. He didn’t move forward. Not yet.

Will’s finger flexed on the trigger. His eyes gleamed. “So tell me — are you really here to save me, or are you here because you want to see what I’ll do without him? Which one of you wants me more?”

The question lingered, venom disguised as curiosity, a blade of mockery sharp enough to draw blood without cutting skin.

Spencer drew a slow breath. His weapon stayed steady, but his voice softened just a fraction. “I don’t want you, Will. I want the man you used to be. The one who fought this darkness instead of surrendering to it.”

Will’s smile twitched — half amusement, half contempt. “Noble. Predictable. But you, Spencer Reid… you’ve always been afraid of what you might become. You can’t stand that I stopped pretending.”

His gaze slid, knife-sharp, toward Dexter. He tilted his head, mock-thoughtful. “But you… You’re different. You’ve got that look. The same quiet itch under your skin. You’re not here to save me. You’re here because you recognize me. Don’t you?”

Dexter’s face stayed still, but the silence was too long.

Spencer glanced at him, the crease in his brow deepening. “Dexter… what is he talking about?”

Will chuckled, the sound dry and cruel. “Go on. Tell him. Or let him keep guessing. Either way, he’ll see it eventually.”

The room seemed to shrink, the air between them taut as wire. Dexter’s lips parted, but no words came. Spencer’s eyes stayed fixed on him, demanding answers, even as the barrel of Will’s gun never wavered.

Dexter’s jaw tightened, his voice low but even. “You’re talking nonsense.”

Will arched a brow, almost delighted. “Am I? Funny — I’ve made a life of seeing what other people hide. And you, Dexter… you wear your mask well. Too well. It doesn’t creak when you smile, it doesn’t slip when you’re tired. That’s not how ordinary men work.”

“I said you’re wrong,” Dexter repeated, sharper this time.

Will’s grin cut across the room like a knife. “Denial. Predictable. But you can’t hide the itch in your eyes. I’ve seen it before — in the mirror, in Hannibal’s gaze. You’re starving. And it’s killing you.”

Spencer shook his head, confused, his gun unwavering but his voice uncertain. “Starving for what? Dexter, what is he talking about?”

Dexter’s lips pressed thin. He didn’t answer.

Will tilted his head toward Spencer now, his voice dropping into that unsettling intimacy Cat Adams once used. “You feel it too, don’t you, Spencer? The pull. The thought you never speak aloud. That if you let yourself go for just one second, the line between you and me wouldn’t exist anymore.”

Spencer’s throat worked as he swallowed, his grip tightening on the gun. “I’m nothing like you.”

Will chuckled, low and knowing. “That’s what you tell yourself at night, when the nightmares come. That you’re still on the right side. That you can keep it at bay. But deep down, you know. You’ve always known. That’s why you’re standing here, shaking inside, because you recognize me just as much as I recognize you.”

Spencer’s breath hitched — just barely — but Will’s eyes lit with triumph at the flicker of reaction.

“See?” Will said softly. “I don’t need Hannibal to read you. You wear it like a scent.”

Dexter shifted then, stepping forward, his tone clipped. “That’s enough.”

Will only smirked wider, his voice biting. “Touch a nerve, did I? Or are you worried I’ll spoil your fun before you’ve had a chance to tell him yourself?”

Spencer’s eyes darted between them, caught between the cruelty in Will’s words and the silence in Dexter’s.

He kept his eyes locked on Will, so focused that he never saw the shadow moving behind him.

A hand struck the base of his skull — precise, brutal. The world went black before Spencer could even register what hit him.

Dexter’s eyes flicked sideways, his instincts flaring too late. He caught the faintest reflection in the window — Hannibal’s silhouette, a blur of motion. Dexter pivoted, gun rising, but Hannibal was already on him. A strike to the wrist sent the gun clattering. A second blow, sharp as a hammer, drove darkness through Dexter’s vision. He tried to stay conscious — he almost managed it — but the weight of Hannibal’s strength and precision folded him into nothingness.

Silence reclaimed the apartment.

When consciousness returned, it did so in fragments. A dull ache at the base of the skull. A metallic bite at the wrists. The faint, oppressive heat radiating from cast-iron.

Spencer groaned first, blinking against the dim light. His arms were stretched back awkwardly, chained at the wrists to the ridged metal of a radiator fixed to the wall. The iron was cool now — dead in summer — but unyielding. He tugged instinctively, the chain rattling just enough to confirm how little give there was.

Dexter stirred beside him, head rolling to the side, eyes snapping open faster than Spencer expected. He took in the restraints in a heartbeat: wrists bound in steel cuffs, chains looped through the radiator’s frame. No leverage, no angle. Their captors had thought this through.

They were close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, their chains forcing them side by side against the wall like twin specimens pinned for display.

Spencer’s voice came first, rough but steady. “Hannibal.”

Dexter flexed his wrists against the cuffs, testing every fraction of movement. “And Will.”

As if summoned, a shadow crossed the room. Hannibal emerged from the kitchen, immaculate as ever, sleeves rolled with clinical neatness. His eyes glimmered with quiet amusement at the sight of them chained, alive but subdued.

“You woke sooner than I expected,” he said softly, his voice cultured, calm. “Resilience is always impressive. But don’t mistake it for freedom.”

From the doorway, Will leaned against the frame, gun dangling loosely in his hand, his smirk sharp and cold. “Told you they’d come. Like moths to a flame.”

Spencer exhaled, the reality settling in. No weapons. No backup. Just the two of them, tethered to iron, their hunters standing free.

Dexter’s eyes stayed on Hannibal, unblinking, cataloguing every detail even as the weight of the chains pressed against his wrists.

The chains rattled faintly as Spencer shifted, testing his wrists again, but his strength was gone. His head lolled to the side, eyes struggling to focus. A haze wrapped around his thoughts like damp wool.

Dexter’s state was worse. His body fought to obey him, but his muscles responded sluggishly, delayed, as though every nerve had been submerged in syrup. He knew the sensation too well.

Hannibal moved into the dim light with serene precision, setting a tray on the low table. A silver decanter, two glasses, a small bowl of figs cut cleanly in half. He poured with elegance, the ruby liquid catching the glow like blood.

“I thought it poetic,” Hannibal said, turning his gaze to Dexter. “To use your own tools against you. Etorphine hydrochloride, is it not? Your… M99.” The faintest smile traced his mouth. “Ingenious, really. A dose so small, yet enough to topple anything on two legs.”

Dexter’s lips moved, but the words caught in his throat. His pupils contracted, sharp focus flickering for a heartbeat. “You’ve been watching me.”

Hannibal inclined his head. “Observing. Admiring. Learning. Isn’t that what predators do with one another?”

Spencer forced his eyes open wider, though the drug weighed them down. His voice came hoarse. “Why keep us alive?”

Will stepped forward from the shadows, leaning against the wall with an almost lazy posture, but his eyes burned. “Because corpses don’t answer questions.” He tilted his head, studying Spencer as though he were a specimen. “And you… you’ve always had answers. Too many, perhaps.”

Spencer tried to steady his breathing, his logic fraying under the chemical fog. “You’ll be caught. The BAU—”

Will’s chuckle cut him off, sharp and mocking. “The BAU. You’ve been circling us like hounds, convinced you’ll snap the leash tight. But here you are. Chained. Drugged. Waiting for mercy that doesn’t exist.”

Dexter’s jaw flexed, the only movement his body would allow. His voice rasped, strained but biting. “If you’re going to kill us, stop talking.”

Hannibal’s eyes lingered on him, fascinated, as though studying a rare specimen under glass. “No, Dexter. Killing you would be premature. What interests me far more is why you walk with wolves while pretending to be a shepherd.”

He stepped closer, crouching so that his face was level with Dexter’s. His voice dropped to a silken murmur. “Who are you, truly? I’ve tasted masks before. Yours has a flavor I cannot yet place.”

Spencer turned his head weakly toward Dexter, confusion and suspicion flashing through his fogged eyes. “What is he talking about?”

Dexter didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The weight of both men’s scrutiny pressed heavier than the chains.

Will’s smirk widened, cruel and knowing. “See? Even now, he hides it from you. Some secrets are too sweet to share.”

The two captives sagged against the radiators, their bodies weakened, their minds fogged — but their awareness sharp enough to feel the teeth closing in.

And then, out of the ripple of light, Harry appeared. Crisp shirt, tie knotted just so, standing just beyond Hannibal’s shoulder like a phantom reflection.

“Goddammit, Dexter,” Harry said, voice sharp but low, so that only Dexter heard. “You let them get this close. You let them knock you down. What were you thinking? You don’t let anyone turn your tools on you. You don’t get caught.”

Dexter’s breath shuddered, his lips twitching against words that wouldn’t quite form. Spencer glanced at him, brow furrowing, but said nothing.

Hannibal kept speaking, calmly, almost gently: “You surround yourself with these agents, with their rules, their endless procedures. Yet here you are, undone by instinct you pretend you don’t have.”

Dexter’s gaze darted sideways — and there Brian leaned in, grinning, arms crossed, his presence thick as cigarette smoke.

“Instinct,” Brian echoed, mocking. “That’s what I’ve been telling you, little brother. Stop pretending you’re like them. You’re not. You’re like me. Like them.” He nodded toward Hannibal and Will. “And isn’t that why you really came here? To get close? To admire?”

Harry cut in sharply. “No. Don’t you listen to him. You’re here because you lost control. Because you’re exhausted, sloppy, letting your mask slip in front of people who will cut you apart the moment they know. You can’t afford mistakes, Dexter.”

Dexter’s mouth opened, his voice a rasp, directed at no one visible. “Mistakes… or inevitability?”

Spencer stiffened, confusion flickering across his face. “Dexter?”

Will’s smile spread slowly, serpent-like. “Oh, he’s speaking now. To who, though? To us… or to the other voices gnawing at him?”

Brian crouched down beside Dexter, eyes gleaming with amusement. “Tell them. Tell your little genius friend here. He thinks he knows darkness? Show him. Tell him how many you’ve strapped to your table.”

Dexter shook his head minutely, chains rattling again. The room warped around him — Hannibal and Will in front of him, interrogators and predators both, while Harry’s harsh whispers sliced into one ear and Brian’s velvet mockery coiled into the other.

“You’re going to lose it,” Harry hissed. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

Brian smirked, leaning closer until Dexter could almost feel the phantom warmth. “Or you’re going to finally be free. Imagine it, Dex. The two of them, Hannibal and Will, stretched out on your table. Your masterpiece.”

Hannibal’s voice intruded, eerily timed, as though he could hear Brian himself. “You do crave something of us, don’t you, Dexter? A reckoning. A communion.”

Dexter’s pulse jumped. His voice broke through the fog, low, raw: “I want—” He stopped, swallowed hard. The ghosts pressed closer, Harry furious, Brian delighted.

Will tilted his head, eyes sharp, predator’s curiosity gleaming. “You want what?”

Spencer twisted against his chains, frustration and fear mingling. “Dexter, answer me. What is he talking about?”

Dexter’s eyes flickered — to Will, to Hannibal, then to the shadows where Harry and Brian argued over him like two devils fighting for the same soul.

Harry’s voice was a lash: “Shut up. Say nothing. Protect yourself.”

Brian’s was a lure, a whisper: “Say it. Show them. Stop hiding what you are.”

Dexter closed his eyes, but the darkness only magnified them — Harry’s warning glare, Brian’s hungry smile. The ghosts of his father and brother gnawed at the edges of his sanity, while the flesh-and-blood monsters before him probed for the same truth.

And Spencer — bound beside him, watching him unravel — was left with the faint, dawning realization that Dexter Morgan wasn’t just haunted. He was harboring something. Something that stared back at Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter without flinching.

Will’s gaze lingered on Dexter, then on Spencer. His expression was unreadable — a mix of curiosity and disdain. Hannibal, calmer, set down his glass, and together they rose.

“We’ll leave them to… contemplate,” Hannibal murmured. A faint smile to Will. “Even the strongest prey weakens when left in silence.”

The door to the next room closed with a muted click. Their voices blurred into low tones beyond the wall.

Spencer shifted once, tried to keep his eyes open, then slumped sideways, head resting against the radiator’s cool iron. His breath slowed. His body gave in.

Dexter remained awake. Barely.

The fog of M99 tugged him downward, but his mind tore itself apart. And in that half-dream state, they appeared again.

Harry stood rigid, arms folded, his face drawn into a scowl.

Brian lounged across from him, smiling like he had all the time in the world.

Harry snapped first. “You’ve lost control, Dexter. Look at yourself. Bound, drugged, exposed in front of the very people you should have avoided. I warned you about this. I trained you to be smarter.”

Brian scoffed. “Trained him to be a coward, you mean. To pretend he’s something he isn’t. Look at him, Dad — still hiding behind your tired old Code when the truth is right here.” He jabbed a finger toward the wall where Will and Hannibal had disappeared. “They’re you. Finally, someone who mirrors what you are — and you don’t have to hide from them.”

Harry wheeled on him. “They’re killers, Brian. Sadists. They kill for theater. Dexter kills to survive — to channel what’s broken in him. It’s not the same.”

Brian’s smile widened, sharklike. “That’s what you tell yourself to sleep at night. But you saw his eyes when he found their blood work, didn’t you? He loved it. He loved what they did with that journalist. You’re scared because he’s slipping from your leash.”

Dexter’s voice broke through, hoarse. “Stop.” His head sagged, then jerked up again. “You’re both wrong. I don’t—”

Harry’s voice cut him like glass. “You don’t what? You don’t want to kill them? You don’t want them on your table?”

Brian leaned closer, crouching so his face hovered inches from Dexter’s. “Say it. Admit it. They’d be your masterpiece. Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, carved up by your hand. Who else could even understand that kind of art but me?”

Harry shoved back. “This isn’t art. It’s suicide. If you go after them, you die. They’ll gut you before you can blink. And if they don’t, the FBI will.”

“Better than wasting away pretending to be normal,” Brian countered, voice silk over steel. “You see what it’s like, Dex, don’t you? To breathe around people who see you. Will does. Hannibal does. Even your little genius friend beside you senses it.” His smile sharpened. “And when he figures it out? What then?”

Dexter’s chest heaved, the drugged fog making his words stagger out. “Spencer doesn’t know. He can’t. He’s not… like me.”

Brian tilted his head, mock pity in his eyes. “Not yet. But you see it. He’s drawn to you. To the dark. He wants to understand.”

Harry’s voice snapped like a whip: “Leave Reid out of this!” He turned back to Dexter, fierce, desperate. “Focus. Don’t listen to him. You can’t let yourself get pulled into their orbit. You’ve built too much to throw it away. You have a son. You have Harrison. Do you want him to grow up without you?”

Brian laughed, low and cruel. “Or maybe Harrison will grow up and finally understand. Maybe he’s the one who’ll stand at your side when the old man’s Code has rotted away.”

Dexter shook his head violently, chains rattling, sweat beading his temple. “No. No. Stop it!”

The two ghosts shouted over each other now — Harry’s clipped, furious warnings clashing with Brian’s seductive whispers.

“You’ll destroy yourself.”

“You’ll be free.”

“You’ll lose Harrison.”

“You’ll gain an equal.”

“You’ll die.”

“You’ll live.”

Dexter’s breath came fast, ragged. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the dark behind them only pressed the phantoms closer, their voices clawing at him until he almost screamed.

The drugs held him under like an anchor, but Spencer’s mind clawed at the surface, thrashing. His body slumped against the radiator, his breath shallow, but inside his head the world burned.

He dreamed.

Will and Hannibal were gone. Dexter was beside him, chains rattling faintly, whispering to no one. But in the dream, none of that mattered. The walls around him faded into dark woods — woods he knew, though they had never existed outside his imagination. The trees bent low, thick with shadow, the sound of crickets swelling, and ahead of him stood Gideon.

Jason Gideon, in his old tweed jacket, sleeves rolled, face worn with the years Spencer had both admired and resented.

Spencer’s chest seized with something between relief and fear. “Gideon?” His voice cracked. “You’re—”

“I’m dead.” Gideon’s voice was flat, tired. “But that doesn’t stop me from seeing you, does it?”

Spencer stepped closer, chains gone in this dreamscape, his body free. “You left me. You left all of us. And now—” His throat tightened. “Now you’re here?”

Gideon’s eyes were sharper than Spencer remembered, almost cruel. “I didn’t leave because of you. I left because of men like him.” His hand flicked toward a shape in the trees. For a moment, Spencer thought it was Hannibal. Then Will. Then Dexter. Shadows blurred into each other, faceless and grinning.

“You think you’re better,” Gideon said, voice low, pressing in like a knife. “Smarter. Cleaner. But I can see it in you, Spencer. The same rot. The same hunger.”

Spencer’s head shook violently. “No. No, I’m not—”

“You are.” Gideon’s voice cut across him, final. “That’s why I kept you at arm’s length. That’s why I never let you in. Because I knew one day you’d look in the mirror and see what they are.”

Spencer’s fists clenched. His voice cracked under the weight. “I’m not like Hannibal. I’m not like Will. I’m not like—” He faltered, breath catching. “…Dexter.”

But Gideon only smiled, thin and merciless. “You already are. You just haven’t admitted it yet.”

The forest around them shuddered. The shadows leaned closer, merging into one: Will’s sharp eyes, Hannibal’s smile, Dexter’s silhouette. They towered behind Gideon like specters of inevitability.

“Stop it!” Spencer shouted, his voice echoing through the dream. “I’m not like them! I’m not!”

But Gideon was already turning away, fading into the darkness as he had in life. “You’ll see it. In time. That’s why I never chose you. Because I knew you’d choose the darkness for yourself.”

Spencer lurched forward, reaching for him, but Gideon dissolved into nothing, leaving only the hollow woods and the shadows grinning in silence.

He woke with a gasp, the radiator burning against his back, the taste of rust in his mouth. His body still heavy with Hannibal’s drug. Beside him, Dexter stirred faintly, whispering under his breath to phantoms Spencer could not see.

Spencer pressed his eyes shut again, trembling, Gideon’s words ringing in his skull like a verdict he couldn’t escape:

You’re just like them.

The drug crawled through Dexter’s veins like ice, numbing, paralyzing, dragging him down. His eyelids fluttered, heavy as lead, and the world dissolved.

He didn’t sink into blackness. He fell into memory.

Plastic crinkled underfoot. Fluorescent light buzzed overhead. The smell of salt and bleach was thick in his throat. He was in a kill room — his kill room — and yet it felt wrong. The table was already occupied, not by a stranger but by a ghost.

It was Lumen.

She wasn’t screaming. She was staring at him, eyes wide, the same eyes that had once trusted him to help her, to save her, to hunt with her. “You let me go,” she said, voice calm, almost tender. “You gave me freedom.”

Dexter’s chest tightened. He remembered her smell, the sharp determination in her voice. The first and only time he had shared the ritual — the hunt, the table — with someone who understood. And yet she faded as he reached for her, like sunlight burning through fog.

Another shape filled the space.

Lila.

Her voice was silk and venom. She laughed, low and mocking, her accent curling around him like smoke. “You think you’re in control,” she whispered, stepping closer, too close. “But you’ve always been mine, Dexter. You loved the chaos I gave you. You loved the fire.”

He tried to deny it, but he remembered the thrill, the way she had seen his darkness and called it beautiful. Her hand pressed to his cheek, warm and dangerous, and the table behind her caught fire, flames rising higher and higher until her face vanished in the smoke.

The smoke parted. Another man stepped forward.

Miguel Prado.

Sharp suit, dark eyes burning with betrayal. He carried himself with the same swagger he’d had in life, righteous and furious all at once. “We could’ve ruled this city,” Miguel said, his voice rising, echoing through the plastic walls. “We could’ve made them all pay. But you killed me. Because you couldn’t share.”

Dexter’s breath hitched. “You broke the Code.”

Miguel sneered. “No, you broke it, the day you decided you were the only one worthy of it. You never wanted a partner, Dexter. You just wanted control.”

The words cracked against him like a whip.

Lumen’s voice whispered from the shadows, “You let me go.”

Lila’s voice hissed, “You’ll always be mine.”

Miguel’s voice thundered, “You’ll never share.”

Their voices overlapped, pulling him in three directions at once. His chest constricted, the kill room spun. Plastic walls rippled like water.

He woke with a strangled gasp, sweat cooling on his skin, chained to the radiator in Rome. The dream clung like blood under his nails.

Lumen, Lila, Miguel. His past companions. All of them had seen his darkness. None of them had stayed.

His head dropped back against the wall. For the first time in years, the Dark Passenger felt unbearable.

Consciousness came back in waves. First the dryness in his mouth, then the ache in his muscles from being slumped against the radiator for hours. Dexter blinked hard, the edges of the room sliding into focus. Beside him, Spencer stirred, groaning softly, his head rolling against the wall.

The chains remained. Heavy, cold against their wrists.

A shadow moved. Hannibal.

He knelt gracefully before them, a glass in hand — crystal, not plastic. Of course. He pressed the rim to Spencer’s lips first, tilting it just enough to let the water touch his tongue. Spencer swallowed greedily, the sound loud in the silence. Hannibal’s expression was one of faint amusement, as though feeding water to captives was an act of courtesy, not cruelty.

When he shifted to Dexter, their eyes locked. Hannibal tilted the glass again, steady, deliberate, letting Dexter drink. The water was cool, clean, almost mocking in its normalcy.

“You’ll need your strength,” Hannibal said smoothly, setting the glass aside. “We prefer our conversations not interrupted by fainting spells.”

Spencer coughed, his voice still raw. “You drugged us.”

“I did,” Hannibal agreed, unbothered. “And with your own supply, Dexter.” He let the name linger, savoring it like wine. “Your little syringe — such an elegant instrument of paralysis. Why reinvent the wheel when your tools are so refined?”

Dexter’s stomach turned, though his face betrayed nothing. M99. Etorphine. My needle. Hannibal had studied it, maybe even admired it.

Before Dexter could speak, Will appeared from the next room. He held something between two fingers, delicate as a jewel. With a flick of his wrist, he tossed it onto the floor between them.

It was a small, square slab of glass. Clean. Clear. Empty.

Spencer frowned. “What… what is that?”

Will crouched, his gaze never leaving Dexter. “Funny thing, what you can find when you look through another man’s possessions. This was tucked in your colleague’s bag.”

Spencer blinked. His throat went dry. He knew what it resembled — like a blank slide from a lab kit — but the way Will said it carried weight. Accusation.

Dexter’s chest tightened. It wasn’t blank in Will’s eyes. It was a symbol. His ritual, laid bare.

Hannibal’s voice purred, low and cutting. “A shard of ritual, carried like a saint’s relic. To the uninitiated, it looks like nothing. But to those who understand blood…” He gestured with elegant fingers. “It is everything.”

Spencer turned his head toward Dexter, confusion sharpening into suspicion. “Why would you have that?”

Dexter’s mind roared. Harry’s ghost spoke fast, urgent: Deny, stay calm, don’t let it crack.

Brian’s laughter overlapped, taunting: They’ve got you, brother. Your neat little secrets are slipping through their fingers.

Will tilted his head, like a wolf sniffing out weakness. “You hide it well. You smile, you joke, you fit in. A good mask. But this—” He tapped the glass with a fingernail, the sound sharp in the silence. “This is the truth. You keep your trophies, don’t you, Dexter? Drops of blood, pressed into glass. Little windows into your kills.”

Spencer’s eyes widened. His voice trembled. “That’s… that’s absurd.”

Will’s smile was cruel, sarcastic. “Is it? You of all people should know, Dr. Reid. You study monsters for a living. Do you think you’ve been sleeping next to an ordinary man?”

Dexter forced himself to speak, his voice low, measured. “He’s lying.”

Will’s grin widened. “Funny thing to say, when the evidence lies at your feet.”

Spencer’s breath stuttered. He wanted to believe Dexter. He needed to. But his mind was too sharp, too trained in patterns, in truths revealed through the smallest details. And the slab of glass was no accident.

Hannibal leaned closer, his tone almost conversational. “You see, Spencer… men like us collect meaning where others collect dust. A photograph, a newspaper clipping. We prefer something more… intimate.” His gaze flicked to Dexter again. “Something that stains.”

Dexter said nothing. His silence was worse than denial.

Spencer swallowed hard. “Tell me it isn’t true.” His voice cracked, not just with fear, but with something close to betrayal.

Harry’s ghost appeared in Dexter’s mind, stern, cold. Protect yourself. Protect the Code.

Brian’s voice slithered over it, mocking. Tell him the truth. Watch the light leave his eyes.

Dexter clenched his jaw. He looked at Spencer and said flatly, “It isn’t true.”

The words hung in the air, heavy, unconvincing.

Will chuckled, leaning back on his heels. “You see? Even his denials taste hollow.”

Hannibal’s eyes glittered. “Masks eventually crack. It’s only a matter of when.”

Spencer pressed his head back against the radiator, his mind spinning. For the first time, he wasn’t sure whether he was chained beside an ally — or a monster.

Dawn seeped into Rome in muted shades of rose and ochre. The hotel stirred with the sounds of tourists rising early for the city, suitcases wheeled over marble floors, the smell of coffee drifting from the breakfast bar.

Inside the BAU’s suite, something was off.

Garcia was the first to notice. She had slipped down to the lobby for cappuccinos, juggling paper cups back upstairs with a brightness that clashed against the bleary silence of the team. She set a cup in front of Spencer’s place at the table out of habit—then frowned. The chair was empty.

“Wait.” Her voice cut through the room, brittle. “Where’s my genius?”

The others looked up. Hotch was by the window, scanning the day’s briefings. JJ was adjusting her hair in a compact mirror. Rossi was grumbling about the quality of hotel wine. None of them had realized until Garcia spoke that two chairs sat vacant.

“Dexter’s gone too,” Emily said, scanning the room. She crossed to the bedroom hallway and knocked once, hard, on a door. Silence. She opened it. Bedsheets untouched, everything in place except for the absence. “Their room looks like it was never slept in.”

Tara swore softly under her breath. Morgan pushed off the wall, tension in his shoulders. “No way Pretty Boy just skips out without a word. And no way the new guy—Dexter—does either. Not at the same damn time.”

JJ’s face had gone pale. “Hotch…”

Hotch didn’t move for a moment, his profile etched against the Roman skyline outside. Then he turned, his expression set in grim lines. “They left without telling anyone.”

Garcia’s hands trembled around her coffee cup. “That’s not like Spencer. He checks in when he’s getting lunch, when he’s buying books, when he’s just thinking about crossing the street.”

Rossi exhaled through his nose, shaking his head. “Which means this wasn’t casual. Either they went rogue… or someone lured them.”

Morgan’s voice rose, sharp. “And if it’s the second option, we’re already behind.”

Hotch’s eyes swept the team. He said nothing about panic, but the silence spoke for him. It was the worst-case scenario—two agents missing, no message, no trail.

Emily’s tone was clipped. “Interpol hasn’t called us yet. If Lecter and Graham had made a move loud enough to draw attention, we’d know. So either they’re holding Spencer and Dexter… or—”

“Or they went after Lecter and Graham themselves,” Tara finished.

The words landed hard.

Garcia sank into a chair, muttering, “Why would they do that? Why would he—” She stopped herself before saying Spencer’s name again.

Hotch rubbed his jaw, thinking. “Whatever the reason, we can’t afford assumptions. Reid and Morgan are both trained. They know protocol. If they broke it, there had to be a reason.”

JJ’s voice was taut, protective. “And whatever the reason, we find them.”

Rossi leaned back, arms crossed, his tone heavy but steady. “First rule: don’t panic. Second rule: don’t waste time. Let’s get a trace on their phones, cameras, anything.”

Garcia nodded quickly, already reaching for her laptop. “On it. I’ll crack Rome open if I have to.”

The team dispersed into motion, tension stretching like wire. In the space they left behind, two chairs at the breakfast table remained empty, coffee cooling untouched.

The address came fast once Garcia traced the phones—too fast. The signal was clean, bouncing off no decoys, no false trails. Spencer’s and Dexter’s devices were both pinging from an apartment in Parioli.

The team piled into black sedans with Interpol escorts, tires cutting through Rome’s narrow streets. Hotch sat forward, eyes fixed, jaw tight, as the city blurred past. JJ clutched her phone, silent. Rossi muttered under his breath about how it felt wrong—too easy, too open.

By the time they reached the building, the Roman sun was sharp overhead. A Carabiniere posted at the gate waved them inside. The doorman’s desk was deserted, its drawers hanging slightly ajar as if rifled through.

“Move,” Hotch ordered.

Morgan took point, Luke flanking him. Guns raised, they swept the lobby, then the stairwell. The silence inside was suffocating, each step heavier than the last.

On the fourth floor, a door stood just barely closed. A faint scuff marked the lock—subtle, precise.

“Break-in,” Morgan murmured, crouching to examine the mechanism. “Clean. Professional. No forced splintering, just persuasion.”

“Dexter,” Emily whispered, glancing at Hotch. “He could’ve done it.”

Hotch gave the nod. Morgan pushed the door inward.

The apartment smelled faintly of wine and something metallic underneath, like old pennies. Curtains were drawn, muting the light into a heavy glow.

The team fanned out.

Rossi stepped into the kitchen first. A bottle of Chianti sat on the counter, two glasses beside it, stained deep red. “They had company,” he muttered. “And not just each other.”

JJ followed the trail into the living room. Her eyes caught immediately on the radiator. Heavy iron links and leather straps dangled from it, abandoned in haste. She froze. “They were restrained here.”

Tara moved to her side, jaw tightening. “And not by amateurs. Look at the knots. Someone knew exactly how to immobilize them.”

Emily knelt by the radiator, touching the floor where faint smears of blood darkened the wood. “One of them bled. Not much. Just enough to tell us they fought.”

Across the room, Luke pulled back the curtains and hissed. “Jesus.”

The others turned. The bed, large and neatly made the day before, was now unmade, the sheets tangled, pillows tossed, an indentation showing where two had slept.

Rossi’s face hardened. “This wasn’t just a hideout. This was a home.”

JJ’s stomach turned. “Which means they’re not planning to stop anytime soon.”

Morgan crouched near the refrigerator. A chain lay coiled on the floor, its end still padlocked. He shook his head. “They kept them here. Cold, clinical. Then they moved.”

Hotch’s gaze shifted toward the low coffee table at the center of the room. His eyes narrowed. “Over here.”

They gathered around.

A Bible lay open, deliberately placed. Its thin pages breathed with the draft of the curtains. A verse had been underlined in black ink, the hand precise, almost calligraphic.

“And he took a cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’”

— Luke 22:20

The words bled across the page, the ink pressed hard enough to dent the paper.

Emily exhaled slowly. “It’s not just a message. It’s a taunt.”

Tara added, her voice low, “They’re equating themselves with Christ. Blood as covenant. Murder as communion.”

Rossi’s jaw worked. “And they want us to drink in the meaning. Literally.”

JJ glanced at the radiator straps again, then back at the Bible. “Spence and Dexter… they’re the sacrifice.”

Hotch closed the book softly, his expression unreadable. “They wanted us to see this. They wanted us to know we’re already behind.”

Garcia’s voice crackled through the comm from the car outside, breathless. “Guys… phones just went dead. Both of them. Cut off in the last ten minutes.”

The apartment hung heavy in silence. Two glasses on the counter, two indents in the bed, two missing men.

And now, a Bible open to blood and covenant.

Hotch’s voice broke the quiet. “We search every inch. Every corner. If they left anything—DNA, fibers, prints—we’ll find it. Interpol sweeps the building, top to bottom.”

Morgan’s fists clenched. “And if Lecter and Graham so much as scratched either of them, I swear—”

“Focus,” Hotch cut in sharply.

But as they spread out, combing the apartment for clues, the reality sank in: Will and Hannibal had been here, they had Spencer and Dexter, and now they were gone.

The echo of their absence lingered in the rooms like another presence—watching, mocking, sanctified by blood.

Spencer woke first, though “waking” felt generous. His eyelids dragged like lead, his body sluggish, poisoned still by whatever Hannibal had injected into them. The air around him was damp, colder than the Roman summer outside should allow. His cheek pressed against stone, rough and cold.

When he shifted, iron clinked. His wrists burned where chains had been fastened tight.

He forced his eyes open. A low ceiling of aged brick arched above him, blackened by time. The basement smelled of mildew, dust, and faintly — always faintly — of blood.

“Spencer.”

The voice came from the darkness across the room. Dexter.

Spencer blinked hard until the man’s silhouette resolved — slumped against another wall, chained the same way, ankles and wrists shackled, metal biting into flesh. His eyes had the same dull sheen of exhaustion, but even like this Dexter looked unsettlingly composed.

“They moved us,” Spencer rasped, his throat dry.

Dexter nodded once. “Countryside, I think. No traffic noise. No city hum. Just… silence.” He tugged at the chain. It rattled, solid as bedrock. “Basement, probably. Thick walls. Screaming won’t help.”

Spencer tilted his head back against the wall, swallowing hard. “So we’re… what? Prisoners of war?”

Dexter’s laugh was brief, humorless. “Something like that.”

They sat in silence for a long moment, only the sound of chains echoing when one of them shifted.

Finally, Spencer’s voice broke through, hesitant but sharp. “Back at the apartment… what Will said about you. About… what you are.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. His eyes flicked away, to the shadows. “He was baiting you. He does that. Gets in your head.”

Spencer studied him. “He wasn’t entirely wrong, though.”

A pause. Chains scraped as Dexter leaned his head back against the stone wall. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

Spencer let out a brittle laugh. “Maybe I don’t. But I’ve profiled men like him. And I’ve profiled men who hide things so deeply that they start believing their own cover story. You didn’t deny him, Dexter. Not really.”

Dexter’s eyes snapped back to him, sharper now despite the haze of the drug. “And what about you?” he asked, voice low. “Didn’t you hear the way Will looked at you? Like he could see something in you too. Something you don’t want anyone else to notice.”

Spencer stiffened. His lips parted, ready to deny it, but the words clung stubbornly to his throat. He remembered Will’s gaze in that apartment — the sarcasm, yes, but underneath, a recognition that felt uncomfortably accurate.

“You don’t know me,” Spencer said finally, softer than intended.

Dexter’s mouth curved in a thin, weary smile. “Maybe I don’t. But I know the look of someone trying to keep the darkness folded up nice and neat inside.”

Spencer exhaled shakily, staring at the chain marks circling his wrists. “And you think you understand that better than I do?”

Dexter’s smile faded. His eyes went distant, almost haunted. “I live it.”

The basement swallowed their words. Above them, faint footsteps passed — Hannibal or Will moving across the villa’s upper floors, purposeful, deliberate. The sound faded quickly, leaving them in silence again.

Spencer’s voice was barely a whisper. “We’re not getting out of here, are we?”

Dexter shifted against the chains, testing them once more. The iron didn’t budge. He closed his eyes, almost in prayer.

“Not unless one of us decides to use what we’ve both been hiding.”

The words hung heavy between them — an admission neither of them could fully face, not yet.

The villa was old, its stones pale against the rising light. Shutters drawn, it held the silence of countryside mornings — birds calling faintly in the distance, cicadas beginning their song. Dust floated lazily in the beams that cut through narrow cracks in the shutters, soft golden lines against the walls.

Hannibal closed the heavy wooden door behind him, locking it with a deliberate hand. His shoulders rolled with the faintest tension, the kind he allowed only when no eyes but Will’s were there to see. He drew a long breath, letting the quiet of the house press against him.

Upstairs, Will had already claimed the bed. Not with arrogance, but with the natural exhaustion of a man who had carried the weight of impulse and murder, then the weight of moving bodies and captives through the night. His clothes lay in a careless trail from the door of the bedroom — shirt draped on the chair, shoes abandoned just short of the rug, belt hanging loose where he had dropped it.

Hannibal found him sprawled across the bed, half-asleep, curls damp with sweat, lips parted in that unguarded way he so rarely allowed himself.

“You look like you’ve fought a war,” Hannibal murmured, his voice low, almost amused.

Will cracked one eye open. “Well, yes. Against the Bay Harbor Butcher. And we’ve won.”

Hannibal’s smile deepened, deliberate, a small flicker of teeth in the half-light. “The Bay Harbor Butcher and his new companion.”

Will huffed, rolling onto his side, dragging a pillow close. “He’s not his companion yet.”

Hannibal brushed a curl from Will’s forehead, fingers lingering against his temple. “If he is not yet, he will be soon.”

Will gave a small, sharp laugh, not entirely humorless, before letting the pillow swallow his face. “You’d enjoy saying that too much.”

Hannibal smiled faintly, setting his own jacket aside, folding it with a care Will never bothered with. He sat at the edge of the bed, looking down at Will — bruised, unshaven, raw from the night before, and yet, to Hannibal, resplendent.

“You should rest,” Hannibal said. “Even gods must sleep.”

Will snorted softly. “If I’m a god, I’m a tired one.”

Silence stretched between them, not heavy but warm. Hannibal slid down beside him, stretching out with feline grace, settling close enough that their shoulders brushed. Will reached for the blanket and pulled it over them both, the gesture careless, domestic.

For a while, neither spoke. Hannibal let his eyes close, listening to the cadence of Will’s breath, steadying, deepening as sleep threatened to pull him under. He did not often allow himself such peace, but here, in this crumbling villa with blood still drying on his conscience, he could.

“You’re warm,” Will murmured suddenly, his voice muffled against the pillow.

Hannibal chuckled softly. “Better than the dogs, then?”

Will huffed, too tired to summon a proper retort, but after a moment he whispered, “Fuck you,” in a tone so drowsy it might have been affectionate.

Hannibal’s lips curved. He drew him closer, arm firm around his waist, his mouth brushing against Will’s curls. “I love you, Will,” he murmured, the words quiet but unflinching, as though they had always been true.

Will let out something between a sigh and a laugh, soft against Hannibal’s chest. He didn’t answer in words, only pressed himself closer, surrendering to the warmth, to the rest they both so badly needed.

The villa held them, quiet and unjudging. Outside, the day had begun, but for them, time slowed.

Two men who had made themselves monsters, wrapped around one another as though they could still be human in sleep.

The Carabinieri headquarters felt less like an office and more like a fortress. Concrete, marble, cold air humming with fluorescent lights. Flags hung stiffly behind the long conference table. The BAU filed in, weary but sharp-eyed, carrying the weight of the missing.

Colonel Ventresca of the Carabinieri sat across from them with two Interpol officials, files laid out with neat precision. His expression was already sour.

“We appreciate your cooperation,” the Interpol man said, clipped and officious, “but this is our jurisdiction. Rome is not Quantico. You will follow our lead.”

Silence for a beat.

Then Rossi leaned forward. His voice was low and dangerous. “Two of our people are missing. Spencer Reid. Dexter Morgan. One’s an FBI agent, the other a forensic genius who’s saved more cases than you’ve read reports on. And you sit there telling me to follow your lead? Fuck you.”

The room snapped. The colonel’s face tightened, color rising.

“You will not insult us in our country,” the colonel barked, standing. His hand slammed down on the table. “You speak to us like children—”

Rossi didn’t flinch. He slammed his palm on the table in answer, the sound like a pistol crack. “Then don’t treat us like tourists! I’m not here to sip wine and pose for postcards. I’m here because my people are chained up somewhere by Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham while you shuffle papers. So don’t lecture me about jurisdiction.”

Hotch’s jaw tightened; when he spoke his voice was flat and final. “If Reid and Morgan die, it won’t matter who signed what. It’ll matter that we squandered time while they suffered.”

Emily’s tone cut in, sharp as glass. “Don’t posture about process with us. Lecter isn’t something you contain with protocol. If you want him caught, start by listening to the people who know how he operates.”

JJ leaned forward, voice taut. “This isn’t your glory to protect. This is about our people. We’re not leaving them behind.”

The colonel’s nostrils flared. “You are guests here, signori. You will show respect—”

Rossi barked a laugh edged with fury. “Respect? Earn it. Because right now you look like a varnished bureaucracy guarding your ego while my people are in danger. If you think I’ll stand here and say ‘grazie’ while you play at law, you’re insane.”

The colonel’s reply snapped out hot, in rough English, “You come to our country and tell us how to do our job? Who do you think you are?”

Tensions rose in a blur: the colonel’s fury, the Interpol official’s clipped protests, the team’s barely restrained anger. Luke’s voice dropped low and dangerous. “You can keep your pride, but if you keep blocking us you will be responsible when there are bodies you could have prevented.”

Tara’s tone was clinical and final. “This isn’t a diplomatic exercise. Lives are on the line. You can posture in press conferences or you can help us get them back alive.”

The colonel slammed a fist onto the files, irritation and wounded pride flaring. “You threaten me in my office? You are Americans—storming in with your threats—”

“Then let us work,” Hotch said, cold as winter. “Help us, or get out of the way.”

The colonel’s face was a mask of hard lines. For a heartbeat he was unmoving; then he spat a word in Italian, furious, and—grudgingly—gestured with a clipped movement toward the door. “Do what you must. But fail, and the consequences are on you—” He let the warning hang in the air.

Rossi leaned back, eyes bright with anger and grief, and said simply, “They already are.”

The room didn’t cool. If anything it burned hotter—an ugly blend of international pride and personal stakes. The BAU left the table with the air of people who’d just crossed a line; the Italians watched them go, furious, stubborn, wounded.

Outside, as the team assembled their plan, the echo of that meeting followed them like heat. The stakes had just become sharper. There would be no polite cooperation from here on; everyone had made their position clear.

They left the meeting with the colonel’s words still buzzing in their ears and the taste of unfinished arguments on their tongues. Outside the fortress of the Carabinieri, the Roman light hit the sedans hard and flat; the team climbed in with the precise silence of people who knew time was a resource you could not waste.

Garcia was already two steps ahead of them in the digital world before they even reached the hotel. She’d been on the line while they argued — a frantic, bright thing behind a bank of screens — and now she rode shotgun with a laptop open, fingers moving in a blur.

“Phones pinged from the apartment in Parioli,” she said without preamble, voice tight. “But then both devices went dark. I pulled the IMEI, the usual: cell tower handoffs, last known cell sector, last data burst.” She tapped the keyboard and a map bloomed on the screen. “Last confirmed locations put them there for thirty-eight minutes. Then… nothing.”

Hotch studied the map. “Any CCTV on the street?”

“Partial.” Garcia blinked. “A traffic cam two blocks over caught a black hatchback at 03:14. Plate blurred because of motion, but ANPR registers give me three possible matches — rental cars issued in central Italy in the last 72 hours. I’ve pinged all three agencies. Waiting on returns.” She didn’t sound hopeful. “The building’s concierge logs were wiped — someone rifled the drawer. The doorman was off duty; the ledger was rifled in a way that’s practiced. Whoever did it knew the routine.”

Rossi ground his teeth. “So someone who knows how we work, or someone who mimics it.”

“Or both,” Emily said. She was leaning over Garcia’s shoulder now, reading the code like a secondary language. “If they wanted us to find the scene, they left enough for us to find. If they wanted to mislead us, they left holes. It’s too tidy.”

Garcia’s face reddened with effort. “I’m crawling through logs: IMSI attachments, last known Wi-Fi associations, tower handoffs. If they used a burner, they got clever — layered SIM swaps with temporary registration numbers. I can pull the towers that handled the handoffs; that narrows grid to sectors. But guys — they used a VPN on top. They wiped packet signatures. Whoever covered this has operational tradecraft.”

“Can you get anything from the apartment’s router?” Hotch asked.

“Router was wiped too. Factory reset. But there’s a chance the ISP has DHCP logs. I’ve already submitted the legal request through Interpol channels. It’ll take time.” She forced a small, impatient laugh. “Sorry — time’s not the thing we have in abundance.”

Rossi slammed a hand on the hood of the sedan as they parked back at the hotel. “Then get me what you can, fast.”

They split tasks with that fluid efficiency the BAU had—roles honed by years. Rossi and Hotch went for the apartment again with a small, focused forensics unit from the Carabinieri; JJ and Emily began compiling behavioral overlays and timelines; Derek and Tara ran ground checks and questioned the doorman and nearby shopkeepers; Garcia continued the digital chase, fingers never still; Luke checked rental car companies and the traffic cams. The team moved like a living organism — and yet, the organism had been ambushed.

At the Parioli apartment the forensics team worked blunt and clinical. Rossi watched them pry open drawers, dust for prints, photograph every surface. The radiator straps were bagged and tagged. A swab from the floor near the radiator returned a faint DNA profile — partial, degraded. “Too little to make a match,” the tech said flatly. “Contamination or an old wound.” Rossi felt the small stab of frustration that comes when evidence refuses to congeal into answers.

JJ read through the Bible passage and the placement pattern, then layered in an analytic frame. “If they’re staging symbolism,” she said, “their cadence is deliberate. Covenant—blood—communion. It’s meant to provoke interpretation. It also tells us: they want us to guess, not to see.”

Garcia’s screen flickered and then serendipity leaned in. “Okay — maybe not luck, but a pattern.” She pointed. “I got a faint Wi-Fi probe from a device in that apartment at 03:09 that tried to associate with a coffee shop’s hotspot two streets over. The probe name? A string of hex I’ve seen before in an encrypted manifest used by—” She swallowed, then smiled thinly. “—by an academic group that publishes on obfuscation for privacy activists. Not illegal. But the pattern—the way the device cycles through probe requests—that’s not their signature. It’s someone using that toolkit.”

Hotch’s eyes narrowed. “They want plausible deniability.”

“They want the BAU to bloop their way down a rabbit hole,” Rossi said.

Meanwhile, Spencer’s and Dexter’s last known phones were treated like evidence in a criminal investigation. The team extracted what metadata they could: the phone models, their last SMS timestamps, app lists. The content had been wiped on both, but metadata lived stubbornly. “Reid’s phone showed a 02:59 MMS attempt to a number that doesn’t resolve in Italy,” Garcia said. “The payload never sent. Dexter’s phone had a 03:06 connection to a cloud account registered to an anonymous provider using offshore registration.”

“Could be an auto-sync,” Emily said.

“Or a jettison,” JJ countered. “Something shoved into the cloud as bait, or as a dump. Either way — they’re covering tracks.”

They hunted the streets then. Derek and Tara canvassed the neighborhood again, politely but intensely talking to night drivers, bar owners, anyone who might have seen a hatchback with midnight lights. “The rental leads showed up as dead ends,” Derek said later, voice low. “Two were legitimate picks, no connection. Third one’s interesting: registration originated in Naples, rented in the afternoon, returned in the morning in a panic. We’re following that one.”

Hours stretched. The BAU moved like an engine revving at a stoplight — ready, but that last connection refused to fire.

Rossi returned to the hotel in the thin heat of the afternoon with a report that was heavy on effort and thin on result. “They were careful,” he said bluntly, not without admiration. “They moved Reid and Morgan from the apartment. We found a partial smear of blood in two places — one near the radiator, one near the door. The blood is consistent with low-volume transfer — wrist abrasions, a nick. Nothing that screams homicide at that point. Whoever handled them wanted them alive.”

Hotch followed up, voice quiet with the pressure of command. “Where’s Hannibal? Where’s Will?”

“No direct link,” Rossi admitted. “But the staging… the Bible. It’s deliberate. They’re toying with us. It’s a message, not a signature.”

Garcia’s fingers flew even as fatigue crept into the edges of her sentences. “I’m cross-referencing CCTV feeds from the route the rental took. There’s a service road outside Tivoli with a private camera. I can scrape frames and enhance them, but there’s weather glare in one frame. If I can reduce the noise, we might get a make or model. Might not, though.”

JJ set down a file and met Hotch’s eyes. “They designed this. They left enough to let us know they knew we were coming. That tells us something about arrogance—and capability. They anticipate the BAU’s rhythms. They probably anticipated our push at the Carabinieri, too. This isn’t reckless; it’s curated.”

“A curated message is a dangerous thing,” Hotch said. “They can control the narrative. They want to shape the hunt. We have to flip the frame: if they expected a reaction, let our reaction be different. Quiet. Deliberate. Surgical.”

Rossi spat out a laugh that had teeth. “Surgical? That’s Lecter’s favorite adjective. Fine. We do it surgical. But God help me if I don’t get to yell at someone for a while.”

Garcia’s laptop chimed — a small success in a day of static. “I pulled the partial glint from the Tivoli feed and ran it through an object recognition filter. It correlates with models of a black hatchback used by a private hire company that services villas in the Castelli Romani. I can ping local traffic cams there. If they moved the pair by car, that’s our best bet.”

Hotch’s face was a mask of concentration. “Do it. Quietly. We don’t want to play into their theater.”

They spread out then, faster, more methodical. Teams were sent to canvass the Castelli Romani, to check toll booths for that imperfect plate match, to interrogate rental counters, to pull the traffic cams. Garcia opened another window and began to parse historical DHCP logs for that same coffee-shop hotspot, looking for MAC addresses that had drifted across the city in that time window.

But for every step forward, the captors had laid down two more shadows. Where the team expected a straight trail, there were forks laced with fog — a PAYG phone handed between hands in a square of light; a rental contract signed with a passport copy that matched no record; CCTV angles that yielded faces in bloom, then smeared into nothing by downpour or glare. The noise was intentional; the silence, curated.

As dusk fell, the map had tightened but not closed. They had sectors, a few camera frames with a possible vehicle silhouette, a trace of blood too small for conclusive forensic linkage, a Bible page waiting for interpretation. Most damning perhaps: the clear demonstration that someone had been in the apartment and had left the scene in a way meant for the BAU to find it.

Garcia exhaled and rubbed her eyes. “I can follow the signals, but they’re ghosting us. Whoever moved these guys understands both digital and human surveillance. They’re good.”

Rossi let out a single, bitter sound. “Good at being monsters. Good at not getting caught yet.”

Hotch gathered them. “We keep pushing. Garcia, continue enhancing and pinging all leads. JJ, Emily — put together a behavioral dossier that hypothesizes their next move based on ritual cadence and mobility. Derek, Luke, Tara—check the Castelli Romani logs and the private hire services. Rossi and I will push on diplomatic channels and pressure the Carabinieri for any surveillance logs we haven’t seen.”

They all nodded — a map of responsibility with teeth. The room smelled faintly of coffee and stale sweat, the exhausted tang of a team running itself at 110% capacity. No one pretended this would be easy. No one pretended it would be quick.

Outside, Rome kept moving — tourists, traffic, oblivious—while the BAU stitched together threads of data into a net that felt too fine to catch anything but air. Yet they worked. They argued. They cajoled, demanded, and negotiated. They pushed on the Carabinieri’s cooperation with a diplomatic intensity that made the local officers bristle, but the pressure bore fruit in small administrative yields: one additional camera feed authorized, three rental locations forced to reveal logs.

It was not closure. It was leverage.

At the end of the day, Garcia sent one message to the group, small and hard: We’ve got a lead on a private hire in Castelli Romani. The feed is noisy, but I’ll keep scrubbing. They moved by vehicle between 04:00–06:00. They’re being careful. So should we.

Hotch’s reply, simple and final: We will.

They left the screens humming and the notebooks open. They had threads now — no ropes, not yet. But threads that when pulled in the right sequence might tighten into something the captors had not anticipated: not instinct, but patience; not theater, but a methodical narrowing.

Outside, beyond Rome’s bustle, the villa lay quiet and patient, men inside sleeping like gods and others below chained and listening. The BAU had begun to reclaim the narrative. For now, it was slow. For now, it was static with the promise of signal.

The war room had turned stale with tension, the hum of laptops and the shuffle of files too thin to mask the crackle of nerves. Garcia’s monitors bloomed with maps of Rome, phone pings, heat trails of data, while the rest of the team moved in a rhythm half-drilled, half-desperate.

Rossi slammed a folder shut. “Their rooms give us nothing. No notes, no recordings, nothing but silence.” He swore under his breath. “Fucking silence.”

Emily leaned over one of the monitors, her jaw set tight. “Phones are clean too. No outgoing calls, no encrypted apps. If they’re sending messages, it’s not through anything digital.”

“Which means,” Tara added, voice low but firm, “they’re communicating the old-fashioned way. Paper, signals, or they aren’t communicating at all.”

Hotch’s eyes cut across the room, landing on each of them. “We assume Graham and Lecter anticipated this. Every hour we waste here, Spencer and Dexter are deeper in whatever they’ve planned.”

Derek braced his palms on the table. “So what, we just sweep every inch of Rome? We’ve already hit Parioli. Nothing but that Bible.”

“The Bible is something,” Rossi said, stabbing a finger at the photo of the underlined passage. “Lecter never leaves crumbs by accident. He’s taunting us. He’s telling us they’re alive, for now.”

JJ’s voice cracked sharper than usual. “Alive isn’t enough.” Her gaze flicked to Reid’s empty chair, the absence heavier than anything in the room.

Garcia, fingers flying across the keys, tried to fill the silence. “I’m running deeper sweeps on traffic cams. Nothing on Will or Hannibal, but—” Her screen chimed. “Wait. Two figures in Castelli Romani, dawn hours. Grainy, but the timing fits.”

Hotch moved closer. “Is it them?”

Garcia chewed her lip. “Too blurry to call, but—” She zoomed in. “One’s limping. Could be Hannibal. The posture matches.”

The table went still. Even Rossi’s breath seemed to hitch.

Hotch straightened. “We follow it. Mobilize now. Castelli Romani.”

The villa was silent except for the cicadas outside, their hum sawing against the heat of midday.

Chapter Text

Spencer stirred first this time, not with the fog of chemicals but with the ache of stiff muscles and dry throat. His head had slumped forward in an uneasy sleep, and now, waking fully, he felt the weight of his chains anew. Beside him, Dexter blinked awake too, rubbing the back of his skull against the cool wall.

“They left us here to stew,” Dexter muttered, voice rasping.

Spencer shifted against the radiator. “They’re not improvising. They’re waiting. That’s worse.”

The door opened with a careful click. Hannibal descended the steps, immaculate as if he hadn’t carried two unconscious men through Rome’s streets the night before. Will followed, the slab of glass pinched delicately between two fingers.

He tossed it, letting it land with a clink near Dexter’s feet again. “I thought perhaps you’d like to look at it twice. The first time, maybe you convinced yourself you misheard me.” His tone was dry, cruelly playful. “But objects tell their own truths. This one says you are not who you pretend to be.”

Dexter’s jaw locked. “And you are?”

Hannibal crouched, pouring water into two glasses from a carafe. He held one to Spencer’s lips without comment, then to Dexter’s. “Hydration,” he said smoothly. “This is no repetition. Now we speak without the fog. Now we see what remains when the masks slip.”

Will leaned against the wall, arms folded, his gaze narrowing on Dexter. “You’re still hiding. Even now. You hide from him”—he tipped his chin toward Spencer—“when he deserves the truth more than anyone else.”

Spencer’s pulse beat in his throat. “What truth?” His eyes darted to Dexter, searching, demanding.

Dexter exhaled, slow, as if buying time. “Don’t listen to him.”

Will smiled faintly, mockery edging his voice. “He can’t deny it forever. He’s collected lives the way some men collect coins. And he’ll collect yours, too, if you let him close enough.”

Spencer’s voice cut sharp, controlled. “Dexter. What is he talking about?”

Dexter met his stare, the silence between them louder than any admission.

Behind them, ghosts stirred — Harry, tight-jawed and severe, whispering warnings; Brian, smirking with perverse delight. And Hannibal and Will watched, patient as surgeons, waiting for the cut.

Hannibal lingered near the edge of the cellar’s low window, the sunlight striping his face in gold. “Names are fascinating, don’t you think? How quickly they become myths. Jack the Ripper, Zodiac, Il Mostro di Firenze. Titles carved into history, while their true selves remain smoke.”

Will’s eyes cut to Spencer. “You’ve studied enough cases to know the pattern. Some monsters don’t hide in shadows—they walk beside you, borrow your language, wear your badge.”

Spencer’s throat tightened. He forced his voice steady. “You’re talking about yourselves.”

Will’s laugh was sharp, humorless. “If I were talking about us, I wouldn’t need to guide you. You already know what we are. But him—” He nodded toward Dexter, still chained beside Reid, jaw clenched in silence. “—you can’t quite name him yet. Can you?”

Dexter said nothing. He kept his eyes forward, not on Spencer, not on Will.

Spencer pressed back against the radiator, mind working fast, too fast. “If he’s what you’re implying, I would know. I’ve read every file, I’ve profiled killers across decades. I would recognize—”

Hannibal cut him off with a soft, amused hum. “Recognition requires honesty, Doctor Reid. Not just of the subject, but of yourself. You’ve seen him, haven’t you? The edges that don’t fit. The way he carries silence like a blade. His fascination with spatter, with ritual.” Hannibal’s voice darkened. “He doesn’t study killers. He understands them. That is different.”

Spencer’s chest constricted. Memories flickered: Dexter’s long walks, his surgical way of describing wounds, the way he seemed too calm in the presence of mutilation. The trophies Will had mocked.

Will leaned closer, voice biting. “You’re a genius, Spencer. Don’t insult yourself pretending you can’t see it. Think of Miami. Think of the body dumps, the ocean graveyards. A butcher who turned cleaning into art.”

Spencer’s eyes widened, realization clawing its way in. “The Bay Harbor Butcher…” The words left him in a whisper, as though saying them aloud made them true. His gaze snapped to Dexter, searching, horrified. “It’s you.”

Silence stretched. Dexter’s jaw worked, but he didn’t answer.

Hannibal’s smile was thin, predatory. “And now you’ve named him. One of the most prolific serial killers of the last century, sitting beside you in chains.”

Will straightened, satisfaction flickering in his eyes. “Not because we told you. Because you saw it yourself. That’s the only way truth ever lasts.”

Spencer couldn’t look away from Dexter. He wanted to deny it, to argue—but his mind, that terrible machine, had already assembled the pieces into a picture he couldn’t unsee.

Dexter finally turned to him, eyes flat, guarded. For once, he had no mask, no excuses. Just the weight of being seen.

Spencer shook his head, too quickly, as though the denial itself could erase the thought. “No. No, it doesn’t make sense. The Bay Harbor Butcher operated in Miami, years ago. Hundreds of victims. He’s—he’s a ghost story.” His words spilled fast, like water over stones, trying to drown the shape forming in his mind.

Will tilted his head, eyes never leaving Spencer. “Ghost stories begin with men, Spencer. Flesh and blood. Someone cut, someone cleaned, someone left the bodies in neat parcels for the tide to carry.”

Spencer’s throat closed. He wanted to stand, to pace, to retreat into numbers and theories, but the chains locked him in place. His mind latched onto patterns. Ritual killings. Perfect dissections. The Butcher who had eluded them all. And Dexter—quiet, meticulous Dexter—who had joined their team without leaving even a ripple.

“No,” Spencer whispered, louder this time, desperate. “He’s an agent. He’s… he’s one of us. I would have known.”

Hannibal’s voice was velvet over steel. “Known? Or refused to see? Genius blinds itself, too, if the truth is too close to the heart.”

Dexter’s chest rose and fell too fast. He shook his head, voice a low rasp. “Stop it.” His eyes cut to Will, fury and something raw beneath it. “You don’t get to use him like this.”

Spencer turned toward him, eyes wide, searching. “Tell me they’re lying. Tell me.”

Dexter opened his mouth, then closed it. His lips trembled against the weight of words unsaid.

Will stepped forward, crouching until his face was level with Spencer’s. His tone was cruelly patient. “Do you really need him to confess? You’ve seen the glass. You’ve seen the way he looks at blood, not with disgust but with recognition. You’ve seen him move like a predator among prey.”

Spencer flinched. Memories surfaced: Dexter’s eyes tracing the seams of the crucified cardinals, his calm dissection of the journalist’s corpse, his too-eager volunteering to recheck the morgue. At the time, they had seemed like quirks. Now, they fit too neatly.

He shook his head again, almost violently. “No. No, it’s impossible.”

Hannibal smiled faintly, almost pitying. “Impossible is the last refuge of the brilliant when confronted with truth.”

Dexter finally broke, voice ragged, his composure stripped bare. “Don’t do this. Don’t look at me like that.” His eyes locked on Spencer, horror in their depths—not at Will or Hannibal, but at being seen by the one person he hadn’t wanted to see.

Spencer’s voice cracked. “You’re the Bay Harbor Butcher.”

The words echoed in the stone chamber, heavier than the chains, undeniable.

Dexter lowered his head, the fight gone from his shoulders. For the first time since Spencer had met him, he looked cornered—not by Hannibal or Will, but by the truth itself.

The door shut softly behind Hannibal and Will, their footsteps receding, but the silence they left behind was unbearable. Spencer sat slumped against the radiator, wrists sore from the chains, breath shallow. He couldn’t look at Dexter, not yet. His mind was an engine, sputtering and choking on too much fuel.

He finally spoke, his voice a cracked whisper:

“You lied to me.”

Dexter flinched as though struck. His eyes flicked up, searching Spencer’s face, but found only the hollow space between them. “Spencer—”

“No.” Spencer’s voice rose, still thin but sharp. “Don’t say my name like that. You lied. Not just to me, to all of us. To the team. To the Bureau. To every family that lost someone, every victim—”

“I didn’t make them victims.” Dexter’s tone was rough, desperate. “They already were what they were. Monsters. Killers. Rapists. I—” He swallowed hard, chest heaving. “I just made sure they couldn’t hurt anyone else.”

Spencer’s lips parted, but no sound came out. His throat worked like he was trying not to choke.

“They were guilty,” Dexter pressed, his voice quieter now, a frantic plea. “Every single one of them. My father taught me a Code—Harry’s Code. Never kill the innocent. Never kill without proof. Make sure they deserve it. And if they do, make sure they don’t get another chance.”

Spencer laughed once, sharp and humorless. “Proof? What kind of proof? Not the kind we take to court. Not the kind that holds up in trial. Just the kind that makes sense to you, in your head.”

“It was enough.” Dexter’s words were steady, but his knuckles whitened against the iron at his back. “Because the system fails, Spencer. You know it does. How many times have we seen it? How many times have we both watched men walk free on technicalities, watched women beaten down because the evidence was ‘insufficient’? How many times have you gone home sick because justice didn’t happen?”

Spencer’s eyes burned. He wanted to deny it, wanted to say Dexter was twisting it, but the memories rose unbidden: killers acquitted, predators released, the grief of families crushed beneath red tape. His jaw clenched so tight it hurt.

“That doesn’t make you right.” His voice shook. “It doesn’t make you the arbiter of who lives and who dies.”

Dexter’s mouth twitched, almost a smile, but it was brittle, broken. “I never claimed to be right. Only necessary.”

Spencer stared at him, stunned into silence.

Then, softly, Dexter added, “You’re not afraid of me.”

Spencer blinked, startled.

“You’re afraid of yourself,” Dexter continued, reading him with painful accuracy. “Afraid because some part of you—some small, dark part—understands. And worse, it doesn’t want to condemn me for it.”

Spencer’s breath hitched. He turned his head away, pressing his temple against the cool metal of the radiator. “You don’t know me.”

Dexter let out a humorless laugh. “Don’t I?”

Silence stretched between them again, thicker this time, the kind that pressed into the ribs.

Spencer’s voice broke through at last, low and unsteady. “I should hate you. God, I should hate you. You’ve killed more people than—than anyone I’ve ever studied. A hundred times more. And I don’t. I don’t hate you. That’s what terrifies me.”

Dexter’s throat worked, his own horror raw and visible. “I didn’t want you to know. Not you. Anyone else, I could live with their judgment. But you…” His words faltered. “You were supposed to see me as good. At least good enough.”

Spencer turned his head at that, finally meeting Dexter’s eyes. There was no mask there anymore, no polished smile, just the ruin of a man laid bare.

“Good enough,” Spencer repeated, the words tasting bitter. “For what? To sit with us, eat with us, work cases with us, pretend you belonged?”

Dexter didn’t answer immediately. He licked his lips, glanced down at his chained hands, then back up. “To be human.”

Spencer’s chest constricted painfully. For a moment he wanted to scream, to call him a monster, to draw the line hard and deep—but the word caught in his throat, refused to come. Because he saw, in Dexter’s face, not a monster but a man terrified of his own reflection.

And worse, Spencer saw himself reflected there too.

His voice was a whisper now, ragged. “You’re the Bay Harbor Butcher.”

Dexter’s eyes closed, just for a second, as though hearing it again still broke something inside him. When he opened them, they glistened. “Yes.”

Spencer pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until stars burst behind them, until the pain gave him something to hold. “God help me, I don’t know if I can hate you for it.”

Dexter’s chest shook, one sharp exhale that wasn’t quite a sob. He leaned his head back against the wall and whispered, “Neither do I.”

Unseen by them both, in the next room, Hannibal and Will listened, silent and still, their trap tightening.

The villa was quiet, its windows shuttered against the climbing sun. Will leaned against the cool marble sill, watching the dust motes drift in the strip of light that forced its way through. Hannibal sat across from him at a small table, hands folded as though this were a matter of etiquette rather than strategy.

“They’re speaking already,” Hannibal murmured, a faint smile on his lips. “Confession without coercion. It never takes long.”

Will glanced at him, expression tight. “Dexter’s cracked open, sure. But Reid?” He shook his head. “He’s been holding that darkness in a cage for years. He wears his sensitivity like armor. He’s not going to just hand it over.”

“Every cage has a key.” Hannibal’s tone was patient, almost indulgent. “You know this better than anyone.”

Will pushed off the sill, pacing a slow circle. “Dexter is easy. His secret is too big to hide forever. A man who kills that often leaves ripples. The Bay Harbor Butcher has already been mythologized — half bogeyman, half folk hero. All we must do is leave the right breadcrumbs, and Reid’s team will see what’s in front of them.”

Hannibal inclined his head. “A drop of blood. A name in the right place. A whisper that becomes undeniable. His own trophies will betray him, as all vanity eventually does.”

Will snorted softly. “Not sure I’d call Dexter vain.”

“Vanity does not always manifest as beauty,” Hannibal replied smoothly. “It is also the arrogance of believing one can shape the world in one’s own moral image. His Code is as much a mirror as any jewel.”

Will paused, studying him, then nodded. “And Reid?”

Here Hannibal’s eyes brightened, a glint of genuine curiosity threading through the calm. “Ah, Reid. He has built his life around intellect, control, predictability. He fears chaos, and yet—he is drawn to it. Drawn to those who carry it. Jason Gideon saw it in him. Cat Adams saw it. You and I see it. Even Dexter sees it.”

Will’s jaw tightened, unease flickering in his gaze. “He’s not us.”

“Not yet.” Hannibal’s voice was silken, deliberate. “But the seed is there. He dreams of blood even if he denies it. What he lacks is permission.”

Will’s head tilted, skeptical. “Permission to kill?”

Hannibal steepled his fingers, considering. “To embrace what he already knows. That violence is not merely destruction. It can be expression. Connection. Freedom.”

For a moment Will said nothing, then exhaled through his nose. “You think we can make him kill.”

“We don’t need to make him,” Hannibal corrected. “We need only prepare the stage. The choice will be his. As it always is.”

Will’s lips curved, bitter and knowing. “You’ll groom him like you groomed me.”

That drew the faintest flicker of amusement from Hannibal. “Not groom. Invite.” He leaned forward slightly, his voice low, intimate. “Imagine it, Will. Spencer Reid, guided by his own hands, stepping into blood. Not because we force him. Because he desires it.”

Will looked away, out toward the shuttered window, jaw clenched. A long silence stretched before he said, “And if he doesn’t?”

“Then he will be broken by the dissonance,” Hannibal replied without hesitation. “And in his team’s eyes, he will falter. Either way, he is separated from them. Either way, he becomes ours.”

The weight of that hung in the room, heavy and inevitable.

Finally, Will muttered, almost to himself, “And Dexter?”

Hannibal’s smile sharpened. “Dexter will damn himself. Reid only needs to realize he no longer wishes to stop him.”

The war room in the Carabinieri headquarters had grown stifling. Maps of Rome sprawled across the tables, marked with circles, pins, and strings in red and black. Photographs of crime scenes and suspects glared back at the FBI from the walls.

Hotch stood at the center, arms folded tight, his expression unreadable but hard as granite. Around him, the rest of the team wrestled with exhaustion and rage.

Garcia was pacing, her phone clutched tight. “They’re ghosts. I’m combing through traffic cameras, credit card slips, train manifests, rental cars, Airbnb logs—if they so much as sneezed on a fiber-optic cable, I’ll find it.”

Derek shook his head, slamming his palm on the table. “That’s just it, Baby Girl. They’re not sneezing. They’re laughing at us, watching us run in circles while they sit back and drink wine.”

“Or blood,” Rossi muttered darkly, pouring himself another shot of espresso from the little pot on the sideboard. His eyes were rimmed red, the veins in his temple standing out. “They’ve always been performers. You don’t chase Lecter and Graham by expecting them to behave like ordinary fugitives. They’re staging an opera, and we’re stumbling through the chorus line.”

Tara leaned over the map, fingers tapping a precise rhythm on Parioli, then Piazza Mincio, then the empty stretch of green where the Caffarella park lay. “We’re treating this like a trail. It isn’t. It’s a canvas.” Her voice was steady, clinical, but her eyes were sharp. “The misdirection isn’t sloppy. It’s deliberate. Hannibal knows exactly what evidence to leave and what to scrub. He wants us chasing what’s absent.”

Luke frowned. “Absent how?”

Tara pointed at the notes pinned over the apartment in Parioli. “No fingerprints. No DNA. No discarded food, no hair, not even dust out of place. Except for what they wanted us to see—the Bible, the chains, the wine. If it’s too clean, that’s the tell. They curated the scene for us.”

Rossi slammed his espresso down. “Exactly. And the message isn’t just ‘we’re here.’ It’s ‘we own you.’ They’re dictating the investigation, step by step.”

Hotch nodded once, grimly. “Which means every false lead we follow is time lost. And time is the one thing Spencer and Dexter don’t have.”

Silence followed. Everyone knew it was true.

Garcia stopped pacing, her voice small for once. “So… what if we’re not looking for where they’ve been? What if we should be asking where they want us to go?”

Derek swore under his breath, dragging a hand over his shaved head. “That’s the thing, though. With Lecter, every damn street in this city is a stage. Rome’s got more history than the whole damn Bureau. He could pick anywhere.”

Tara exhaled, pressing her palms flat against the map. “Which is why we stop thinking like cops and start thinking like them. Symbolism, spectacle, narrative. That’s where they’ll move next. Not logistics—meaning.”

Hotch let the words settle, then spoke, low and sharp: “Then find me the meaning. Every hour we spend here chasing ghosts, they get further ahead. And we lose Reid. We lose Morgan. We lose everything.”

The room fell into tense, vibrating silence. Strings stretched tight across the map quivered in the air-conditioning, as though mocking them.

For all their training, for all their brilliance, the BAU were no longer hunters. They were being herded.

The basement smelled of stone and damp earth, iron bars of the old windows letting in slivers of daylight that barely touched the floor. Spencer tugged at the chain on his wrist, testing the slack, listening to the faint rattle echo against the walls. Across from him, Dexter sat with his back to the same radiator, arms loose at his sides, face unreadable.

The silence pressed down until Spencer finally broke it, his voice low but clear.

“We can’t just sit here,” he said, his tone edged with that restless impatience only he could wield. “We have to do something about our situation.” His eyes locked onto Dexter’s, unflinching despite the weight of what he’d pieced together. “I’m going to ignore—for now—the fact that you’re a prolific serial killer. Because the alternative is doing nothing, and I’m not dying chained to a radiator in some countryside villa while the team stumbles around Rome.”

Dexter tilted his head, lips twitching faintly. “You say ‘ignore,’ but you’re not really ignoring it. You’ve catalogued it, indexed it, and shoved it into one of your mental drawers marked ‘later.’”

Spencer gave him a dry, almost mocking look. “Congratulations, you’ve just described how my brain works. But unless you plan on killing me right here, which would be self-defeating since we’re both in the same mess, I suggest we focus on something else.”

Dexter leaned back against the cold metal, thoughtful. “The team doesn’t know where we are. That much is true. Lecter and Graham made sure of it. But they didn’t kill us. That means we’re useful. Which buys us time.”

Spencer frowned. “Time for what? Psychological games? Experiments? To see how long it takes before one of us breaks?”

Dexter didn’t answer immediately. He studied Spencer, seeing the tension in his shoulders, the intelligence firing behind his eyes, the refusal to yield even when cornered. Finally, he said, almost softly, “Time for us to decide what kind of survivors we’re going to be.”

Spencer exhaled, a bitter laugh escaping him. “You make it sound like a choice.”

Dexter’s voice hardened. “It is. You’re not stupid, Spencer. You’ve already seen it. They want to turn you. They want to see if you’ll give in. If you’ll… let it out.”

The words hung heavy between them. Spencer’s hands clenched into fists, jaw tightening. “I’ve spent my entire life proving I’m not my mother. That I’m not my father. That I’m not broken. I am not going to give Hannibal Lecter the satisfaction of being right about me.”

Dexter’s gaze darkened, but there was no mockery in it, no cruelty. Only recognition. “And I’ve spent my life killing the ones I tell myself deserve it. Different roads. Same passenger.”

Spencer shook his head sharply, forcing the thought away. “It doesn’t matter right now. What matters is getting out before they decide we’re expendable.”

Dexter gave a small, knowing smile. “Finally, something we agree on.”

The chains rattled again as Spencer adjusted against the radiator, eyes sweeping the basement walls, searching for any weakness, any point of leverage. His mind was already racing, calculating probabilities, cataloguing every detail that might be turned to their advantage.

For once, Dexter stayed quiet. He could see it: the profiler’s mind in motion, refusing despair. He liked that.

Because for all the chains and walls and predators above them, there was one undeniable truth: Spencer Reid was not broken yet.

And Dexter Morgan had no intention of letting him break.

The door opened; footsteps on the stairs. No speeches, no ceremony. Will set down a tray: bread torn into hunks, a wedge of pecorino, a small bowl of olives, two glasses of water. Hannibal followed with a second glass bottle and a folded linen napkin, as if manners still applied.

“Eat,” Will said. “You’ll need your head.”

Spencer’s chains scraped as he shifted upright. Dexter watched the tray without moving until Hannibal knelt, lifted a glass to Spencer’s mouth first, then to Dexter’s. No flourish, no gloating—just the measured insistence of a physician making sure a patient swallows.

Hannibal sat back on his heels, eyes steady on Spencer. “You’ve killed before.”

Spencer gave a thin, dry smile. “Is this dinner theater? Cheese and character assassination?”

“Not assassination,” Will said. “Inventory.”

Hannibal didn’t blink. “Tobias Hankel. You shot him. Your first. Your hand steadied as you aimed. Your pulse slowed. You found the calm.”

Spencer’s jaw tightened. “Self-defense.”

“Rafael,” Will added, almost gently. “You chose the shot. You remember the stillness afterward. You didn’t feel guilty.”

Spencer let out a small breath that could have been a laugh. “Thank you for the recap, gentlemen. Do you want me to sign something?”

Hannibal’s head tilted. “You want to argue facts with the facts. What interests me is the sensation. The way necessity unclipped something inside you and it breathed.” He leaned in a fraction. “You remember that breath.”

“Everyone remembers not dying,” Spencer said, voice even. “Everyone remembers stopping someone who would kill them.” A beat. “And I remember not drowning in remorse. That scared me. Is that the line you want to hear?”

Will’s eyes warmed with something like approval. “There it is.”

“Congratulations,” Spencer said, brittle. “You’ve found my least favorite truth.”

Hannibal turned a little, letting his gaze slide to Dexter. “He names it. He doesn’t flee it.” A pause that was almost kind. “You bend it into a system.”

Dexter didn’t rise to the bait. “Leave him alone.”

“We are,” Will said. “We’re leaving him alone with himself.” He nudged the bread toward Spencer with his knuckles. “Eat.”

Spencer took a piece because his body insisted. The crust crackled; he chewed like it was labor, eyes fixed on nothing.

Hannibal placed a small object on the floor between them, a deliberate punctuation: a clean slab of glass, blood dried to a thin rust line at one edge. He didn’t look at Dexter as he set it down.

Dexter’s eyes flicked to it anyway. Shame and hunger crossed his face so quickly Spencer couldn’t tell which landed.

Will spoke softly, not to Dexter this time, but to Spencer. “You think you’re safe because you refuse what you wanted to feel. But refusing isn’t the same as choosing. It’s just pretending the choice doesn’t exist.”

Spencer swallowed, bread dry in his mouth. “Is this where you tell me I’m like you?”

Hannibal’s answer was immediate. “No. You are like you. Which is worse. Because you cannot exile yourself from yourself.”

Dexter cut in, harsher than he meant to. “Enough.”

Hannibal looked at him as if he’d expected the interruption. “You don’t want him in pieces,” he said, almost pleasantly. “Neither do we. We prefer a whole man. Whole men make better decisions.”

Spencer’s eyes flicked between them. “You keep saying ‘decision’ like there’s some clean choice at the end of this.”

“There is,” Will said. “There always is. Whether you admit it or not.”

Silence. The olives sat untouched, shining in their brine.

Hannibal rose, smoothed the napkin on the tray with two fingers, then glanced at Will. Something unspoken passed between them. Will bent, set a small, innocuous black square at the baseboard—no larger than a matchbox—and tapped it once with his thumb. A tiny light blinked and went dark.

“Talk,” Will said to Spencer, to Dexter, to the room. “We’ll be upstairs.”

Hannibal’s gaze met Spencer’s one last time. “You are not afraid of him,” he said, a slight inclination toward Dexter. “You are afraid of the part of you that doesn’t condemn him.” No malice in it; no comfort either. Simply a diagnosis.

They went. The door closed. Footsteps faded.

For a long minute, neither man touched the food.

Spencer broke first. “I’m not letting them write me.”

Dexter’s mouth twitched. “You just let them read you.”

Spencer’s laugh scraped his throat. “You think I don’t know my own file? I’ve been living with the footnotes for decades.” He dragged a hand across his face, then dropped it, palm open on the stone. “I don’t blame you.”

Dexter blinked. “That’s the part you should take back.”

“I don’t,” Spencer said, and the certainty in his voice scared him more than anything Hannibal had said. “I don’t blame you for wanting the world safer. I don’t blame you for acting when the system fails. I blame you for lying to us about who you are. I blame you for making me see it and then asking me to pretend I didn’t.”

Dexter stared at the glass slab. “I wasn’t asking you to pretend.”

“You were asking me to stay blind,” Spencer said. “I don’t do blind.”

Dexter nodded once, the admission a crack opening. “Okay.”

Spencer’s voice lowered. “They’re going to push me. Not to be you—worse. To be whatever proves them right. And I can’t—” He broke off, jaw tight. “I can’t live half-open. It hurts. It’s… noise.”

Dexter’s answer surprised them both. “Then don’t be half anything.”

Spencer looked at him sharply. “You’re telling me to—what? Kill? Adopt your Code? Pick a trophy and start filing?”

“No,” Dexter said, quick and hard. “No.” He drew a breath, steadied. “I’m saying decide what you are without them deciding for you. Not Hannibal’s theater. Not my rules. Yours.” He searched Spencer’s face, as if looking for a door that might open. “If you keep pretending the capacity isn’t there, it will tear you apart. If you let them define it, they’ll weaponize you. If you define it, maybe you survive.”

Spencer’s fingers curled against the floor. “Define it how?”

“Start with what you won’t do,” Dexter said. “What you won’t become. Then what you will protect. Draw the line there and defend it.” He swallowed. “Even if it means you never cross it again.”

Spencer studied him, something wary and luminous behind the exhaustion. “You’re trying to save me from you.”

Dexter didn’t smile. “I’m trying to save you from the middle.”

The room listened to itself breathe.

Spencer leaned back against the radiator, closed his eyes, and spoke as if he were cataloging data aloud to hear the shape of it. “I have killed. I did not feel remorse the first time. I am not ashamed of not dying. I am ashamed that the lack of remorse didn’t destroy me. I believe the law matters. I believe the law fails. I believe I can see patterns the law can’t. I believe that terrifies me.” He opened his eyes. “And I believe if I let them push me, they’ll make me prove their thesis.”

Dexter nodded slowly. “So don’t.”

Spencer huffed. “Solid plan. Step one: don’t.”

“Step one,” Dexter said, “decide you won’t give them the scene they want. Step two: we get out of here.” He angled his head toward the tray. “Chains rust. Linen tears. People go to sleep.”

Spencer glanced at the matchbox at the baseboard, the one Will had tapped. “They’re listening.”

“Then let them hear this,” Dexter said, turning his head toward the invisible ear. He raised his voice just enough. “You won’t turn him into a copy of yourselves. If he crosses any line, it won’t be on your stage.”

Spencer’s mouth tightened. “That sounded noble.”

“It was petty,” Dexter said. “I hate being predictable.”

A beat. Then Spencer reached for another piece of bread, tore it in half, and pushed the larger portion across the stone until it touched Dexter’s fingertips.

“Fine,” he said. “We don’t give them the scene.”

Dexter picked up the bread. It felt like a pact.

Upstairs, the house shifted. Somewhere a floorboard murmured. The light in the tiny device by the baseboard blinked once and went dark again.

Spencer spoke into the space between them, quiet, a new thing forming in the shape of a decision. “If I ever do it, it won’t be because they said I would.”

Dexter answered without hesitation. “It won’t be because I asked you to.”

“Good,” Spencer said. He tilted his head back to the wall and closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to hold the line he’d just drawn.

Dexter watched him, and for the first time since the chains closed, the panic inside him eased—not because the danger was gone, but because there was finally a direction that wasn’t surrender.

Above them, two men listened. Below, two men refused to perform.

The kitchen of the villa was simple—stone counters, worn wooden cupboards, a stove that smelled faintly of olive oil. Sunlight had bled out of the sky, leaving the room bathed in amber from the overhead lamp. The world outside was quiet, cicadas droning faintly in the trees.

Will was already moving with a kind of ease, sleeves rolled, knife in hand, slicing tomatoes into thin, even rounds. He tossed them into a bowl with basil, coarse salt, and a thin stream of oil. Hannibal leaned against the counter, corkscrew in hand, pulling open a bottle of Chianti.

“Your cut is precise,” Hannibal murmured. His voice was low, indulgent, not instructing—observing.

Will smirked faintly without looking up. “I’ve been paying attention.” He slid the knife across the cutting board, brushed the blade clean with his thumb. “I’m not your student anymore.”

“No,” Hannibal agreed. He poured the wine, the soft glug-glug-glug filling the kitchen. “You are not.”

Will set the knife down, reached for a handful of garlic cloves, smashed them flat beneath the blade, and scraped them into a pan. His movements were sharp, deliberate. Hannibal moved closer, brushing his fingers across Will’s wrist as he took the bottle to refill Will’s glass. Their hands touched and lingered.

“You’ve made a home of this,” Hannibal said softly.

Will gave a small laugh. “Domestic bliss? That’s what you’re calling it?”

Hannibal leaned in, lips brushing the side of Will’s neck, just beneath his ear. “I call it necessary.”

Will’s head tilted slightly, exposing his throat, but his knife hand kept working—slicing onions, sweeping them into the pan where oil shimmered. The sizzle filled the air.

They cooked together as equals. Will stirred while Hannibal salted. Hannibal tested the heat of the pan while Will adjusted the seasoning. There was no hierarchy here, no student and master, just two men sharing the labor, each anticipating the other’s hand.

As Will leaned across him to reach the pepper, Hannibal’s hand drifted against his back, steadying him. Will smirked again, eyes sharp. “Careful. I might start thinking you like this.”

“I do,” Hannibal said, without hesitation.

They stood close, shoulders brushing, the warmth of the stove heating their faces. Will plated the tomatoes, Hannibal shaved thin curls of cheese over them. The domesticity was real—ordinary food, ordinary wine—but every gesture hummed with something darker beneath.

Will poured more wine into his own glass, swirled it, and finally broke the silence. “They’ll never be the same. Reid and Morgan.”

Hannibal arched an eyebrow. “Dexter.”

“Dexter,” Will corrected himself with a short nod. He drank, let the burn coat his throat. “They’ve been chained together. Pressed into each other’s truths. That doesn’t come undone.”

Hannibal’s mouth curved, faint and knowing. “No, it does not. Bonds forged under pressure are unbreakable. Even if they resist, even if they pretend otherwise.”

Will’s jaw tightened as he sliced bread into thick slabs. “They’ll fall into each other. It’s inevitable.”

Hannibal’s hand slid lightly along his arm, stopping just at the elbow. “You say it as though you envy them.”

Will glanced sideways at him, eyes shadowed but amused. “No. I’m saying it because I recognize it. You and me. Them and each other. It’s the same shape, different edges.”

Hannibal leaned in, kissed the back of Will’s neck again, slower this time, letting the words sink in. His voice was a whisper against Will’s skin. “Then let them discover what we already know.”

Will set the bread down, knife clattering softly against the counter. He didn’t turn, but he didn’t move away either. “And if they hate us for it?”

“Then they are still bound,” Hannibal murmured. “Hate and love are merely reflections of the same tether.”

Will’s lips curved, almost a smile. He lifted the pan, slid the onions and garlic onto a waiting plate, and reached for his glass of wine. Their shoulders brushed once more as Hannibal placed his hand against the small of Will’s back, grounding him in the moment.

The kitchen smelled of basil, bread, and simmering oil. Two killers, cooking dinner. Two men, imagining the lives of the other pair chained below.

“They’re linked forever,” Will said, almost to himself, raising the wine to his lips. “They just don’t know it yet.”

“You know who I’ve been thinking about lately?” Hannibal asked, holding out a glass.

Will glanced at him, wary. “Who?”

“Alana and Margot.”

Will huffed out something between a laugh and a scoff. “The happy wives.”

“A quieter mirror of us,” Hannibal said, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of tomato he’d stolen. “They built their little fortress, sent their warnings, wrote their letters.”

Will’s hands paused over the bread. “Remember the Stones.”

“Yes.” Hannibal’s voice was amused, indulgent. “Three words, heavy with their own importance.”

“Sounds like something you’d write,” Will shot back.

Hannibal arched an eyebrow. “Please. My letters are never so vague.”

Will snorted, smearing garlic over the toast. “No, yours usually come with blood, or an ear.”

“That was one time,” Hannibal said with exaggerated dignity.

Will’s laugh came sharp and sudden, filling the kitchen. Hannibal looked pleased, almost smug. He leaned closer, as if confiding something. “Boring is a crime, you know. Perhaps the only unforgivable one.”

Will gave him a sidelong look. “You’d put half the world away for that.”

“I’d start with etiquette classes,” Hannibal said, deadpan.

That did it. Will barked out another laugh, shaking his head. “Fuck you.”

“I love you,” Hannibal replied, so smoothly it could have been another joke. But his eyes stayed steady on Will’s, and for a moment the words hung between them with a weight neither chose to break.

They carried their plates to the table, simple food arranged with more care than it deserved: tomatoes, bruschetta slick with olive oil, slices of cheese. Wine glowed red in their glasses.

Will leaned back, chewing slowly. “Mirrors don’t always show what you want to see.”

“True,” Hannibal agreed, lips twitching. “Sometimes they show a tomato hacked to death.”

Will’s grin widened. “Don’t make me stab you with this fork.”

“Better men have tried.”

Their laughter came easy now, back and forth, warm and sharp at once. The fleeting mention of Alana and Margot faded quickly, replaced by food, wine, and the rare gift of making each other laugh.

The Parioli apartment sat in an unnatural stillness, as though it were waiting for them.

The Italian forensic team had stripped the place bare hours earlier, carrying their kits out with the certainty of men who believed they had seen everything worth seeing. The men of the BAU had accepted that verdict, too, but JJ, Tara, and Emily had exchanged a look before quietly returning.

Now, as the evening sun sank, the three women moved carefully through the rooms.

JJ’s voice broke the silence first, soft but firm. “We’ve all worked enough cases to know it — men look for the obvious. Prints, drops, smears. Things they can catalog and bag.” She glanced at her friends, her blond hair catching the light. “We know to look for what doesn’t scream.”

Emily gave a small smile. “We’re women. We’re used to reading silences.”

Tara nodded in agreement, her eyes sweeping the apartment. “So let’s read this room.”

They split naturally, like water flowing around obstacles. JJ paused before a framed print on the wall — something classical, but off-center, slightly crooked as if adjusted by a hand that wanted it that way. “This was staged,” she murmured. “Not left behind.”

Emily crouched by a low table, noting the way a pair of wine glasses sat neatly rinsed, but not put away. “This isn’t about mess. It’s about intention. Someone wanted this to look finished but still… lived-in.”

Tara lingered near the window, fingertips brushing the heavy curtain. “Everything suggests presence without permanence. A signal, not a home.”

It was then that JJ noticed something at the base of a small cabinet near the door. “Wait.” She bent down, fingers reaching into the shadow. A glint of glass came free.

A syringe.

Perfectly clean on the outside. But inside — a faint residue clung stubbornly in the barrel, pale and almost pearlescent.

Emily exhaled slowly, her stomach tightening. “That doesn’t belong to the scene. That was placed.”

Tara’s gaze sharpened. “Not blood. Some kind of agent.” She leaned closer but didn’t touch it. “Whatever it is, it wasn’t left by mistake.”

JJ’s brows knit together. “So what are we looking at? A message?”

Emily didn’t answer right away. She turned the syringe in her gloved hand, watching the residue shift faintly under the light. “It’s too deliberate to be random. This isn’t a tool left behind. It’s a symbol.”

They fell into silence for a moment, the apartment heavy around them.

Emily set the syringe gently back on the cabinet, her hand lingering over it. “Then the only question is — who was meant to read it?”

The sterile light of the Carabinieri lab cast long shadows on the walls. The syringe lay in the center of the steel table, its faint residue glimmering as though mocking their scrutiny.

JJ leaned forward, gloved hands steady. “Test results came back. It’s not blood. It’s not ink. It’s a paralytic compound.”

Tara’s brows lifted. “Fast-acting. Clean. It doesn’t leave many traces once metabolized.”

Emily folded her arms, her jaw tight. “So it’s a hunter’s tool. Whoever used this didn’t want a fight. They wanted silence.”

Garcia’s face flickered on the laptop screen, the colors of her apartment glowing neon behind her. “Okay, so my babies handed me a compound to dig into, and I’ve spent the last two hours falling into a medical rabbit hole that smells suspiciously of conspiracy. This stuff? It’s not just rare — it’s infamous.” She clicked a few keys and a report filled the screen. “It’s been found in dozens of bodies linked to one specific case. Miami, early 2000s. The Bay Harbor Butcher.”

A silence fell over the room, heavy and immediate.

JJ frowned. “That case was closed.”

Garcia nodded quickly. “Closed and sealed. The FBI and Miami Metro agreed the Bay Harbor Butcher was Sergeant James Doakes. Cop on the inside, hiding in plain sight, you know the drill. Except—” She leaned closer to the camera, lowering her voice theatrically. “Doakes died in an explosion before he could be brought to trial. Case wrapped with a neat little bow.”

Emily shook her head slowly. “And yet here we are, holding a syringe with the same signature compound.”

Tara’s voice was even, but the weight behind it pressed like stone. “Which means either someone is deliberately copying the Bay Harbor Butcher… or someone has resurrected him.”

JJ exhaled sharply. “We’ve been chasing two men — Lecter and Graham. But what if they’re not just playing their own game? What if they’ve brought an old ghost back into the mix?”

Garcia tapped her keyboard rapidly, pulling up old headlines. A grainy photo of Doakes appeared — severe eyes, square jaw, his badge glinting in the Miami sun. “This is the guy who was named. Butchered bodies drained, bagged, and dumped at sea. Miami was drowning in terror before the case closed. Every victim had this compound in their system.”

Emily’s eyes drifted back to the syringe. “Lecter left this for us. He wants us to see the connection. He wants us to think about Miami.”

Tara tilted her head. “But why Doakes? Why resurrect a case that was supposedly solved?”

JJ’s expression darkened. “Maybe because the solution was wrong.”

The words lingered in the air like smoke.

Garcia, unusually subdued now, closed the file on Doakes. “If Lecter and Graham are trying to tell us something, it’s this: the Bay Harbor Butcher never died in that fire.”

The three women exchanged a long look. The syringe gleamed between them — not just evidence, but a challenge.

The syringe lay in its evidence bag on the table of the hotel’s makeshift command room, a sliver of glass and steel catching the fluorescent light. Around it sat the entire team, faces grim, exhaustion sharpening the lines under their eyes.

Hotch stood at the head of the table. He didn’t raise his voice; he never had to. “We’ve confirmed it. The compound inside that syringe is identical to the one used by the Bay Harbor Butcher.”

A murmur rippled through the room. JJ’s lips pressed together. Rossi muttered something in Italian under his breath. Derek leaned forward, arms crossed, disbelief shadowing his features.

“It can’t be,” Luke said. “That case is done. Doakes—”

“Doakes was convenient,” Rossi cut in sharply. “A dead man can’t defend himself. If the Bureau wanted to close it, they would have. And they did.”

Emily’s eyes flicked to the syringe again, then back to Hotch. “So Lecter and Graham are telling us the Butcher’s still alive.”

“No,” Hotch said evenly. “They’re telling us more than that.” He let the words hang a moment. “They’re telling us something we don’t know about ourselves. About Spencer. About Dexter.”

The room went still.

JJ blinked. “Hotch—”

“They left this deliberately,” Hotch continued, gesturing to the syringe. “They know we’d recognize it. They know Garcia would tie it back to Miami. Lecter doesn’t waste symbols. He thinks there’s something hidden in plain sight, something we’ve missed — and he wants us to choke on it.”

Derek swore under his breath. “You’re saying this is personal.”

Hotch’s gaze swept across the team, pausing on each of them in turn. “It always was.”

Tara leaned forward, fingers laced. “If they want us to think the Butcher is alive, then they’re implying one of our own knows more than they’ve said.”

The words dropped like stones into the silence.

Garcia, pale on the laptop screen, adjusted her glasses. “Um, hi, can we not? Spencer and Dexter are already— they’re already missing. Hannibal and Graham are monsters, manipulators. They want us paranoid. They want us turning on each other.”

Rossi’s voice was gravel. “Paranoia doesn’t make the Butcher disappear.”

JJ shook her head, voice tight. “Spencer’s not a killer. And Dexter… he’s been nothing but steady since he joined.”

Luke exhaled sharply. “And yet they’re the ones missing. Together.”

Hotch raised a hand, silencing the noise. His voice cut clean. “No one here doubts Spencer. Or Dexter. But we’d be naïve not to consider why Lecter and Graham want us to.”

Morgan leaned back, jaw tense. “So we play along. Assume they’re taunting us. We dig. We follow. Eventually, Lecter and Graham slip. That’s how this ends.”

Emily’s tone was steady, but her eyes betrayed unease. “Or we dig… and we don’t like what we find.”

Hotch closed the evidence folder with a decisive snap. “Either way, we follow the lead. That’s our job. That’s what we do.”

The team fell into silence again, the syringe a gleaming shard of truth — or lie — between them.

And above all of it lingered the weight of Hotch’s words: Hannibal and Will believed the team didn’t know something about Spencer and Dexter.

Something that could break them.

The syringe lay on the table like a shard of glass between them, sterile and gleaming, yet dirtier than blood. Nobody touched it now.

Hotch stood with his arms folded, jaw tight, eyes moving from face to face as though waiting for someone to blink first. No one did.

JJ broke the silence, her voice sharper than she intended. “This is ridiculous. You’re talking about Spencer as if he’s—” She stopped herself, her throat tightening. “As if he’s anything like them.”

Emily leaned forward, steady but unyielding. “JJ, it isn’t about believing he’s like them. It’s about recognizing what Lecter wants us to think. He planted this for a reason. If we don’t at least ask ourselves the questions, we’re already behind.”

JJ slammed her notebook shut. “No. We know Spencer. We know him better than anyone.”

“Do we?” Rossi’s voice cut through, low, gravelly. “He’s brilliant, yes. But he’s also fragile. He’s been through more trauma than most people see in a lifetime. Prison, addiction, loss after loss. How many times have we all said to ourselves: one day, one of these cases is going to break him?”

“Don’t,” JJ snapped, fire in her eyes. “Don’t say that like it’s inevitable. Spencer is stronger than that. He’s—” She caught her breath, steadied herself. “He’s not like them.”

Derek finally spoke, voice loud enough to silence them all. “Hell no, he’s not. Pretty Boy is family. End of story.” He jabbed a finger at the syringe. “This? This is a trick. That bastard Lecter left it for us to fight over, and we’re doing exactly what he wants.”

Hotch’s gaze fixed on Derek, cool and commanding. “Denial is just as dangerous as paranoia. We don’t get to decide what feels comfortable. We deal with facts. Fact: Spencer and Dexter went missing together. Fact: Lecter left behind a substance tied to one of the most prolific killers in American history. Fact: we have no idea whether our teammates are victims, pawns, or something else.”

Tara cleared her throat, trying to keep her tone even. “Then the real question is—why them? Why not Hotch? Why not Morgan? Why specifically Dexter and Spencer?”

Emily’s mouth tightened. “Because Lecter sees something in them that maybe we’ve missed.”

“Or he wants us to think he does,” JJ shot back, her voice trembling with contained fury. “He wants to turn us against each other. He knows Spencer is the heart of this team. If he makes us doubt him, even for a second, he wins.”

Garcia’s voice broke through from the speaker on the table, softer than usual, almost pleading. “He’s not wrong, though. Lecter, I mean. About targeting them. Spencer—he’s… He’s the light in all this darkness. If Lecter snuffs that out—” Her breath hitched. “I don’t know what happens to the rest of us.”

The words hung heavy.

Hotch finally exhaled, steadying himself. “No one in this room wants to believe Spencer could be compromised. But belief doesn’t solve cases. We follow the evidence, and right now, the evidence points to Lecter manipulating us. Until we know more, we don’t rule anything out.”

Derek muttered under his breath. “Still sounds like you’re ruling him out.”

“Enough.” Rossi’s hand slammed the table, making the syringe jump. “We can fight about what we want to believe all day. But the truth is, Lecter left us a message. Maybe it’s a warning. Maybe it’s a taunt. But either way, it means he isn’t finished with Spencer and Dexter. That’s where we focus. Not on tearing each other apart.”

JJ’s voice cracked, but she forced the words out. “Then we find them. We don’t stop until we do. And when we bring Spencer back, all of you will see. He’s still him. He’s still Spencer.”

No one argued with her. Not because they were convinced—because they needed to believe it, too.

The syringe sat sealed at the center, a thin glint under fluorescent light. No one touched it.

Hotch remained standing. “We plan, we execute, and we adapt. No improvisation beyond what the moment demands.” He let the room settle. “We assume Lecter and Will are listening—directly or through proxies. So we give them nothing to anticipate.”

Rossi rolled his shoulders, as if shrugging back his years. “Then we stop moving like cops and start moving like hunters who know they’re being hunted.”

“Two tracks,” Tara said, sliding a legal pad into the cleared space beside the syringe. She wrote a big 1 and 2 cleanly, decisively. “Inside and outside. Inside Rome is noise and misdirection—their bait. Outside Rome is their sanctuary. We squeeze both.”

Emily took the map of the city’s northeast quadrant and smoothed it flat. “Track One: Rome. We treat every lead as theater. We follow it, but we don’t commit our core to it. Decoy teams, visible presence, controlled leaks to the press to force Lecter’s hand.”

JJ nodded, already there. “I can feed sanitized bites to a couple of Italian reporters—not Rinaldi’s colleagues, different outlets. We ‘confirm’ increased surveillance in Parioli and Caffarella, drop hints about Piazza Mincio and Campo de’ Fiori. Enough to look busy, not enough to help them.”

Luke leaned in, tapping the neighborhoods with a knuckle. “If they’ve been watching us—and they have—they’ll know we’re thin. So we set a rhythm: patrol, break, patrol, break. Predictable. We sell complacency.”

Derek’s mouth pulled tight. “And we put bodies where we can win if they take the bait. High sight lines, multiple exits, locals out of the way.”

“Track Two,” Tara continued, drawing a circle far outside the city proper. “Countryside. We know they moved Spencer and Dexter out after the apartment. Villa, farmhouse, something with privacy and sound insulation, within ninety minutes.” She looked to Garcia on the laptop screen. “We need the universe of properties that match that profile.”

Garcia pushed her glasses up and straightened like a surgeon at a console. “On it and already halfway there. I’ve pulled property registries, short-term rental databases under shell owners, agricultural permits, and off-grid energy purchase patterns. I’m prioritizing parcels with recent deliveries that don’t match reported occupancy—generators, fuel, bulk food, industrial freezers, linen service out of season. Also looking for one-time landline activations in the last ten days.”

Emily’s brows lifted. “Industrial freezers?”

Garcia’s smile thinned to a line. “We’re not underestimating them tonight.”

Rossi dragged a new map across the table—rings radiating from central Rome like a target. “We also learn from their art. Lecter’s always chosen places with layered meaning. The cardinals: ecclesiastical shadow and spectacle. The journalist: a fountain reimagined as ink. He won’t hide in a place that’s merely convenient. He’ll choose soil heavy with history.”

Hotch clicked a pen and wrote in the corner: HISTORY, SIGHTLINES, PRIVACY. “Add access vectors. Rural roads with choke points, proximity to small-airfield flight paths they could watch from below, nearby ruins or protected land to keep neighbors sparse.”

“Water,” Emily said. “Not for escape. For ritual. He keeps circling imagery of washing, ablution, ink as blood, blood as ink. Give me villas near streams, ancient cisterns, irrigation channels.”

Garcia’s fingers rattled across keys. “Cross-referencing. We love a thematic filter.”

JJ set her coffee aside. “Spencer and Dexter. We plan as if they’re alive and resourceful.” She looked around the table, daring anyone to argue. “Because they are.”

No one did.

“Spencer will leave a thread,” Tara said quietly. “Something small and deniable. He knows we can read him. He knows we have to.”

“Dexter too,” Emily added. “Not a note, not a trail. A choice. He’ll align with survival. If he thinks we can find him, he’ll give us exactly one chance to notice.”

Derek let out a breath that sounded like a weight being set down. “Then we watch the margins. Not the center of any scene. The corners. The bad cut in the curtain. The chair moved half an inch.”

Hotch nodded. “We formalize it. Teams of two, eyes for different things.”

He looked to each pair as he spoke.

“Emily, JJ: symbolic staging, narrative intent, social engineering. If the room talks, you’re the ones who can hear it.”

They both nodded, a quiet understanding passing between them—the same quiet that had taken them back to Parioli after everyone else declared it empty.

“Tara, Luke: logistics and patterning. You model likely movements hour-by-hour—their rest cycles, their supply needs, their tolerance for risk.”

“On it,” Luke said. Tara was already sketching a timeline.

“Derek, Rossi: canvass the belt outside the city. Quiet. Friendly. You’re not cops—you’re men whose car broke down and who need directions. Get eyes on the properties Garcia feeds us, note dogs, lights, cooking smells, anything that says the place is not a weekend house but a working den.”

Rossi grunted. “We can do neighborly.”

Derek’s smile was humorless. “We can do invisible.”

“Garcia,” Hotch continued, “you are our heartbeat. Two lists: ‘Performances’ in Rome—places ripe for misdirection—and ‘Sanctuaries’ in the countryside. Rank by probability and freshness. Feed us decorrelated subsets so if one of your lists leaks, it won’t burn the whole picture.”

Garcia’s eyes shone. “Partitioned intel. Yes, sir.”

“And me?” Hotch asked himself aloud, answering before anyone could volunteer. “I take Interpol and the Carabinieri. We get them on our tempo without a public fight.” He glanced to Rossi. “You’re with me for the first round, then you peel off.”

Rossi smirked. “You want me to say ‘please’ in Italian or ‘enough’ in English?”

“Both,” Hotch said. “But no shouting.”

Rossi spread his hands, who-me innocent. JJ coughed into a smile.

Emily’s gaze ticked to the syringe. “We also plan for the worst. Lecter left a message. Whether it’s a lie or not, the team has to move like the message could be true.”

“Means what?” Luke asked.

“We keep a wall inside the wall,” Emily said. “If Spencer or Dexter are turned against us—even for an hour—we need redundancies that protect everyone without treating either of them like an enemy.” Her voice stayed steady, but something inside it ached. “I want nonlethal contingencies staged where we can reach them fast and quietly.”

Derek’s jaw worked. He didn’t like it. He nodded anyway. “Staged, not brandished.”

“Exactly,” Emily said.

Tara tapped her pen. “We should also script the first words if we reach them. Not an argument, not an accusation. A protocol. Something memorized that signals we will not fracture.” She glanced up. “If they’re listening to us right now, they expect our first words to be fear.”

JJ’s throat tightened and cleared. “Then our first words are home.”

The table went still. Even the laptops seemed to hush.

Hotch wrote it down: FIRST WORDS: HOME.

Rossi leaned forward, elbows on the wood. “And the syringe? We can’t pretend it didn’t land. If Lecter wants us to swallow it, we take it apart instead.”

Garcia’s voice warmed on the line, buoyed by purpose. “Already did some taking-apart. The compound batch signature isn’t just a chemical fingerprint—it’s a supply chain tattoo. There are three plausible European importers in the last five years who could source it without raising flags. Two are legit medical distributors. One is… not.”

She brought up a sanitized vendor record—company name a bland nothing, invoices clean as bone. “Our shady friend services high-end ‘security’ clients who love discretion. They deliver anywhere within two hours of Rome with no questions asked.”

“Drivers?” Luke asked.

“Rotating,” Garcia said. “Phones scrubbed, van plates swapped. But I do have delivery windows, toll transponder pings, and two calls to a prepaid handset that bounced off a rural tower southeast of the city six nights ago. The same night Spencer and Dexter went missing.”

Hotch pointed. “That’s our cone.”

Tara circled the region on the map. “Two-hour ring, southeast quadrant, intersect with villas that fit Rossi’s meaning criteria and Emily’s water note.”

Maps layered, lists multiplied. For the first time in hours, the room felt like it was turning toward something rather than spinning in place.

JJ scribbled a neat column: CALLS TO MAKE. “I’ll brief the Embassy liaison—only what we choose. We need a medevac corridor on paper for when we pull them out.”

“When,” Derek echoed, as if the word itself were ballast.

Rossi checked his watch. “We start the neighborly drive before dawn. People tell strangers more when they’re still on their first coffee.”

“Not you,” Emily said. “You make them nervous after coffee.”

Rossi lifted a brow over his cup. “I only scare the guilty.”

“Then we’re in luck,” she said. It earned a handful of tired smiles.

Hotch laid out deployment cleanly:

·       0200–0400: Garcia locks the Sanctuary short list; Tara/Luke complete timeline model; JJ seeds the decoy press whispers.

·       0430: Hotch/Rossi to Interpol; Derek/Luke wheels ready; Emily/JJ kit nonlethal contingencies and decoy routes.

·       0600: Two-person canvass teams roll to three high-probability properties—no approach, just eyes.

·       City core stays visible but soft—uniformed presence we can disown if it spooks anyone the wrong way.

“Contingencies?” Hotch asked.

“Power,” Emily said immediately. “If they’ve gone off-grid, we assume generators. We bring ears for that—parabolic mics—not to violate anyone’s rights, to hear if a property is living wrong for the hour.”

“Smell,” Derek added. “Woodsmoke in summer, bleach where it doesn’t belong, cooking at odd times.”

“Sound,” Tara said. “Dogs that bark and then don’t. Radios cut mid-song.”

“Light,” JJ finished. “Curtains that glow at the wrong hour. Windows that look blacker than dark.”

Hotch capped his pen. “We move quiet. We don’t show our whole hand to anyone—not Interpol, not the Carabinieri, not the press.” He glanced to Garcia. “You keep the heart beating and you keep your voice off any channel they can steal.”

Garcia’s eyes shone. “Copy that, sir. I’ll breathe softly.”

A beat passed. The plan hung in the air, intricate and alive.

Then Emily, who had been staring at the syringe as if it might spit out a second message, spoke without looking up. “We need to tell each other something before we go.”

Hotch nodded for her to continue.

“If we find Spencer and Dexter and they’re not who we want them to be in that moment—not because they’ve changed, but because they’re afraid—we don’t punish them with our faces.” She finally lifted her gaze. “We give them home. We bring them back with our eyes first.”

JJ’s chin trembled and steadied. “Then say it now.”

The team, roughened by fatigue and fear, said it together, a word that felt both too small and exactly right.

“Home.”

The room breathed. The city beyond the glass breathed. For a heartbeat, there was only the sound of wheels beginning to turn—checklists, clocks, the scrape of chairs pulled back from the table.

Hotch gathered the maps. “Two hours. Eat something. Close your eyes, even if it’s for ten minutes. We move at oh-four-thirty.”

They broke, not scattered—paths crossing in the cramped room with small, solid touches. Derek squeezed JJ’s shoulder once. Rossi set a coffee down by Emily’s elbow without a word. Tara handed Luke the pen he’d misplaced; he pocketed it like a charm. On the laptop, Garcia’s screens bloomed with new windows, code and cartography waterfalling in gentle green.

No one looked at the syringe again.

They didn’t need to. The plan had absorbed it, transmuted it from taunt to compass.

Outside, Rome glittered and murmured, old stones holding old heat. Inside, the team rewrote the next hours to belong to them.

And somewhere beyond the ring roads and the soft dark fields, two men were waiting to be found.

The iron groan of the door cut through the dark. A wedge of light slanted across the stone floor, breaking the stale air with Hannibal’s calm silhouette. Will followed, carrying two thin mattresses folded against his chest. Hannibal held a pair of pillows, the absurdly ordinary touch almost laughable against the backdrop of stone walls and barred windows.

“Freedom,” Hannibal said softly, kneeling to set down the pillows. His hand brushed Spencer’s shoulder as he leaned past him, the casual contact sharp as a needle. “Of a kind.”

Will’s mouth curled in that half-smile of his, tired and mocking all at once. “Chains off. You’ll have no excuse to complain.”

The locks clinked. Metal fell from wrists and ankles. The relief was almost painful—Dexter rubbed the raw grooves in his skin, Spencer flexed his fingers, his arms heavy and numb from hours of restraint. Hannibal and Will didn’t linger. They left the mattresses, left the door locked, and took the light with them.

The two men stood in silence a moment, the new space around their limbs disorienting. Then Dexter dropped to one of the mattresses, pressing his palms to his eyes like he could grind the fog of the drug out of his skull.

Spencer sat across from him, the other mattress between them. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. His voice was rough, quieter than usual. “They’re making this a test.”

Dexter let out a sound between a laugh and a groan. “Everything with them is a test.” He looked up, his face gaunt in the gloom. “But they don’t grade on a curve.”

Spencer rubbed his temples, forcing himself to think. “They’re not keeping us alive out of mercy. It’s deliberate. Every move has a purpose. Even these—” He tapped the mattress with a long finger. “Even this is strategy. Comfort changes behavior.”

Dexter tilted his head, watching him. “You sound like you’re lecturing in front of your class.”

Spencer’s mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile. “I wish it were just theory.”

The silence grew thicker, filled only by the muffled creak of the old villa above them. Spencer shifted on his mattress, rolling to face Dexter directly. His eyes were still sharp despite the exhaustion.

“We can’t just sit here,” he said, his voice steadier now. “Waiting for them to decide what to do with us—that’s surrender. And I won’t.”

Dexter tilted his head, studying him. “What’s your plan? Rattle the door until it falls off its hinges?”

“Think,” Spencer countered, his tone dry, almost biting. “That’s what I do. Think until I find an answer no one else can see.”

Dexter almost smiled. “I thought I was the obsessive one.”

Spencer didn’t flinch. “You are. But your obsession is blood. Mine is patterns. Between the two of us, maybe we have a chance.”

Dexter leaned forward, elbows on his knees. For the first time since they’d been thrown into this basement, he felt something resembling momentum. “You’re saying we work together.”

Spencer nodded once. “We’re already linked whether we like it or not. They’ve decided that for us.” He hesitated, then added, “And honestly… I don’t hate it.”

That admission hung heavier than chains.

Dexter didn’t answer right away. He looked at Spencer—at the way his hair clung damp to his forehead, the way his hands fidgeted like he was holding back a storm. He recognized it. The restlessness of someone caged not just by walls, but by himself.

“You’ve killed before,” Dexter said carefully. Not accusing, not condemning. Just stating.

Spencer’s jaw tightened. “In the line of duty.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

The words struck like a stone against glass. Spencer’s eyes flicked away, then back, and Dexter saw the calculation in them—the need to hold his secrets like fragile bones. Finally, Spencer exhaled.

“I didn’t feel guilty,” he admitted, barely more than a whisper. “Not then. Not after. Not even now.”

Dexter’s throat tightened. For a moment he almost reached out, but his hands stayed curled against his knees. “Then you understand me more than you want to.”

Spencer shook his head, almost violently. “No. I’m not you.”

Dexter’s voice was low, steady. “I didn’t say you were. I said you understand.”

The quiet stretched again, but it wasn’t empty—it was charged, alive. Somewhere above, a door shut softly, followed by muffled footsteps. Hannibal and Will, moving about their perfect domestic evening while their captives unraveled below.

Spencer drew his knees closer to his chest. “If the team finds us, and they know what you are…” He trailed off, then looked at Dexter with naked honesty. “I don’t know if I’ll protect you or hand you to them.”

Dexter gave a small, humorless laugh. “That’s fair. If I were you, I would be conflicted too.”

The two men sat in that fragile truce, closer to each other than either of them wanted to admit, yet bound tighter than any chain could hold.

The basement had grown colder as night settled, stone walls holding the day’s heat no longer. Their shadows stretched thin under the single lightbulb, too dim to keep the dark at bay.

Spencer lay back on the thin mattress, staring at the ceiling. His lips moved once before sound followed. “When I was twenty-four, I thought I’d lose my mind like my mother. Schizophrenia. It was a clock ticking in my head. Every time I forgot something, every time I thought I saw something that wasn’t there… I was sure that was the start of it.”

Dexter turned his head toward him. Spencer’s voice was softer than before, without any of the sharpness that usually protected him.

“I don’t… tell the team that. They already think I’m fragile enough. But for years I woke up waiting for it. For the fracture. The break.”

Dexter swallowed, his throat dry. “And now?”

Spencer’s eyes flicked to him. “Now I wonder if what I’m afraid of isn’t madness. Maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe I’m afraid of being too clear, of seeing too much. Of realizing I’m not broken. Just… bent.”

The words landed inside Dexter like an echo. He closed his eyes. “You sound like me.”

Spencer gave a small, bitter laugh. “That’s what terrifies me.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Above, faint laughter drifted down—Hannibal and Will, amused in their private world, safe in their love.

Dexter forced the silence open. “I had a wife once. Rita. She thought I was normal. Sweet. The kind of man who mows lawns and fixes leaky faucets. I let her believe it.” His mouth pulled tight. “And then she died. Because of me. Because of what I am.”

Spencer’s brow furrowed. “You blame yourself.”

Dexter turned onto his side, facing him fully now. “Don’t you?”

Spencer blinked.

“Maeve,” Dexter said quietly. “I read your files. I know.”

Spencer flinched like the name itself cut him. His voice cracked as he spoke. “I wasn’t there when she needed me most. I could’ve stopped it. I didn’t.”

Dexter’s tone was almost harsh. “No. You couldn’t have. And if you keep pretending you could, you’ll break yourself in two.”

Spencer pressed his palms over his eyes, but his voice still came, muffled. “She’s still in my head. Her voice. Her laugh. When I think about her, I don’t feel guilt. I feel… hunger. Hunger for the woman who took her. For everyone like her. That’s the part I can’t tell anyone. Because it’s not justice. It’s darker than that.”

Dexter’s chest tightened. It was like hearing his own confession years younger, in a voice not his own.

“That hunger doesn’t go away,” Dexter said quietly. “You can bury it. Pretend. Build walls, codes, rules. But it’s there, waiting. I know.”

Spencer lowered his hands, his eyes rimmed red but dry. He looked at Dexter—really looked. “And you don’t hate yourself for it?”

Dexter hesitated. He wanted to lie. To say yes, of course, every day. But in the dark, with no recorder, no team, no mask—he couldn’t.

“No,” he said finally. “Not anymore. It’s who I am. I hate what it costs the people I love. But the rest…” He shook his head. “The rest feels like breathing.”

Spencer lay back again, staring at the ceiling. His voice was almost a whisper. “Then maybe I’m suffocating.”

The words hung between them, heavy and raw. Dexter wanted to reach across the small space, to bridge it, to do something human. But his hands stayed still.

The silence thickened until Spencer finally spoke again. His voice was fragile, but insistent.

“Tell me, Dexter… when you do it. When you kill. What does it feel like?”

Dexter’s eyes slid shut. He had never said it aloud, not to anyone living. For a moment, he thought about staying silent. But Spencer’s gaze pressed into him, sharp even in weariness, demanding truth.

“I used to see it as a release,” Dexter said, the words gravel in his throat. “Like pressure in my chest breaking open. Clean. Controlled. Necessary. But there’s something else.”

Spencer tilted his head. “Something else?”

Dexter hesitated, then exhaled, confessing what he had never dared.

“I see people. Not real. Shadows. My father, Harry—he gave me the Code, told me how to channel it. He still talks to me. Sometimes he warns me, sometimes he judges me. And Brian—my brother. He doesn’t want me to follow rules at all. He wants me to be free. And Debra… she’s dead, but I see her too. She doesn’t forgive me. Not for what I am.”

Spencer stared. His breath caught in his throat. “You… hear them? See them?”

Dexter gave a bitter laugh. “I know they’re not real. But they’re with me all the same. Harry tells me not to get attached. Brian tells me to stop pretending. Deb calls me a sick fuck and she’s right.” He rubbed his eyes with his palms. “Sometimes it’s the only way I can think. Through them.”

For a long moment, Spencer didn’t speak. Then, quietly, he said, “You’re not schizophrenic. You’re haunted.”

Dexter froze at the word. Haunted. It sounded truer than anything he’d ever heard.

Spencer rolled onto his side, looking at him directly. “When I was young, I thought the voices in my head would come from an illness. From my bloodline. But maybe we both carry something else entirely. Not madness. Not delusion. A passenger, like you call it. The thing that refuses to leave.”

Dexter’s chest tightened. “And yours whispers for blood.”

Spencer didn’t deny it. His eyes stayed steady. “Yes.”

The bulb flickered overhead, and the basement seemed smaller than before, the air denser with truth.

Dexter swallowed. “That’s why I don’t want this for you. I know what happens when you start listening. It doesn’t stop. Ever.”

Spencer’s lips twisted into a faint, humorless smile. “Maybe it already started.”

That answer hollowed Dexter out. Because he believed him.

For the first time, Dexter reached across the small gap, chains clinking faintly as his hand brushed the mattress beside Spencer’s. Not touching. Just near.

In the silence that followed, the ghosts were quiet.

They did not fall into sleep like children at ease. It came in ragged pulls and thin seams — the kind of sleep you get between watches, the kind you steal when the world has folded you too small to hold upright.

Spencer curled his knees close, the mattress denting where his shoulders met the thin foam. His breath found a slow metronome; the tautness in his jaw eased by fraction of degree. He kept his eyes open longer than he needed to, watching the dull halo of the bulb above, counting the faint scuffs on the ceiling until the numbers blurred into nothing. When his lids finally closed, it was like the end of a long negotiation — reluctant, and decided for him.

Dexter lay on his back, one hand tucked beneath his head. The corners of his mouth hardened, then softened, as if some private calculus had finished. The ghosts did not vanish; they folded into the margins, voices dimmed to the level of breathing. Harry’s cautious counsel sat at the edge of his thoughts; Brian’s louder encouragement was farther off, more like ocean surf. Debra’s voice — sharp, alive, unforgiving — threaded through both, then thinned. Dexter counted to forty before letting himself drift, because counting had always been a small, clean ritual that made the dark manageable.

They slept with space between them and a line that was both new and ancient: two men who had unloaded truths they could not live with alone. When sleep took them, it was broken and shallow. Spencer dreamed of patterns that dissolved when he reached for them; that same dissolving woke him once and left him with the taste of iron that was nothing but his own pulse. Dexter dreamed of small, clinical rooms and the whisper of latex gloves; he woke with the cold certainty of knives in his fingers before realizing the hands were empty.

At one point in the night they both stirred, silent and automatic — a shared motion, two bodies answering an instinct neither would name. Spencer shifted, and Dexter’s hand, almost of its own accord, twitched closer before stopping. Neither claimed the movement; neither pushed it away.

Outside, the villa held its steady, uninvolved night. Somewhere high above them, voices rose and fell, laughter low and practiced. Inside, the basement kept them like a promise and a threat. Their breathing became the only map in the room, little rivers of sound that showed where fear pooled and where it thinned.

Morning would come on the edge of another plan, the team would move, and choices that felt theoretical in the dim would harden into decisions with teeth. But for those hours between dark and dawn, they were as simple and dangerous as anyone: two people who slept when they could, and who woke when they had to.

The villa was quiet, too quiet for Will’s restless mind. Morning light seeped through the shutters in pale ribbons, dust motes hanging like suspended secrets. Hannibal had already risen, silent in his movements, as though the house were his cathedral and he its high priest. Will sat at the table, staring at the dark wood grain, his hands clenched too tightly around the coffee cup.

“You think too loudly, Will,” Hannibal said smoothly, setting down a plate of figs and bread as though breakfast were enough to erase the chains in the basement, the two men sleeping fitfully on mattresses below.

Will didn’t answer at first. His jaw flexed. The silence between them stretched, taut as a wire. Then Hannibal leaned closer, voice soft but sharp as a scalpel.

“You are afraid he will see himself in Dexter. That Spencer will recognize what you have always feared to recognize in yourself.”

The words struck. Will’s hand trembled; the cup clinked against its saucer. Hannibal watched, calm, waiting for the inevitable storm.

“You don’t know what the fuck I fear,” Will hissed.

Hannibal tilted his head, unbothered. “On the contrary. I know it better than you allow yourself. You cannot hide from me. Not your anger. Not your desire. Not your truth.”

The tight coil inside Will snapped. He surged up from the chair, grabbing Hannibal by the lapel, and shoved him back hard. Hannibal’s back slammed into the plaster wall, the wooden beams above quivering from the impact. The sound echoed through the villa, like the crack of a gunshot.

“You don’t get to say that to me,” Will spat, face inches from Hannibal’s. His hands fisted the fabric, twisting it, ready to tear it from Hannibal’s body. “You don’t get to tell me who I am.”

Hannibal’s breath came slow, controlled, though his pulse quickened with delight. His lips curved into the faintest smile. “Ah, but you’ve always let me, haven’t you? You wouldn’t know yourself without me.”

Will slammed him again, harder this time, shoulder crashing against the wall. Hannibal’s head knocked back, a dull thud against plaster. A bruise would bloom, but his expression only softened with something like pleasure.

“You enjoy this,” Will accused, shaking him once, violently. “You fucking love this.”

“Yes,” Hannibal breathed, unashamed, his voice steady even as his body absorbed the impact. “Because in your anger, I see your passion. You claim me when you hurt me. You declare me yours.”

Will froze for half a heartbeat, the truth of it burning him, before snarling, “You’re mine. Only mine.”

Hannibal’s hand rose slowly, carefully, as if approaching a wounded animal. His fingertips brushed Will’s brow, tracing the scar etched into the skin there — the scar he had given Will, years ago, when betrayal and love had collided in blood.

“You carry me here,” Hannibal murmured, reverence dripping from every syllable. His fingers lingered, pressing lightly on the jagged line, a signature carved into Will’s flesh. “My gift. My mark. An intimacy no other man can claim.”

Will’s breath shuddered. His grip on Hannibal’s collar loosened, then tightened again, torn between shoving him away and never letting go.

“You cut me open,” Will whispered, voice breaking with memory and rage. “You gutted me like one of your fucking pigs.”

“And you lived,” Hannibal replied softly, eyes never leaving his. “You rose from it stronger. More beautiful. You wear me, Will, not as a wound but as a bond.”

Will’s chest heaved. For a moment he wanted to spit, to curse, to shove Hannibal until the wall cracked behind him. But Hannibal’s touch anchored him. The scar burned beneath his fingers, and Will felt something he hated to admit: that the mark was not just a reminder of pain. It was proof of survival. Proof of love, in Hannibal’s twisted language.

“You’re insane,” Will muttered, but the fury had drained, leaving only exhaustion.

“And you are exquisite,” Hannibal countered. His thumb smoothed the scar as if it were a treasured artifact.

The fight ebbed like a tide, leaving them pressed close, breath mingling. Will’s fists unclenched at last, but he didn’t step away. Hannibal didn’t push him off. Instead, they stood locked together in the morning light, bound by scars that neither of them regretted.

Will swallowed hard, eyes closing briefly. His forehead rested against Hannibal’s for the briefest of moments, an admission, a surrender, a promise all at once.

The villa was silent again, but the air between them thrummed with what had just passed: anger turned into intimacy, violence transfigured into love.

The basement was half-dark, a low ceiling heavy with old beams, the air damp with stone and silence. Spencer stirred first, blinking against the thin strip of morning light leaking through the high window. His body ached from sleep too shallow to be restful.

Across from him, Dexter was already awake, sitting on one of the thin mattresses Hannibal had dropped off the night before. He rubbed absently at his wrist, not from shackles — those were gone — but from the phantom memory of them. Freedom without escape.

Footsteps creaked above, heavier than casual, purposeful. Then the door opened, spilling a wedge of light down the steps.

Will descended with a tray in his hands, Hannibal following close behind. The smell of bread and cheese reached the two men before the tray touched the floor. Boiled eggs, a carafe of water. Nothing fancy, yet the simplicity made it feel worse — like this was domesticity, not captivity.

Spencer sat up, adjusting his glasses. His voice cut the silence like a scalpel.

“Sounds like you two were fighting upstairs. For a moment, I thought the whole house was going to come down.”

Will paused mid-step, just long enough for a smirk to curl at the corner of his mouth. “You’ve good ears. Must come with the job.”

Spencer didn’t blink. “I don’t need to be a profiler to know the sound of someone being slammed into a wall.”

Hannibal crouched to place the tray on a crate between the mattresses. His movements were calm, precise, his tone neutral. “You need nourishment. The body cannot reason without it.”

Dexter leaned forward, taking one of the cups of water. Spencer hesitated, but followed, their shoulders brushing as they reached. The brief contact grounded them both, though neither acknowledged it.

They ate in silence for a few moments, bread breaking, eggs peeled with quiet cracks. The food was plain, but in their current state, it tasted almost decadent.

From the doorway, Will’s voice cut back in, low and sharp. “Strange, isn’t it? How quickly people slip into routine. You give them breakfast, and they forget they’re prisoners.”

Dexter’s jaw clenched. “I haven’t forgotten.”

Hannibal’s smile was faint, unreadable. “Good. Forgetfulness would cheapen you.”

Spencer set down his bread, his mind spinning. His voice carried more defiance than he intended. “What could possibly divide two men who’ve killed cardinals together, who stage journalists in fountains of ink? Why fight at all?”

Will shifted against the doorframe, arms crossed, his gaze locking on Spencer with surgical precision. “Maybe we fight because we can. Maybe because it’s honest. Don’t pretend you’ve never raised your voice at someone you loved, Reid.”

The name hit harder than it should have. Spencer flinched almost imperceptibly, his hands tightening around his knees.

Dexter’s voice cut in, low and protective. “Don’t talk to him like that.”

Will’s smirk widened. “Protector, then. You’re fond of him already.”

Spencer’s breath hitched, and his face burned hot with anger he couldn’t quite channel. “What do you want from us?”

Silence. Hannibal’s gaze lingered, not cruel but unrelenting.

“We want you to see yourselves,” Hannibal said simply. “And decide whether the cages you carry inside are worth keeping locked.”

Dexter turned away, jaw grinding, staring hard at the damp wall. The words were too close, too true.

Will crouched down in front of Spencer, eyes narrowed. “You heard us fight. You think it’s weakness. It’s not. It’s honesty. We don’t hide from what we are. We accept it. Do you?”

Spencer’s throat tightened. He wanted to answer, to deny, but nothing came. His silence said more than words could.

“Leave him alone,” Dexter muttered, voice low, dangerous.

Will stood again, brushing off his knees. “They’ll talk when we’re gone. They’ll say the things they wouldn’t dare with us in the room.”

Hannibal nodded once. “Let them.”

They turned, ascending the stairs with the same measured grace they’d entered. The door shut, the lock clicking into place.

Silence pooled in their wake. Spencer pulled his knees tighter to his chest, staring at the food he no longer wanted. Dexter sat across from him, shoulders tight, watching.

Finally Spencer broke it, his voice barely above a whisper. “They’re right about one thing. We’ll talk when they’re gone.”

Dexter didn’t answer. Not yet. He shifted closer, the scrape of mattress on stone loud in the stillness. The two men sat there, the leftover bread untouched between them, silence filling the space where comfort should have been.

The door shut above them, the lock sliding into place with a final, metallic click. Silence swelled, the kind that pressed at the ribs and made every breath feel like trespass.

Spencer pushed the plate of bread and cheese away with the edge of his palm. His appetite had evaporated the moment Will crouched in front of him, the scrutiny still clinging to his skin like sweat. His stomach churned with nerves, not hunger.

Dexter, by contrast, picked up another piece of bread, tearing into it with deliberate slowness. He chewed methodically, each bite an anchor. Stress didn’t close his throat; it demanded fuel. His body always prepared for the hunt, even when the prey was unclear.

“They could have brought more,” Dexter muttered finally, half to himself. “Two grown men, and this… it’s nothing.”

Spencer’s lips twitched — not quite a smile, not quite bitterness. “You’d eat it all, anyway.”

Dexter glanced at him, caught between defensiveness and honesty. “Yeah. Probably.”

Silence lingered again, but this time it wasn’t as heavy. The faintest outline of camaraderie hummed between them, unspoken, fragile.

Spencer tugged at his sleeve, fingers restless. “I stop eating when I’m stressed. Always have. My mom used to… notice. She’d count the meals I skipped.” His voice trailed off, the weight of memory curling it inward.

Dexter leaned back against the cold wall, watching him. “I go the other way. The worse things get, the more I eat. Like it’ll fill the… space.” He gestured vaguely toward his chest, as if words failed him.

Spencer finally looked at him, studying him with those sharp, restless eyes that saw too much. “Do you ever stop pretending?”

The bread stalled halfway to Dexter’s mouth. He lowered it slowly, crumbs spilling against his palm. “Pretending what?”

“That you’re fine. That this is just another… situation.” Spencer’s voice was calm, but his gaze was cutting. “You eat, you crack little jokes, you keep moving like the walls aren’t closing in. But they are.”

Dexter set the bread down, his throat suddenly dry. “I’ve been in worse basements.”

“That’s not an answer,” Spencer said softly.

Dexter’s laugh was short, brittle. “Neither is your silence.”

The air between them thickened. Spencer pulled his knees closer to his chest, staring at the floor. “You’re right. I don’t talk because I don’t want to say the wrong thing. If I do, they’ll use it against me.”

Dexter leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “They’ll use everything against us. Silence doesn’t make you safer.”

Spencer’s eyes flicked up, meeting his. For the first time, Dexter saw the exhaustion that lived deep there, the fracture lines of a man who had caged his own darkness for decades.

“They want me to admit something,” Spencer whispered. “That I’m not who I think I am. That I’m more like them than I want to be.”

Dexter exhaled slowly, the weight of truth pressing down. “They’re not wrong.”

Spencer’s jaw tightened. “Don’t.”

“You’ve killed,” Dexter said, voice low but steady. “You know you didn’t feel guilt afterward. You’ve been carrying that silence longer than you admit.”

Spencer’s hand twitched, the tendons in his wrist flexing as though to strike, but he stilled himself. He forced a breath through his teeth. “If I let it out, it won’t stop. You of all people should know that.”

Dexter swallowed, his hunger gone now. “That’s the lie we tell ourselves — that it’s better to keep the monster half-caged. But you can’t live like that forever, Spencer. It tears you apart.”

The name landed differently this time, grounding, almost intimate.

Spencer stared at him, glasses sliding slightly down his nose, his face pale in the dim light. “And what? You want me to be like you?”

Dexter shook his head quickly. “No. God, no. I don’t want you to end up like me. I just—” He broke off, pressing a hand over his mouth, as though forcing the words back inside.

Spencer leaned in just slightly, curiosity sharper than fear. “Then what do you want?”

Dexter lowered his hand, his voice raw, barely more than a rasp. “I want you to survive this without shattering.”

The words settled between them, heavier than any lock on the door.

Spencer leaned back, closing his eyes, whispering almost to himself. “That’s not up to me anymore.”

Neither spoke after that. The tray of half-eaten bread and eggs sat between them, untouched. Dexter leaned against the wall, watching Spencer’s breathing slow, shallow but steady. Exhaustion claimed them both, dragging them down into uneasy sleep, side by side on the thin mattresses, while upstairs Will and Hannibal moved about like watchful gods.

Night unstitched itself slowly across the Roman countryside. Lamps winked out in the hotel windows; the streets thinned; the city exhaled. Inside the hotel, the team moved like a single organism tuned to a time only some of them kept in their heads. Watches were checked with the same intent as breaths; gloves were tugged on as if they were armor.

Garcia’s screen glowed in the dim command room. She had erased every unnecessary window until only the live map remained: pins in two colours — Performances within the city, Sanctuaries outside it. The sanctuary pins pulsed faint red; the list Garcia had partitioned overnight had been whittled to three high-probability properties by the hour she’d given Hotch. They were all within the southeast cone: vineyardhouses and one ancient farmhouse conversion with a private drive and scrub pines that swallowed headlights.

Hotch spoke quietly, the iron in his voice not meant to loud-announce the fear. “Two teams go out first: Rossi and Derek take the southeast ring. JJ and Emily will canvas the villa lane and the adjacent ruins for symbolic staging. Tara and Luke run the timeline and support logistics; they shadow Derek and Rossi but keep an eye on supply movement. I take Interpol and the Carabinieri, get access permissions and a legal corridor if we need to move fast.” He paused, head inclining toward Garcia. “You keep us fed,” he said, half humor, half command.

Garcia’s smile blinked across the speakers. “Feeding you is my love language.”

They moved out in pairs like a formation rehearsed in private rehearsals. Rossi and Derek took a rental with a polite driver and became two English tourists with spilled maps and bad Italian. They spoke loudly to each other in faux confusion as they parked near the first property, then drifted into practiced neighborliness: a cracked joke, a question about landowners, a comment about the weather. Rossi’s face unbent into that amiable, grandfatherly mien that made local suspicion shrug and open doors.

“If you’re looking for the farmhouse with the long cypress drive,” Rossi said to a night-watchman drawing a smoke, “you’re on the wrong road. But there is a place at the end that will point you to the right one.” He let the man direct them, leave with a cigarette stubbed in the dust — a small courtesy. Derek lingered near the gate, palms on the hood of the car, scanning angles, listening for a generator rumble, for a dog’s pattern that didn’t match the hour.

At 05:20, JJ and Emily stepped into the lane that veered toward the villa Rossi had earmarked. The lane smelled of wet earth and old stone. Morning birds kept time with their feet. JJ’s profile read a small catalogue of human movement — a packed ashtray in a window, curtains drawn despite dawn, a solitary boot by a side door. Emily moved with the same measured curiosity she gave a delicate puzzle: she looked at the way furniture faced rooms, the angle of paintings, the absence of photographs on shelves. Where the Carabinieri had catalogued prints and broken locks, the two women read gesture: a chair turned just so, a table set as if for two that had not been sat at.

“Look,” Emily said quietly, pointing. A framed print leaned against the wall where it had been taken down, its back showing. The removal had been done carefully, not frantic — the mark of someone staging rather than fleeing.

JJ crouched and ran a finger along the floorboards, seeing not grit but the map of footprints left by slippers and a heavy boot. “Staged,” she said, voice small. “Like the apartment in Parioli. Not for hiding — for showing.”

They tucked their observations into their notes and walked on, letting the silence do the listening. When they reached the well-kept property line, JJ pulled a neighborly face and asked the gardeners, in halting Italian, if anyone had been in or out at odd hours. A woman’s answer — “a van last week, though it was empty when we peered out” — hit Garcia’s live feed like a bell and pinged their screens.

Tara and Luke watched vehicle records and supply histories from the mobile work station in the truck. Tara’s timeline model showed small, ordinary vectors that made sense only when layered: the grocery runs that were too large for a single couple, the registered but unused service accounts for linens, a single dropped freight delivery to a rural gate timestamped at 23:14 two nights ago. Luke flagged a fuel purchase that landed outside the county line at 02:03 on the night Spencer and Dexter disappeared. The pattern—subtle, bureaucratic—leaned directionally toward the farmhouse.

Back with Rossi and Derek, the neighborly dance started to loosen openings. A gate was unlocked by a neighbor who thought they were lost. They slid across the gravel and found a lawn raked clean, a small kitchen garden trimmed, and a back door latched but not bolted. No one seemed to live in breathless haste; instead the property wore the look of a place kept meticulously for guests — linens in the wash, a recently trimmed cutting board — and yet there was a faint smell, almost industrial and metallic, undercutting the herb and wood-fire smell. Derek wrinkled his nose. “Not wood smoke,” he murmured. “Something else.”

Rossi’s weathered eyes narrowed. “Freezer. Or chemicals.”

They backed out quietly, made a note, and called it in to Hotch. The team folded the information across their map and tightened the red pulse around the site.

At 06:15, Hotch took a call that would determine whether they sent a uniformed Carabinieri approach or a quieter, tactical presence. He listened, then leaned toward the team. “They can spare a single patrol near the main road but want to coordinate runs through the local prefecture on a search warrant only if we can show probable cause. We move quiet, but we keep the legal window open.”

Rossi’s jaw clicked. “We keep pressure without a front page. We don’t burn the property, and we don’t spook them if they’re indeed hiding someone.” He let that hang.

Minutes later Garcia’s soft voice came, a thread across the room. “I got two transponder pings on a delivery van that came within two kilometers of that farmhouse, then pinged south toward another property at the edge of a private estate around three in the morning. The driver is a rotating subcontractor with links to the shell vendor. I’m pulling names and cross-referencing with known debtors and sort-of-legal accounts. Also, I’ve got the image match request in for any small oil barrels purchased in the last month.”

Every finding was slow and nervy, like picking threads from the hem of a dress without ruining the garment. The team worked quietly, their voices low and clinical. They were careful to steer away from the room where the syringe sat on the table as if it were an accusation too raw to glance at directly.

At 07:02, Emily’s voice over the comms was steady. “We’re at the second villa now. The arrangement of the sitting room—two places facing one another, a chair angled left and a chair angled right—suggests a choreography. Whoever lives here wants face time with a guest, a setting for conversation. Also,” she added, softer, “the coffee cups on the sideboard are the sort used in restaurants that service more than eight people. That matches Garcia’s linen note.”

JJ placed a hand to the old plaster wall and let her palm fall down. The texture told her things the camera did not. She traced the faint nick pattern where a table or headboard had been dragged and thought of the apartment in Parioli — the same obsessive neatness, the same care to keep certain items as message rather than necessity. She scribbled a note: Performance: yes. Shelter: maybe. Ritual: probable.

While canvassing, small human moments threaded the morning. Derek, undercover with a tale of a flat tire, sat on a stoop talking to an old woman about her grandson’s school until she mentioned a man who liked to bring fresh figs and leave at strange hours. Rossi found a young farmhand who loved American films and could be coaxed to divulge truck routes in exchange for a story from a life he might never have. JJ found a child’s drawing behind a fridge — two men holding hands, a house gagged by a sun — and it hit her like a small shard. She didn’t show the others but folded the paper into her palm and kept walking. These were not the slow dry details of charts; they were the human grain the team needed to follow.

The first clear sighting came at 08:05 — not the two men, but a local delivery cook who reported seeing two shapes on the lower terrace of the farmhouse at dawn; one tall, one slender, who left with a crate. The description matched neither Lecter nor Graham, but Garcia’s overlay of the van pings with the man’s route made the farmhouse the first place to move to if they escalated.

Hotch gathered the team briefly in whisper. “We don’t raid. We observe. Derek and Rossi will enter on the pretense of fixing a generator. JJ and Emily will stay on sight lines, noting any movement in windows and doors. Tara and Luke will watch the supply routes. If we have an opening that’s safe, we go. If not, we pull until we can create one. No heroics.” He met each of their faces, the words firm but not unkind: “Bring them home.”

As the morning sun scraped higher, the farmhouses began to look less like scenic postcards and more like stages — terracotta roofs, humming insects, olive trees bending as if to listen. The team moved with a hardness beneath their movements that made their hands steady even when their hearts were not. There was strategy in tenderness now: ways of being gentle and relentless at once.

At 09:02, Rossi and Derek drew close enough to approach the farmhouse at the end of its pebbled drive. Derek’s body told a story of a clearance plan: eyes constantly moving, shoulders ready. Rossi’s voice softened as he chatted with a neighbor, then, when they were close enough at the gate, he slipped an apology in Italian and asked about a generator problem. The neighbor pointed toward a side door that was, yes, latched but not bolted. After a little maneuvering and an excuse to step to the back, Rossi nudged the latch and slipped in, Derek at his shoulder.

They moved like two men who belonged, two men who could be invisible because their roles were familiar. The kitchen was clean and small, the scent of strong coffee lingering in a metal carafe. The freezer door hummed. Rossi opened it and found a neat stack of white trays, each labeled in neat black marker with initials and dates. It wasn’t human tissue. Yet the tray seals were the kind used by some private butchers and by certain laboratories. Derek’s hand went for a tray like a seaman checking rigging, lifting carefully. He frowned and felt his stomach drop. The seal at the edge had been recently disturbed.

Rossi’s radio chirped a small warning. “Hotch. Possible activity at the second property. Freeze seals opened. No obvious sign of people in residence now. Two sets of fresh boot prints. Might be a delivery rotation.”

Back at the command room, Hotch breathed and leaned forward. “Listen to me carefully. We do not move until we can guarantee any intervention is survivable. We have no right to create slaughter zones.” His voice was not cold because he had become insensitive; it was cold because he understood the balance intimately.

Garcia’s screen blossomed with faces and addresses and the sliding overlay of names — shell companies, delivery logs, and an old name that made Emily look up so quickly the others could see the sharp intake of breath. “One person in the vendor chain is a subcontractor who worked with the Miami docks two years ago,” she said. “Small-time, but there’s a file — a name that links him to a Doakes incident. I’m pushing for more, but it’s a thread. It might mean nothing, but it might mean someone who travels.”

Rossi’s hand tightened around the freezer doorframe as if it anchored him. “We follow the thread,” he said, simple and fierce. “We follow it all the way to wherever it dares to take us.”

They tightened their net and drew their breath, waiting for the villa’s inhabitants to make a mistake. The morning thinned and the noon heat hinted at itself in the air. The team moved and listened, catalogued and whispered, and in every motion there was the grit of fear — not dramatic or cinematic, but the basic animal fear of getting a person wrong and losing them to the quiet brutality of other people’s plans.

It was not a movie raid. It was hours of patience and small rituals: JJ checking the angles of light on a terrace, Emily cross-examining the way a bowl was centered on a table, Derek tasting the air near a pump and finding the ghost of chemical bite, Rossi smiling to a neighbor and getting a name she’d told only her sister. Each breadcrumb was registered, folded into a growing mosaic that would — Hotch promised himself — be enough.

When the midday sun finally shoved shadows to the near side of the trees, they had more than suspicion: they had a pattern, a narrowing ring that allowed them a next move planned in increments rather than gambles. Their plan was not to storm but to surround, to pressure like water against stone until a seam gave them entry. The team was tired, dirty around the fingernails, but their hands were steady. They had not yet found Spencer or Dexter. They had found the threads Hannibal and Will had left like a cruel map — and now they were unraveling the map into a rope that might bring them home.

Hotch looked at them all in the makeshift command room and said the thing that sounded like both prayer and instruction. “We move on the seam. We move on a pattern, not on anger. We avoid Lecters’ theater. We go for the men inside.”

They left the maps and the coffee cups and the syringe and walked to their cars. Rome hummed unaware. The road ahead was long and folded into the blue heat and the list of things they still did not know. But they moved together — a battered family of professionals who would not let each other fall apart quietly.

Night had weight in the basement. It lay on the stone like a second skin, cool and patient, carrying the faintest scent of water and old iron. Spencer woke before he meant to, startled by the kind of silence that always comes just before something happens. Dexter was awake too, propped on an elbow, listening in that whole-body way Spencer had begun to recognize—like an animal lifting its head to scent a change in the air.

Footsteps. Not hurried. Decided. The wedge of light opened at the door, and then Will came down first, steady on the narrow steps with a folding table balanced against his shoulder. Hannibal followed with plastic sheeting coiled in his arms, a neat roll of heavy tape, a canvas tool bag whose weight was unmistakable even before it thudded softly to the floor.

Between them, on the landing, a man shuffled—a man in his forties, maybe, thick through the chest, hands bound in front with nylon ties that had already burned red rings into the wrists. His eyes were bright and unfocused above a gag. The bruise across his cheekbone was a fresh, ugly violet. He stumbled at the last step; Will caught him without looking at him, as if catching a falling pan.

Hannibal set the canvas bag down and placed a slender folder beside it. “Lunch will wait,” he said mildly. “This will not.”

Spencer’s mouth tasted like old coins. He forced himself upright, spine against stone. Dexter rose too, slow, everything in him tightening. Spencer saw the shift as if it were a visible change in light: the way Dexter’s attention narrowed, the way his breathing evened into something almost ceremonial. Six weeks without killing. Spencer didn’t know this as a datapoint; he knew it the way you know weather by your joints.

Will unfolded the table; the metal legs locked with a hollow snap. He laid the plastic out with the kind of care you give to cloth you love—edges squared, corners smoothed by the heel of the palm. He didn’t look at Spencer or Dexter while he did it. He didn’t need to. The room looked at them for him.

“Proof,” Hannibal said, and tapped the folder once with two fingers.

Dexter didn’t reach for it immediately. He stared at the bound man first. The man stared back, a tremor starting in his jaw, and that tremor told Spencer more than pleading would have. This wasn’t a mistake. This wasn’t a lost tourist or a neighbor dragged from the wrong gate. Something rotten walked in with him.

Spencer took the folder. He didn’t ask permission. The first photo was a girl in a hospital bed, an old photograph, colors leached. The second—years later—a woman in a parking garage, her keys bent under a shoe. Police reports in Italian with translations clipped behind them; a prosecutor’s note about mishandled evidence; chain-of-custody gaps circled in neat red; a witness who recanted; a complaint filed by a mother whose name showed up three times in three different towns. The last page was a single printout: a recent booking photo from a minor theft charge that had gone nowhere, the same man’s face, thinner now, eyes that didn’t bother to hide what had already been decided inside them long ago.

Spencer turned one page back. A pathologist’s summary: ligature patterns; binding consistent with control, not restraint; trauma staged to suggest consent. The cold of the paper bled into his fingers. He put the folder down as if it weighed something impossible.

Will’s voice was level. “Harry would approve.”

Something in Dexter’s face—not relief, not yet—relaxed by an inch. He looked down into the canvas bag when Hannibal opened it. Plastic-wrapped bundles of blades, sealed and pristine. Two pairs of gloves. Clean towels. A roll of plastic smaller than the sheet already on the table—cover for splash, Spencer’s mind offered, clinical whether he invited it or not.

“I’m not asking you to do anything you do not already need,” Hannibal said mildly, as if discussing a run to the grocer. “I am simply… removing friction.”

“Why?” Spencer asked, and it came out raw. “Why give him this?”

Hannibal angled his head without moving his eyes from Dexter. “Because he will do it soon regardless. Because he is starving. Because I prefer order to chaos.”

Will, finally looking at Spencer, added, “Because you need to see, and not in theory.”

The bound man made a sound behind the gag—panic trying to argue with inevitability. Dexter didn’t look at him yet. He pulled the gloves on, one finger at a time, smoothing the latex like a liturgy. Spencer watched the transformation click into place with small, precise gestures: Dexter setting the knife rolls in a line, checking the tape, measuring the plastic with his eyes. None of it was rushed. None of it was sentimental.

“Don’t make me like you,” Spencer said, not sure whether he meant it for Dexter or for the two men at the stairs.

Dexter met his eyes. “I’m not making you anything.”

Will took a small step, just enough to be read as movement rather than menace, and cut the gag free with a pocketknife. He didn’t remove the ties.

The man sucked air, eyes scraping around the room for a softer face and finding none. His voice came out high and ugly. “You can’t— I didn’t— I was cleared—”

“You were not innocent,” Hannibal said, not unkindly. “You were incompetent at hiding.”

Spencer swallowed. He knew this register—Hannibal’s old-physician tone. It came empty of anger and full of judgment; it gave nothing away of the man’s pleasure.

Dexter moved now. He guided the man onto the table without force, just the inevitability of someone who knows how bodies move. When the man tried to twist, Dexter’s hand found an elbow and turned it gently to make struggling painful but not dramatic. Tape hissed. Plastic lay smooth against skin. The man cursed. Dexter checked the bonds with a methodical press. A breath. Another. The room held itself still.

The ritual words—Spencer had read about them in Miami reports that never made it to any court; he had imagined variations; he had wondered, privately, shamefully, if a script made it easier. Dexter didn’t speak a speech. He spoke to the man as if to a ledger.

“You hurt people who could not hurt you back,” Dexter said, not raising his voice. “You learned how to look like someone safe. You learned how to make mishandled evidence look like a mercy. You kept a souvenir and told yourself you had been chosen.”

The man spat something Spencer didn’t translate. Dexter wiped it away with a towel and continued, calm.

“You got away because the system failed. Harry taught me what to do when that happens.”

Spencer’s chest hurt. He didn’t move. He could hear his pulse in his ears and the quiet beneath it: the way Dexter’s breathing had leveled into something calmer than rest. The need was not frenzy. It was precision—like thirst answering water.

“Spencer,” Will said softly, voice coming from a long way off though he stood three paces away. “Look at his face.”

Spencer didn’t want to. He did.

Dexter’s expression was not cold, not cruel. It was clear. The static that lived behind his eyes was gone. The constant small-hum of vigilant discomfort had quieted. What remained was focus. He looked… present, in a way Spencer felt like a rebuke.

Hannibal nodded once, a small gesture of an instructor who has seen what he needed a student to notice. “Clarity,” he said, not to Dexter. To Spencer.

Dexter chose a knife. Not the longest. Not the showiest.

The blade gleamed in the basement light as he raised it. There was no hesitation, no pause. Dexter drove the knife straight into the man’s chest, angled clean toward the heart. The scream was muffled by the gag, cut short as blood surged around the steel.

Dexter held it there. His gloved hand pressed firm on the handle, feeling the resistance, the frantic flutter of a heart fighting the inevitable. The blood welled, spilled over his fingers, warm and vivid. He leaned in, watching with surgical calm as the life ebbed away, slower than the victim could bear.

When at last the body went slack, Dexter exhaled through his nose. The Passenger quieted, settling deep into his marrow like a beast fed.

But it wasn’t over. Not here.

He withdrew the blade, crimson running down in rivulets, and then set to work with precise, methodical rhythm. Cutting through flesh, tendon, bone. His hands moved as though recalling choreography long rehearsed. He carved the man into nine pieces — nine neat segments laid upon the plastic. Limbs divided, torso bisected, the head separate. Order in destruction.

Spencer forced himself to watch. His stomach churned, but he did not turn away. Part of him wanted to scream, to recoil, but another part — darker, quieter — leaned in. Observing not just with disgust, but with a kind of reluctant fascination.

Spencer tried to catalog details the way he always did: positions, timings, pressure arcs, blade choices. But the abstraction he used as distance dissolved at the edges. The real thing pulled his mind close, like a hand on the back of the neck. He felt it land inside him where he had never allowed anything to land before.

He hated the heat that rose in his chest. He hated that part of him—small and deeply honest—envied the peace blossoming across Dexter’s face as the last necessary motion was made. The room seemed to breathe out when Dexter did.

It wasn’t triumph. That surprised Spencer more than anything. Dexter didn’t look proud. He looked… free of noise. As if the room had been full of static and someone had reached over and turned the knob until the channel came in clean.

Spencer’s vision blurred at the edges. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and the world rearranged itself to the same shape. He had not invented this. He had not dramatized it. It was simple and terrible and true.

Will didn’t smile. He didn’t gloat. He watched Spencer like a scientist watching an element change state. “There,” he said, very softly. “Now you know.”

Spencer wanted to say no. His throat refused to move around the word. He looked at Dexter instead. “Does it always feel like this?” The question sounded like a confession.

Dexter peeled one glove off, then the other, slow so his hands didn’t shake. He didn’t look at the table. He looked at Spencer the way you look at a friend you don’t want to lie to.

“Not always,” he said. “Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s wrong at the edges. But most times—when the Code is right—” He searched for something and chose a small, unromantic word. “—it’s quiet.”

Spencer nodded once, an involuntary motion like a reflex test. He looked down at his hands. They were steady. That scared him more than shaking would have.

Hannibal moved to the table, not to admire, not to interfere, but to tidy—an old habit that turned conclusion into order. He gathered the knives, laying them back into the roll in a precise sequence. He closed the tool bag, wiped the plastic with gentle, professional motions that neither denied nor highlighted what had happened on it. Will folded the loose sheet from the floor, tucking the edges in as if he were making a bed. The domesticity of it made Spencer feel for a moment like he might laugh in the wrong direction.

“Leave the table,” Will said. “We will return for it.”

Dexter stood very still with his hands bare, his chest rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm that made the room seem calibrated to him. He looked younger by five years and older by ten. The itch under his skin—the thing Spencer had sensed since the day they met in Rome—was gone. It left behind a shape that space could learn again.

“Water,” Hannibal said, and poured two cups. He handed one to Dexter. He handed the other to Spencer. “You will need it.”

Spencer drank. His mouth had gone dry during the first cut and never recovered. The water was room temperature and felt like a truth as it went down.

Will hoisted the tool bag to his shoulder. Hannibal gathered the folder with the proof, tucking it under his arm as if it were a book he would reread later. Will paused at the bottom step and looked back at them. Not at the table. At the men.

“You’ve both been honest today,” he said, almost courteous. “We’ll give you a few hours with it.”

Hannibal inclined his head to Dexter, a small courtesy offered peer-to-peer, and then to Spencer, a different courtesy—acknowledgment, not permission. “Eat when you can,” he said. “Clarity can be exhausting.”

They left as they had come, without hurry. The door closed. The lock pressed the air flatter against the stone.

For a long minute there was only the delicate percussion of cooling metal and the quiet of breathing. Dexter sat. The chair creaked a little, a human noise that made the rest of the room’s noises behave. He set the cup down carefully on the crate, centered it, then smiled as if at a private joke about centering cups on crates. He looked… lighter. Not happy. That wasn’t the right word. Balanced. The way you look after you’ve taken off a pack you didn’t realize had been on your shoulders for sixty days.

Spencer realized he was still standing. He sat because his knees asked him to.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Dexter said finally, and he meant it.

Spencer let out a breath that tried to be a laugh and failed. “I’m not.”

They looked at each other a long time, without blinking away. A small piece of bread still sat on the tray from earlier; Spencer didn’t want it; Dexter did. Dexter picked it up without ceremony and ate it in three unhurried bites, and the ordinary act cracked something in the air that had been too taut to touch.

“The folder,” Spencer said, nodding to the proof. “You didn’t even have to read it.”

“I did,” Dexter said. “Just not with my hands.” He tapped his temple lightly. “I’ve met him hundreds of times.”

Spencer pressed his fingertips to his brow, to the place where thoughts gathered before speech. “I hate that I understand.”

Dexter’s smile was small and sad. “I hate that, too.”

They sat in the cooling quiet. Upstairs, faintly, a faucet ran, then stopped. A door closed. Somewhere outside, a night bird called and another answered, the sounds sliding around the edges of stone like a reminder that the world did not know what had just been settled below it.

Spencer surprised himself by speaking first. “When it’s quiet,” he said, “does the fear go with it? The fear of breaking?”

Dexter considered. He didn’t hurry the answer. “It doesn’t go. It turns into something else. Not fear. Not pride. It’s… space. Enough room to make the next choice without shaking.”

Spencer nodded, slow, as if the motion itself could set something right in his neck. He took a drink of water and felt it land all the way down.

“Do you want me-” he began, then stopped, embarrassed by the shape of the question, by its implication.

Dexter saved him from having to finish it. “No. I don’t want you to become me. I want you to choose without lying to yourself about why.”

Spencer looked down at his hands again. They were steady. They stayed steady. He didn’t know what he would do with that steadiness yet. He knew that pretending it wasn’t there would make it shake.

They stayed like that until the night thinned and the first suggestion of dawn pressed its thumb against the high window. Dexter cleaned what he could without ceremony, moving with a practiced economy that neither dramatized nor concealed. Spencer helped where help was obvious—handing a towel, straightening a corner of plastic—small acts that felt, against his will, like a kind of respect for craft.

When they had done what could be done, they took their places again on the thin mattresses, near enough to hear each other breathe, far enough to pretend it was distance and not tenderness. Neither of them closed their eyes for a while. They didn’t need to. The room was quiet in a new way.

“Spencer,” Dexter said into the almost-morning, voice low, “if the team finds us and they ask you what we did down here—”

Spencer cut him off, his own voice steady. “I’ll tell them the truth.”

Dexter turned his head on the pillow. “Which truth?”

Spencer turned his, too. In the dim, their faces were outlines and breath. “My truth. That neither of us did anything wrong. That Lecter and Graham have taunted us, without succeding.”

Dexter exhaled, something like relief passing through him and out. “Thank you.”

They didn’t say anything else. Upstairs, the old house settled. Down here, something else settled with it. Not peace—that would have been dishonest—but a workable stillness that could hold until the door next opened.

The villa’s basement was quiet again. The body was gone, along with the plastic, knives, and the ritual precision of the kill. Hannibal and Will had swept it all away, leaving only stone walls, two mattresses, and the smell of iron.

Dexter sat hunched forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the faint stain where the tarp had been. The act was over, but the echo of it still pulsed inside him, a raw thrum of satisfaction that hadn’t dulled in six long weeks. He should have been calm. Instead, he felt restless, wired, alive.

Spencer shifted on the opposite mattress, knees drawn to his chest, fingers twined in front of his lips. He had been watching Dexter without shame, cataloguing every twitch, every subtle change in his posture, like he would with any subject under observation. But this was no subject. This was his roommate, his strange ally, his mirror.

At last, Spencer broke the silence. “You looked… different.”

Dexter turned his head. “Different how?”

Spencer’s mouth quirked, not quite a smile, not quite mockery. “Peaceful. As if killing was the most natural thing in the world for you. Like breathing. Like—” He tilted his head, studying him. “—like me when I solve an equation that’s been tormenting me for days.”

Dexter let out a short laugh, low in his throat. “That’s one way to put it.”

Spencer rested his chin on his knees. “You don’t hide it very well when it’s done. You glow, Dexter. Do you know that?”

The word startled him. Glow. He thought of blood on plastic, the warmth of a heart stilled beneath his blade, and now the image of Spencer—eyes catching what no one else ever dared to look for. He chuckled again, softer this time. “Glow isn’t exactly the word I’d choose.”

“It’s the right one,” Spencer countered, matter-of-fact, though his voice softened. “Don’t argue with a genius.”

Dexter smirked. “You’re impossible.”

“You’re dangerous,” Spencer shot back, but there was no accusation in it, only a kind of intimacy, as if the danger belonged to him too.

They sat like that, the silence no longer empty but charged. Upstairs, faint laughter filtered down through the floorboards—Hannibal and Will moving about, perhaps opening wine, perhaps weaving more of their endless games. But here in the basement, time slowed.

Spencer’s stomach growled, the sound sharp in the stillness. He winced. “I’m not hungry.”

Dexter arched a brow. “You didn’t eat half your breakfast. Stress does that to you.”

“And you?” Spencer asked.

“I wanted more.” Dexter leaned back on his hands, stretching out. “Stress does that to me.”

Spencer’s lips tugged into the barest smile. “We’re opposites, then.”

Dexter tilted his head, eyes narrowing just slightly, amused. “Not opposites. Complements.”

The word lingered between them.

Spencer’s gaze didn’t break away. He felt a flicker of warmth in his chest, unexpected and unwelcome, and yet he didn’t push it aside. His voice came out softer, almost teasing. “So what are we, Dexter? Killer and genius? Or just two sides of the same broken coin?”

Dexter studied him for a long moment, the edges of his mouth curling into something that wasn’t quite his usual mask, something more genuine. “Maybe we’re both.”

Spencer let out a quiet laugh, curling tighter into himself. “Careful. That almost sounded like affection.”

Dexter smirked, leaning a little closer, his voice a murmur now. “Maybe it was.”

The silence after was heavier, not awkward but weighted, dense with everything unspoken. Two men in a locked basement, bruised and exhausted, yet inching toward something neither had expected to find here—something carved from blood, sharpened by shared shadows, softened by exhaustion.

Above them, the villa carried on with the sound of knives against cutting boards, wine poured into glasses, the faint hum of music. But below, in the basement, Dexter and Spencer sat in the hush of their own strange communion, the first threads of a bond that was at once terrible and tender.

The hotel room was dim, curtains drawn against the morning light. JJ sat on the edge of the bed, hands pressed to her face, her shoulders shaking. She had held it together through reports, through Hotch’s clipped orders, through Rossi’s fury with the authorities. But now, alone with Emily, her mask cracked.

Emily knelt beside her without hesitation, an arm slipping around JJ’s shoulders, pulling her close. “Hey,” she whispered. “It’s okay. Let go.”

JJ clung to her, the tears hot and sudden, running unchecked. “He’s gone, Emily. Spencer’s gone, and I—” Her voice broke, the words swallowed in sobs.

Emily held her tighter, cheek resting against JJ’s hair. “He’s not gone. Not like that. We’ll get him back.”

“They’ve got him,” JJ gasped, clutching Emily’s sleeve. “Hannibal, Will… whatever they’re doing, I can feel it. They’ll twist him, Emily. And I wasn’t there to stop it. I wasn’t—”

“You couldn’t have been,” Emily interrupted, gentle but firm. “None of us could. Don’t you dare blame yourself.”

JJ pulled back just enough to look at her, eyes red and wet. “But what if he changes? What if they change him, and he’s not Spencer anymore?”

Emily cupped her face, thumb brushing away a tear. Her voice was steady. “Then we bring him back. Whatever it takes.”

JJ’s chest heaved, breath uneven, but the storm was breaking. She leaned forward again, burying her face against Emily’s shoulder. Emily let her stay there, rocking her slightly, her own eyes closed.

Inside the room, two women held onto each other like anchors, both knowing that tomorrow they’d have to put the armor back on. Tonight, JJ was allowed to cry. And Emily was there to catch her.

The basement was quiet except for the distant groan of the old house above them. The air smelled of damp stone, iron, and faintly of the food they’d just eaten. Dexter had finished most of it; Spencer’s plate sat nearly untouched.

Dexter shifted, stretching his long legs out in front of him, and asked casually, “So… do you have a type?”

Spencer’s head turned sharply, brow furrowed. “A type?”

“Yeah,” Dexter said, like he was talking about something ordinary.

Spencer blinked, his mind leaping to the obvious. “That’s—personal.”

Dexter’s lips tugged at a smile. “Romantically?”

Spencer rolled his eyes, though a flush crept across his cheeks. “What else would you mean?”

Dexter waited, silent long enough that Spencer finally looked at him again. His voice was low when it came. “To kill.”

Spencer froze. His mouth opened, then closed. He stared at Dexter as if the words themselves had scraped something raw inside him.

Dexter leaned back against the wall, arms folded. “Everyone who kills has a type. Even if they don’t admit it. Even if it’s only in the back of their head. For me, it’s the guilty. People who hurt others and get away with it. The code says they don’t deserve to walk free.”

Spencer tried to swallow, his throat dry. He wanted to deny it, to laugh it off, to remind Dexter who he was. But memory betrayed him—Tobias Engel’s blood, Raphael Sbarge’s lifeless body, the moment of awful clarity afterward when he hadn’t felt regret, not really.

“I don’t—” He faltered, shaking his head. “I don’t think I have a type.”

Dexter didn’t push. He just watched, patient, eyes steady.

And Spencer, too tired to keep the words locked away, kept speaking.

“Maybe it would be the ones who pretend they’re better. The ones who think they’re untouchable because of where they were born, or the badge they wear, or how much money is in their pocket. I’ve seen those men. Men who ruin lives because they can. Men who smile while they do it.” His hands clenched, pale knuckles stark against the dim light. “Men who act like the rest of us are just… tools. Pieces on their board.”

He stopped, exhaling unsteadily. But the floodgate was open now.

“I hate it most when someone looks at another person and sees nothing. No value. Just… air to breathe until they’re done with you. Disposable.” His voice cracked, but he pushed through it. “That’s the kind of person who deserves to be afraid.”

Silence stretched between them. Dexter leaned forward, elbows on his knees, gaze locked on him.

“That sounds like a type to me,” Dexter said quietly.

Spencer laughed once, bitter and nervous, shaking his head. “I don’t want it to be.”

Dexter’s voice dropped, calm and even. “Want has nothing to do with it. It’s already there. You’re just deciding what to do with it.”

Spencer stared down at his hands. His fingers trembled, and he pressed them hard against his knees to still them. “Sometimes I think… if I let it out, if I let myself be that person even once—really be that person—it wouldn’t stop. That it would feel too good. That maybe it’s what I was made for, all along. And that terrifies me more than anything.”

Dexter’s expression flickered—something like recognition, something like pity—but he didn’t answer right away.

Spencer closed his eyes, the weight of the truth pressing against him, heavier than the walls around them. “But then I wonder if maybe… maybe feeding it once in a while would be better than starving it forever. Maybe it would quiet everything down. Maybe I could think again.”

His voice fell to a whisper, like a confession he hadn’t meant to say aloud:

“Maybe clarity only comes with blood.”

The words hung heavy in the air, vibrating in the silence like a struck chord. Spencer kept his gaze on the floor, shoulders drawn tight. He hated himself for saying it, hated himself more for meaning it.

A moment passed. Then another.

And then he felt something—Dexter’s hand, warm and steady, pressing against his wrist. It wasn’t forceful, not a grip, just enough pressure to anchor him. Spencer stiffened at first, but Dexter didn’t let go.

“You’re not wrong,” Dexter said, voice low, the kind of tone that seemed built for secrets. “Clarity does come with blood. That’s why I’m still alive. That’s why I’m not broken in a padded room somewhere. Every time I give the Passenger what it wants—on my terms, with my rules—I remember who I am.”

Spencer lifted his head, searching Dexter’s face. He wanted to find judgment, or cruelty, or hunger. But there was none. Just an eerie calm.

Dexter’s thumb brushed lightly over the inside of his wrist, a small, human gesture that felt too intimate in the cold basement. “The difference between monsters and us isn’t the dark urges. It’s what we do with them. The code keeps me from drowning in it. It gives me a line I can stand on.”

Spencer swallowed, throat dry. “And if I cross it?”

Dexter’s hand shifted, fingers wrapping fully around his wrist now, grounding him. “Then you make another line. You make one that fits you. That’s the only way it works. Nobody else can cage it for you—not the Bureau, not your friends, not even me.”

Spencer’s lips twitched, somewhere between a bitter smile and despair. “You make it sound so simple.”

“It’s not simple,” Dexter said, shaking his head slightly. “It’s a war. Every single day. But starving the Passenger won’t win it. That only makes it scream louder. You’ll go crazy trying to pretend it’s not there. Believe me.”

Spencer felt the pulse under Dexter’s fingers, the weight of the hand holding his wrist. He didn’t pull away. He let the contact stay, strangely grateful for it. For once, he didn’t feel like a specimen under a microscope, or a puzzle piece that never fit.

He felt—seen.

Dexter leaned a little closer, his voice dropping further, as if daring the walls to listen. “If you ever decide to feed it, Spencer, I’ll be there. To make sure you don’t lose yourself.”

Spencer’s heart thudded hard in his chest, his face burning despite the chill of the basement. He turned his eyes away, whispering, “That’s the scariest promise I’ve ever wanted to believe.”

The scrape of a key in the lock made both men glance up. The door creaked open, spilling a sliver of warm light into the basement. Will and Hannibal stepped inside with the kind of composed efficiency that made even the simplest gesture seem deliberate. They carried trays—two plates each, and bottles of water balanced on the side.

No chains. No mocking words. Just food.

Will set a tray down in front of Spencer, Hannibal in front of Dexter. The meals were plain but filling: roasted chicken, bread, a handful of olives, slices of tomato slick with oil. Food that smelled good, too good for prisoners.

“Eat,” Hannibal said. His tone was calm, almost gentle. “Strength will be required.”

He and Will left without ceremony, locking the door behind them.

For a moment, neither Dexter nor Spencer moved. The silence felt heavier than the food. Finally, Dexter reached first, tearing into the bread, then the chicken. His appetite was sharp, almost hungry enough to blot out the circumstance.

Spencer pushed a tomato slice around his plate with the edge of his fork. He wasn’t starving. Not in the same way. His stomach knotted with thought instead of hunger.

Dexter noticed. “You’ve got to eat,” he said, chewing. “Even if you don’t want to. You’ll need it.”

Spencer gave him a side glance. “You sound like Hotch.”

Dexter smirked faintly. “Except Hotch doesn’t eat like this.” He tore another piece of bread with his teeth.

Spencer let out the smallest huff of air, not quite a laugh but close enough. He picked up a piece of bread, forced himself to chew. The olive oil coated his tongue, heavy and bitter.

They ate in silence after that—Dexter with steady, practiced bites, Spencer slower, reluctant but deliberate.

When the plates were scraped clean, Spencer leaned back against the wall, setting his fork down. “This feels… wrong. Eating like this.”

Dexter swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Everything about this is wrong. But staying alive—that’s never wrong.”

For the first time since they’d been thrown into this basement, Spencer nodded without argument.

The team was called at dusk. Sirens cut briefly as the SUVs rolled into the narrow vicolo, headlights bouncing off the old stones. The alley was cordoned off with tape strung between cracked walls, Carabinieri holding back a handful of locals craning their necks to see.

Inside the barrier, silence pressed. The fountain at the center of the vicolo trickled faintly, its water reflecting streetlamps in rippling streaks of yellow. But it wasn’t the fountain that drew every eye.

Nine black plastic bags floated within it, each anchored and carefully positioned. Together they formed a grim constellation, too precise to be random. The water lapped against them with quiet insistence, rocking the pieces gently against one another.

Emily’s throat tightened. It was a declaration.

JJ muttered under her breath, “Oh my God.”

Rossi’s face hardened, and he pointed toward the symmetry of the arrangement. “Not Lecter. Not Graham. This—this is different.”

Tara took a step closer, her eyes narrowing at the surgical neatness. “Each piece has its own bag. Whoever did this wanted control. Absolute control.”

Hotch crouched near the edge of the fountain, scanning the geometry of the floating bags. “Nine parts. Head, torso, limbs… everything accounted for.” He stood, his expression grim. “This is the Bay Harbor Butcher’s signature.”

JJ shot him a sharp look. “That case was closed. Years ago.”

Rossi answered before Hotch could. “Closed isn’t the same as solved.” His voice was low, gravelly with conviction. “This is him. Or someone who learned from him.”

Emily’s gaze lingered on the fountain, on the eerie precision. “No. This isn’t imitation. Whoever did this… this is the real thing.” She crossed her arms. “Which means Lecter and Graham wanted us to see it.”

Tara’s voice cut through the air. “Why leave this for us?”

Rossi shook his head. “It’s a message. They’re telling us something, but not in words.”

Hotch looked over the scene once more. His voice was calm, but it carried finality. “This isn’t their kill. They’ve handed us someone else’s. And they want us to know exactly who’s behind it.”

The team stood in the narrow vicolo, the air heavy with damp stone, faint water, and the weight of a revelation none of them wanted to name aloud.

Rossi exhaled slowly, hands on his hips. “Which means the circle’s wider than we thought. They’ve taken someone into their fold.” He looked around at the others, letting it settle. “Maybe more than one.”

Tara’s brow furrowed. “They only had Spencer and Dexter. They took them, they chained them. If this body isn’t theirs…” She trailed off, realizing what that meant.

Hotch stood, his expression unreadable. “Then Lecter and Graham didn’t just capture them. They recruited them.”

JJ’s stomach knotted. “No. Spencer—”

Emily’s hand caught JJ’s wrist, grounding her. “Think, JJ. Lecter doesn’t waste movements. If this was left for us, it’s because he wants us to see who’s inside their circle now. Dexter. And maybe Spencer too.”

Rossi’s voice was gravel. “Not maybe. If Lecter and Graham staged this, then Spencer’s already complicit—whether willingly or not. That’s the message.”

The fountain burbled softly, carrying the sound of water lapping against plastic. Around it, the silence of the team pressed heavier than any crowd. The realization settled in, terrible and intimate: Lecter and Graham were no longer working alone. They had turned their captives into collaborators.

The operations room they had taken over in the hotel didn’t look like much: a couple of folding tables, laptops running on too many cables, maps pinned to the walls with thumbtacks, half-finished coffee going cold in paper cups. But the air in it felt compressed, like the walls themselves knew that something irreversible had been uncovered.

Hotch stood in front of the projection screen where, hours earlier, images of black plastic bags floating in a fountain had been shown on repeat. Now the screen showed a timeline, but no one was really looking at it. The pieces had already clicked into place too quickly to ignore.

“It’s not mimicry,” Rossi said flatly. His fist came down on the table, hard enough to rattle the stack of case files. “This wasn’t done for theatrics. It was done because we would recognize it. Someone wanted to make sure we understood exactly what kind of killer we’re dealing with.”

Emily crossed her arms, studying the pinned photographs of the nine butchered pieces. Her jaw tightened. “Clean. Clinical. The sectioning wasn’t done in rage or improvisation. Whoever did this has technical training. They knew how to carve, how to package, how to dispose—almost like handling lab specimens.” Her voice was measured, but there was an edge of disgust in it.

Garcia, perched at her laptop, swiveled her screen toward the rest. “I ran cross-checks on supplier codes and lab inventories. One of the chemical signatures we pulled—the residue in the syringe from Parioli—has only been logged in a handful of closed cases. Miami. You can guess which ones.”

A silence fell, heavy and immediate. It wasn’t surprise anymore. It was recognition.

Derek exhaled through his nose, shaking his head like he was trying to dislodge the thought. “So we’re saying it. Out loud. The Bay Harbor Butcher.” He tapped the photo of the bags on the screen. “This is his work. Or someone who was standing close enough to watch him do it.”

JJ, who had been quiet until now, leaned forward on her elbows. “Except Doakes is dead. That chapter’s been closed for years.” She looked around the room, the unspoken question thick between them. “So if the Butcher is here—how?”

Rossi didn’t look away. “Because he’s not dead. Or because someone else picked up where he left off. Either way—this isn’t coincidence.”

Garcia’s voice was softer now, almost reluctant. “The overlap is too precise. The supply chain, the packaging, the exact dimensions of the cuts. It’s not a student copying a master. It’s the master’s hand.”

Hotch moved then, taking a slow step closer to the table. His calm was the kind that cut deeper than shouting. “We operate on evidence, not hunches. But right now, evidence points toward someone embedded close to us. Someone who knows how we work. Someone who had the access, the knowledge, the cover.” He paused, his eyes sweeping the team. “That means we monitor. We protect every channel of information. We don’t confront until we’re sure. But we prepare as if the answer is already in front of us.”

Emily’s voice was dry, sharp: “Even if that answer is Dexter.”

The name finally landed, spoken aloud, and the room felt smaller.

Rossi rubbed a hand down his face. “If it’s him, then Hannibal and Will didn’t just outplay us. They handed us our own executioner, wrapped in a badge and a smile.”

JJ shook her head, her voice breaking just slightly. “Spencer trusts him. That’s what scares me most. If this is true, then Will and Hannibal are using Dexter to tear us apart from the inside.”

Derek pushed away from the table, pacing. His voice carried that hard Chicago snap he used when emotion started boiling over. “So what’s the move? We sit on our hands while he sharpens his knives? We’ve already lost hours. Spencer’s still missing, and now you’re telling me the guy he’s chained next to could have a body count north of a hundred?”

Garcia, uncharacteristically grim, answered without looking up from her keys. “One hundred thirty-four confirmed. Probably more. That’s what the files say.”

The number sat there, obscene, like an open wound.

Hotch finally broke the silence, his tone iron. “We don’t accuse without proof. But from this moment forward, every resource goes to locking down his history. Travel records, case overlaps, every unexplained disposal site. If there’s a trail, we’ll find it.” He straightened, his expression unreadable. “And if it leads where I think it does—we stop him. Lecter and Graham may have staged this body as a taunt, but they’ve also given us a chance. We’re not going to waste it.”

No one spoke after that. The only sound was Garcia’s keys clicking, filling the silence with the cold rhythm of data being pulled, each keystroke another step toward the truth.

And in the back of every mind, the same thought pulsed, unspoken but undeniable:

If Dexter was the Butcher, then Spencer was trapped in a basement with him.

The basement smelled faintly of soap and damp stone. The air was heavy, pressing down on Dexter and Spencer even as the new, thicker mattress and clean sheets made the room less cruel than it had been. Hannibal and Will had left them for the night, food cleared, chains long gone. There was no sound but the muted creak of the old pipes overhead.

Spencer sat cross-legged on the mattress, hands knotted loosely in his lap, staring into nothing. Dexter lay back against the wall, one arm folded beneath his head, watching him with the kind of quiet that wasn’t restful — the quiet of someone measuring what might come next.

At length, Spencer spoke, his voice low and deliberate.

“I’ve killed before.”

Dexter tilted his head, listening.

“Not often. Twice,” Spencer went on, eyes still distant. “Tobias Hankel. He kept me chained in that cabin, injected me, tortured me. I killed him, and it wasn’t guilt I felt. Just… release. And then Rafael, in Mexico. He had me and my team at gunpoint. I shot him. And again — no guilt. Only clarity.”

He turned finally, meeting Dexter’s gaze. “That’s how I know. The darkness isn’t something I’ve invented because of fear, or trauma. It’s there. It’s always been there. And when I let it out, it doesn’t destroy me. It clarifies things.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. “You’ve made peace with it.”

Spencer gave a faint, humorless smile. “Peace isn’t the word. It’s more like… acknowledgment. I don’t need to pretend anymore. If I don’t feed it, I’ll fracture. If I do, maybe I stay whole.”

For a long time, neither of them spoke. The silence was thick, but not empty. Dexter sat forward now, elbows on his knees, studying the younger man as though he could see that hidden fracture running right through him.

Spencer lay back at last, turning toward the wall. “I’m not afraid of it anymore.” His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Not afraid of me.”

Dexter closed his eyes, and for once the Dark Passenger inside him was quiet — listening.

He turned his head toward Spencer, startled not by the admission — he’d suspected — but by the calmness with which Spencer said it. For Dexter, the hunger had always been a beast to chain. For Spencer, it sounded like an answer.

“You don’t sound afraid,” Dexter said.

“I’m not,” Spencer admitted. “What I’m afraid of is what happens when the team finds out. They’ll never see me the same way again. And… that terrifies me more than the killing itself.”

Dexter exhaled slowly, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “I know that feeling. I’ve been living in it for years. I could survive prison, or death. But not their disappointment. Not the look in their eyes when they realize I was never what they thought.”

Spencer studied him, gaze sharp even in the dimness. “You think they’ll forgive you less than me?”

Dexter let out a low, humorless laugh. “You’re their genius. Their kid brother. If they find out about you, it’ll break them, but they’ll try to save you anyway. Me?” He shook his head. “They’ll say I corrupted you. And maybe they’ll be right.”

Spencer’s voice cut back, firm. “You didn’t corrupt me. You just made it impossible for me to keep lying to myself.”

The words hung between them like a wire strung too tight. Dexter felt it thrumming through his bones.

“And if I stand beside you when you let it out?” Dexter asked, voice low. “If I show you how to feed it… would you hate me then?”

Spencer’s mouth twitched, a shadow of a smile. “No. Because the truth is, you’re the only one who won’t look at me with disappointment. You’ll look at me and see what I really am. And that’s why I’m not screaming for the team right now.”

Dexter’s chest tightened — not with fear, but with something heavier, dangerously close to belonging. He shifted, their shoulders brushing at last, neither of them moving away.

The silence stretched, full of things neither of them could say aloud without shattering something fragile. Spencer’s shoulder pressed more firmly against Dexter’s, testing, as if measuring whether he’d flinch away. He didn’t.

Instead, Dexter moved, almost before he could think better of it. He shifted onto his side and pulled Spencer into him, an awkward, stiff motion at first — but once Spencer let out a long breath and didn’t resist, Dexter’s arm wrapped fully around him.

It wasn’t calculated, wasn’t strategy. It was raw instinct.

Spencer’s body was tense at first, bony frame uncertain against Dexter’s solid chest, like he was bracing for mockery or rejection. But when none came, when Dexter only held him, that tension eased by increments. His breathing slowed, shoulders loosening under the weight of another man’s quiet steadiness. He’d never admit it aloud, but he was so tired of being alone in his head, of carrying every secret and doubt without a place to set them down. Here, at least for this moment, he didn’t have to.

Dexter’s throat worked as he stared into the dim ceiling above them, hand curled against Spencer’s back. He wasn’t used to this either — not this closeness, not this gentleness that wasn’t part of some disguise. He had worn masks for everyone in his life: family, coworkers, friends. But not with Spencer. Not here. The contact felt dangerous, not because of fear, but because it was real.

Spencer’s head rested lightly against his chest, his hair brushing Dexter’s chin. “This doesn’t mean anything,” Spencer murmured at last, his voice half-defensive, half-exhausted, as though he needed to say it before the vulnerability swallowed him whole.

“I know,” Dexter said softly. He didn’t argue, didn’t press — but he held on tighter anyway. Because the truth was, he didn’t want to let go.

Spencer let out a shaky breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He wasn’t used to this kind of intimacy, not outside the few rare friendships he trusted with his life. But Dexter’s grip wasn’t suffocating. It was grounding. The steady beat of his heart, the heat of his chest, the sense that, just for now, neither of them had to pretend — it filled a hollow space that Spencer had learned to ignore.

Dexter’s jaw tightened, eyes fixed on the shadows dancing across the ceiling. He could feel the fragility of the man in his arms, could feel his own fragility reflected back at him. Spencer knew more about him than anyone should, and yet he stayed. That loyalty — undeserved, unearned — made something coil painfully in Dexter’s chest.

The basement was cold, the walls damp, but in that fragile embrace there was warmth, a rare moment of being known and not abandoned. And it lingered longer than either of them expected.

Spencer’s fingers curled slightly against Dexter’s shirt, as though testing the reality of it. For the first time since he’d been chained in this place, he allowed himself to close his eyes, not out of defeat, but out of trust.

Spencer’s words faltered halfway through a thought, his voice heavy with fatigue. “Maybe… tomorrow…” He didn’t finish, just breathed against Dexter’s chest, his body slackening.

Dexter shifted slightly, uncertain. The embrace had lasted longer than he’d intended, and though it didn’t make him uncomfortable, he wondered if Spencer might pull back any second, embarrassed once he realized what they were doing. Carefully, he loosened his arm, trying to give him the option to move away.

But Spencer only stirred faintly, pressing closer instead, fingers tightening slightly in the fabric of Dexter’s sleeve like an anchor. His cheek stayed tucked against Dexter, his breathing uneven, stubborn in its refusal to let go.

“You don’t want me to move,” Dexter said quietly, almost testing the words aloud.

Spencer’s reply was delayed, caught between waking and sleep. “…No. Stay.” The syllables were blurred, but the intent was sharp enough. His grip on Dexter’s sleeve remained, betraying a need that cut through exhaustion.

Dexter froze, then let his arm fold back around him, more securely this time. He felt the subtle tremor in Spencer’s shoulders, the way his body, wrung out from too many battles fought in silence, finally allowed itself to lean.

They lay like that for a while, the basement’s stillness wrapping around them. Spencer mumbled something incoherent, then clearer, though almost swallowed by drowsiness: “Feels… better like this.”

Dexter’s throat tightened. He had no ready answer, nothing polished or easy. Instead, he let his chin dip until it brushed Spencer’s hair, letting the silence be enough.

Spencer shifted once more, this time with the unconscious insistence of a man too tired to think, only to feel. His hand stayed where it was, clutching the sleeve, a small but stubborn act of refusal to let Dexter go.

Dexter exhaled slowly, surrendering too. “Alright,” he murmured. “I’ll stay.”

The words didn’t wake Spencer, but they seemed to settle into him anyway. His breathing deepened, his weight grew heavier, and for the first time in what felt like years, Dexter held someone without needing to calculate, without needing to hide. Just two men in the dark, too tired to pretend anymore.

The hotel room was too small for the weight of what hung in the air. The truth had already been spoken: Dexter Morgan was the Bay Harbor Butcher. The words were out, impossible to take back, impossible to soften. Now they were left with the wreckage — and with the thought that Spencer was locked in a basement with him.

JJ sat forward, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. She wasn’t crying — not anymore — but her breath trembled like she could start again if someone touched her too softly. Emily sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders pressed. No words between them. Just presence.

Across the room, Tara rubbed her temple, muttering, “Jesus Christ…” not for the first time. Her tone was sharp, but her hands shook when she dropped them into her lap.

Rossi stood by the window, glass of wine in hand, though he hadn’t touched it in minutes. His eyes weren’t on the streets below but on the reflection of his teammates in the glass. The people he’d promised himself he’d keep steady. But even he couldn’t find the right words this time.

Hotch finally broke the silence, voice low, steady, but far more personal than usual. “They wanted us to see it. That syringe. They wanted us to know not just about Dexter — but about what they see in Spencer.” He glanced over his shoulder at the others, his eyes tired, rimmed red. “And if they think he belongs at Dexter’s side…” He trailed off, jaw tightening.

Morgan swore softly under his breath and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his face with both hands. “Nah. No. Spencer’s our kid. He’s—” He stopped himself, looked around, and saw in everyone else’s eyes the same fear he didn’t want to name. “Shit.”

JJ’s voice was small but sharp. “You saw him after Tobias. After Rafael. He didn’t…” She lifted her head and swallowed, eyes darting to Emily’s as if begging her to back her up. “He didn’t look sorry.”

Emily didn’t flinch. “No. He didn’t.”

The silence that followed was brutal.

Tara leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers laced like she was praying. “We’ve always known he’s… different. Brilliant, but different. The way he shuts down, the way he processes… it’s not like us.” She paused, and her voice dropped lower. “And if they’re pushing him, if they’re telling him what he already fears—”

“He’s not a killer,” JJ snapped, more out of desperation than certainty. Her hands balled into fists in her lap. “He’s not like them.”

“JJ.” Rossi’s voice was soft but unflinching. “You just said yourself he didn’t regret it.”

JJ turned on him, eyes flashing. “He saved us. Twice. Don’t twist it.”

Emily reached across, placing her hand lightly over JJ’s fists, grounding her. “Nobody’s twisting anything. We’re saying he’s vulnerable. And they know it.”

Hotch moved closer, finally setting down his glass. His voice softened, almost weary. “We’re not afraid of Spencer. We’re afraid of what they’ll make him believe about himself.”

Morgan leaned forward, forearms braced against his knees, voice low. “So what? We just sit here? We just wait while they… break him down?” His voice cracked with anger he wasn’t used to showing. “That kid would take a bullet for any of us.”

“He already has,” Rossi said quietly.

That silenced them again.

Emily broke it, speaking carefully. “And that’s the point. Spencer’s the same guy who loves us, who loves his books, his stupid card tricks, teaching, debating. He’s the one who lights up when he’s explaining something nobody else understands, the one who actually loves people, even when he thinks he doesn’t. But loving people…” She hesitated, her eyes moving to Hotch. “Loving people doesn’t stop you from stepping over the line, if someone pushes you just right. You know Hannibal Lecter. He’s done it before. With Will Graham.”

Morgan seized on it, shaking his head fast, like clinging to a rope. “Yeah, but that took him, what, five years? Five years of working Will, twisting him inside out. Reid’s only been with them for a few days. That’s nothing. They don’t have the time.”

For a heartbeat, hope flickered in JJ’s eyes, fragile as glass.

Then Rossi crushed it with a sigh. “It wasn’t time that changed Will. Hannibal didn’t groom him. He didn’t need to. He just gave Will permission to be who he already was.”

The words hit like a blow. JJ’s hope shattered; she looked down at her lap, shoulders shaking again. Emily shut her eyes, jaw tightening, as though she could stop the truth from landing.

Hotch spoke at last, voice low but final. “And if that’s what they’re doing to Spencer…” He let the silence carry the end of the thought.

“No one grooms Spencer,” Emily said suddenly, her tone sharp enough to slice the air. “He’s not fragile glass you can shape however you want. He’s… him. Always has been. Hannibal didn’t groom Will Graham, and he won’t groom Spencer. What he’ll do is give him permission. That’s worse.”

JJ’s nails dug into her palms. “But Spencer doesn’t want permission. He wants to come home. He wants his books, his chess sets, his students. He wants Henry to look at him like a hero. He’s not looking for someone to—” Her voice broke. “—to free him.”

Rossi exhaled slowly, eyes on the floor. “JJ, sometimes it isn’t about looking. Sometimes it’s about what’s already waiting inside. We’ve seen killers who hid it for decades. They were fathers, priests, teachers… people who smiled and loved and laughed. And then one day, they stopped hiding.”

Tara’s voice was steady, but her hand clenched around her glass. “We have to be honest. Spencer’s already shown he can cross lines most of us couldn’t. He survived things that would’ve broken anyone else. And if he did come out… calmer, as we said earlier—” she stopped, shaking her head, “—that means something.”

Morgan leaned forward, his eyes burning. “It means he’s strong. It means he doesn’t carry his ghosts the way the rest of us do. That’s not a crime. Don’t twist it.”

Emily met his gaze, unwavering. “Nobody’s twisting it, Derek. We’re saying Hannibal and Will will twist it. They’ll tell him calm means truth. That his strength is proof. That it’s not a scar but a calling.”

Hotch finally spoke, his voice low but cutting through the haze. “Spencer is still Spencer. That’s the only fact we cling to. He is the same man who would die for each of us. He’s the same man who already has. But loving us doesn’t exempt him from temptation.”

JJ shut her eyes tight, whispering as though praying, “Then we just have to be louder than their voices. Louder than their lies.”

Rossi gave a bitter smile. “I’ve been at this too long to believe love alone can drown out the darkness. But I’ll tell you this—sometimes it’s the only anchor a man has left. If Spencer’s still anchored to us, we have a chance.”

Morgan’s fist slammed against the table. “I swear to God, if Will Graham lays a finger on Spencer, I’ll put him in the ground myself. I don’t care what he was to us. He’s nothing but a target now.”

JJ’s breath hitched, and she snapped back, louder than she meant. “Stop pretending this is about revenge. This isn’t about you, Derek. This is about him. About Spencer. He’s alive, and that’s the only reason I haven’t lost my mind already.”

Emily leaned forward, dark eyes flashing. “Alive isn’t enough. Don’t you get it? He’s theirs now. He’s sitting in their world, breathing their air, listening to every poisonous word they pour into him. That does something to a person. It doesn’t matter how smart, how strong, how loyal—no one walks out untouched.”

Tara cut in, voice sharp with frustration. “So what, Emily? You want us to write him off? Pretend he’s already gone?”

“I want us to face the possibility,” Emily shot back. “Because if we don’t, if we keep clinging to the boy genius we remember, we’re going to make the wrong call when it counts.”

JJ’s hand slammed the table this time, tears spilling freely. “He’s not just ‘the boy genius.’ He’s my friend. He’s my family. He loves us. That means something. That keeps him tethered, no matter what they do to him.”

Morgan’s jaw flexed. “And if that tether snaps? What then? What happens if he looks us in the eye and we don’t recognize him anymore?”

For a long moment, no one spoke.

Hotch finally broke the silence, his tone grim but steady. “Then it’s on us to make sure we reach him before that happens. We’ve lost too many already. Not him. Not Spencer.”

The room was raw with grief, anger, and the unspoken truth hanging between them: no one knew if Spencer could be saved.

Rossi’s voice came low, gravel deep. “Enough for tonight. We can tear each other apart later. Right now, we need rest. Tomorrow we act. And when that day ends, one way or another, we’ll know who Spencer Reid really is.”

Derek found Penelope in the corner of his darkened hotel room, knees pulled up, glasses off, wiping at her face with the heel of her hand as though she could scrub the tears away before anyone saw. She looked up when he came in, mascara smudged, eyes shining.

“Don’t,” she whispered, before he could say a word. “Don’t do the tough guy thing right now. Not with me.”

He stopped cold, shoulders shaking as if he’d been hit. For a heartbeat he tried to swallow it down — the image of Spencer chained, the thought of those hands that had cuffed killers now being forced still. It broke him. He sank to the floor beside her, head in his hands.

Penelope slid closer, wrapping her arms around him without hesitation. He clung to her like he was drowning, and for once, didn’t try to hide it.

“They don’t get to win,” she said fiercely against his shoulder. “Not Lecter, not Graham. They don’t get to break him. Not Spencer. Not our boy.”

Derek’s voice was ragged. “Garcia, you didn’t see… the look in Hotch’s eyes. He’s scared. If Hotch is scared, then—” His throat closed, and he couldn’t finish.

She tightened her hold, nails pressing lightly into his back as if to anchor him. “Hotch can be scared. You can be scared. I’m scared too. But Spencer? He’s stronger than any of us give him credit for. He always has been. He’s been through prisons, addictions, loss after loss. And he’s still here. Still Spencer. You think a couple of monsters are going to erase all that?”

Derek pulled back enough to look at her, his eyes bloodshot. “You really believe that?”

She nodded, more tears falling, but her voice didn’t waver. “I have to. Because if I stop believing it, then they’ve already taken him from me. And I can’t—” her voice cracked, but she forced it through — “I can’t lose him. Not like this.”

He let out a shuddering breath, pressed his forehead against hers. “You’re the only one keeping me standing right now, Baby Girl.”

Penelope cupped his cheek, wiping at the tears he didn’t even notice had fallen. “Then lean on me. We’ll hold each other up until he comes back. Because he will come back, Derek. That’s who he is. He’s ours.”

For the first time that night, Derek let himself believe it, if only because she said it with such certainty. He wrapped her tighter in his arms, both of them shaking, both of them refusing to let go.

Hannibal sat at the head of the long dining table, half a glass of red wine before him, untouched. Will was sprawled across from him, elbows on the polished surface, hair still damp from the shower, shirt unbuttoned halfway as though he’d forgotten to finish dressing.

They had eaten little — just bread, cheese, olives — but they lingered as though the meal itself was an excuse to speak.

It was Will who broke the quiet. “You know… this wasn’t the plan.”

Hannibal tilted his head. “What wasn’t?”

“All of it. The Cardinals, the journalist, the… pageantry. That was us making noise, saying we were one thing, not two. That was enough. That was supposed to be enough.” His eyes flicked toward Hannibal, sharp even in weariness. “But we had already crossed eyes with them.”

A smile tugged at Hannibal’s lips, not mocking, not indulgent — fond. “Dexter and Spencer.”

Will nodded. He leaned back, rubbing at the scar above his eyebrow with a thumb — the scar Hannibal had given him years ago. “The second I looked at them, I knew. You knew too. Our plan had to change.”

Hannibal raised his glass, swirling the wine as though weighing Will’s words in its orbit. “Yes. They were a mirror. Not a perfect one, but close enough to force a new reflection.”

Will gave a small laugh, dry but real. “A mirror with a crack running through it. Dexter with his code. Spencer with his fear. They didn’t even know they needed freeing. And now—” He exhaled, almost incredulous. “Now they do.”

“They do,” Hannibal echoed softly. “And who better to free them than us?”

For a moment, silence again, filled only by the sound of their breathing. Then Will chuckled, low in his throat, shaking his head. “God, listen to us. Like we’re talking about creation. About being gods.”

Hannibal’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “It amuses you?”

“It does,” Will said, grinning now despite himself. “Not because we think we’re gods. Just… because we managed it. Because we could.”

“And because it pleases you,” Hannibal added, voice warm, “to see Spencer step closer to what he truly is.”

Will met his eyes across the table, that grin softening into something else — pride, maybe, or recognition. “Yeah. It does. And it pleases you to watch me pleased.”

Hannibal lifted his glass in salute. “Always.”

Will’s laughter burst louder this time, echoing through the villa. Hannibal let himself laugh with him, the sound low, rich, unguarded. No philosophy, no mask — just two men sitting together, wine between them, reveling in their own dark satisfaction.

After it faded, Will leaned forward again, elbows back on the table, eyes bright and sure. “Whatever this is now, Hannibal — it’s better than what we planned. It’s not just about us anymore.”

Hannibal inclined his head, finally sipping his wine. “No. But it makes us more us than ever.”

Will sat back against the pillows, sleeves rolled to his elbows, the heat of the day still clinging to his skin. Hannibal, composed as ever, settled beside him with the ease of a man who belonged there.

On the nightstand, the silver ring caught a glint of the fading light. Hannibal had slipped it off earlier, leaving it where it could be seen. Not flaunted, not explained — simply placed.

Will’s gaze landed on it, lingered. His lips tugged into the faintest smirk. “You keep leaving that thing out.”

Hannibal’s eyes followed his, and the corner of his mouth curved. “It does not belong in a drawer.”

“You’re waiting for something,” Will said, voice low, amused but not mocking.

“As are you,” Hannibal replied, calm, unprovoked.

Will let the silence stretch before leaning his head back, still smiling to himself. He didn’t pick the ring up, didn’t press further. He only allowed its presence to settle between them like another heartbeat, steady and inevitable.

Their shoulders brushed, the kind of contact that felt accidental but lasted too long to be. Hannibal poured what remained of the wine into Will’s glass and handed it over without comment. Will accepted, their fingers brushing just enough to spark that same, unspoken recognition.

They drank, not to celebrate, not to forget, but simply to be. And the ring stayed where it was, catching the last of the light, waiting.

After a few minutes, Will spoke. “You knew exactly what you were doing with Spencer,” he said, voice dry and razor-thin. “You carved him open with a few words and smiled while you watched him bleed.”

Hannibal’s calm didn’t falter. “You wound me, Will. I did nothing he wasn’t already begging to hear.”

Will’s head snapped toward him, eyes burning with contempt and something darker beneath. “You like to think that makes you merciful. But all you really are is a vulture circling the weak.”

“Not weak,” Hannibal corrected, rising to his feet with the quiet weight of inevitability. “Unrealized.” He moved closer, so near Will could feel the warmth of him. “You mistake recognition for manipulation because you still despise the mirror.”

Will laughed, bitter and low. “You want to see me in him. You want me to think that what you did to me was some kind of kindness. Don’t flatter yourself. I was dragged into hell kicking and screaming, and you savored every second of it.”

“True,” Hannibal admitted, and that bare honesty was worse than denial. His hand came up, slow, deliberate, and he caught Will’s wrist. He didn’t squeeze, didn’t restrain — just held it steady. “But you stayed. You stayed, Will. Because the fire warmed you as much as it burned.”

Will pulled, but Hannibal didn’t let go. Their eyes locked — anger against stillness, violence against devotion. And then Hannibal bent, lips brushing the inside of Will’s hand. Not his palm, not his knuckles — but the fourth finger. The place where a ring belonged.

The kiss lingered. Will’s breath caught — not in surprise, but in fury contained by the thinnest edge of restraint. He yanked his hand free and shoved Hannibal back against the wall. The impact thudded through the room, and Hannibal’s laugh — low, almost joyous — spilled out in the aftermath.

“You enjoy this,” Will spat, leaning close, teeth bared. “Being pushed, being hated. You want to be hurt.”

Hannibal’s eyes gleamed, lips curved in that terrible calm. “Only by you.”

For a long moment, the silence was unbearable. Will’s chest heaved; his fist hovered near Hannibal’s jaw. Hannibal simply watched, unblinking, unafraid.

Finally, Will exhaled a curse and stepped back, his body trembling with restrained violence. He sank down onto the bed again, running a hand over his face. “God, you’re insufferable.”

“And still,” Hannibal said, adjusting his collar as though nothing had happened, “you sit with me. Still you allow me close enough to kiss what you pretend you don’t want to kiss me.”

Will laughed — harsh, almost broken — then lay back, shoulders brushing Hannibal’s when he joined him. “One of these days, I’ll strangle you.”

“Then I’ll die adored,” Hannibal murmured, and he touched Will’s hand again — not holding, not demanding — just letting his fingers rest against Will’s. The gesture, quiet and intimate, undercut the sharpness of everything before.

The light that crept into the basement wasn’t sunlight. It was the thin spill of a single bulb flicked on from above, humming faintly, the shadows on the walls bending sharp. Spencer stirred first, his body slow, his mind reluctant to claw its way out of the half-dreams he’d fallen into. Beside him, Dexter was already awake, sitting with his back against the stone wall, looking… still. Too still.

For once, Spencer realized, Dexter wasn’t pacing or restless. There was no tension clenching his jaw, no restless twitch of his hands. He looked like a man who had eaten a meal after starving for weeks. A man at peace. Spencer knew what that meant, though he didn’t say it aloud. The memory of last night—the table, the knives, the plastic—was still too close.

The scrape of metal broke the silence: the basement door unlocking, boots on the stairs. Spencer stiffened, but Dexter didn’t even flinch. He only glanced up, almost expectant.

Hannibal descended first, calm as always, a tray balanced in one hand. Behind him, Will carried something bulkier, wood legs scraping against the stairs as he lowered it carefully onto the floor.

“You’re both still alive,” Hannibal observed lightly, setting the tray down. Two bowls, steaming faintly; fresh bread, butter, a wedge of cheese; and—Spencer noticed with something close to disbelief—a carafe of coffee. “How civilized.”

Dexter reached for the tray without hesitation, dragging it closer, already serving himself with that same precise neatness he brought to his kills. He ate quickly but cleanly, methodical. Hannibal’s gaze lingered on him with satisfaction.

Will, meanwhile, unfolded what he had carried down: a small table, scarred with use but solid, with two plain wooden chairs. He positioned it carefully in the center of the basement, like a parent preparing a child’s playroom. Then the two man ascended the stairs and closed the door behind them.

Spencer’s eyes dart to the little table, to the tray, to the pen left like a temptation. He laughs — small, incredulous, brittle. “So what is this? Are they trying to domesticate us? Make us into pets?”

Dexter doesn’t spoon his coffee or check his plate. He watches Spencer the way a man watches something fragile and new. When he answers, his voice is flat but not unkind. “They make the body easier to ignore.”

Spencer blinks. “The body?”

“The hunger.” Dexter’s hand taps the table once, precise. “If your hands are full with bread, if your back isn’t aching on a cold floor, you stop thinking about the noise under the skin. They buy you small comforts so the rest of you has room to stretch.” He looks at Spencer directly, the corner of his mouth almost—but not quite—softening. “It’s not about kindness. It’s strategy.”

Spencer’s brow knits. “So they gild the cage.”

“Exactly.” Dexter folds his fingers together. “They smooth the edges. Give you a pillow. A pen. Paper. A stupid little table to make you feel like a man who might sit and write instead of rip and tear. When your wrists don’t throb and your stomach isn’t clenched, your mind shifts. It’s easier to listen to someone telling you who you are.”

Spencer turns that over, the words moving through him like a cold wind. “So they’re… letting us be comfortable so we’ll be open.” He swallows. “Open to what?”

Dexter’s eyes sharpen; there’s a quiet hunger there that has nothing to do with last night’s meal and everything to do with vocabulary. He says the word like a bad taste. “The part they want you to meet. That part that doesn’t care for rules. That part that promises… relief.” He tilts his head. “You know what I mean.”

Spencer’s hand hovers near the pen, then pulls back. “You mean—they’re giving us room so the dark thing inside of us can breathe.”

Dexter’s laugh is a breath, almost a sound of sympathy. “Dark passenger. Call it whatever you want. The mechanism is the same. If the body is occupied—warm bed, warm food, a neat little desk—your head has the space to listen to the other voice. To test it. To try it on like a coat.”

A silence settles between them that isn’t empty; it’s full of implication. Spencer watches the shadow of his own fingers on the paper and then looks up at Dexter. “Do you think they want us to… to be like them?”

Dexter studies him for a long moment. In the way he watches you can see the arithmetic in him—risk, reward, the cold catalog of behavior. “They want proof,” he says finally. “Proof that their method works. Two people, paired: one who already knows how to give permission, one who can be given permission. If you change, then their thesis is vindicated.”

Spencer exhales hard enough to fog the air between them. “And if I don’t?”

“Then you’re a failed experiment,” Dexter answers; it’s clinical and hard and breaks something in the room. “And failures are erased or abandoned.”

Spencer feels the weight of that like a physical thing. The pen trembles in his fingers. For a second he imagines writing, not case notes, not equations, but the thing inside him laid bare. He doesn’t.

“You made a choice,” Spencer says, quieter now, as if the sound might wake the dead. “Last night. You fed it.”

Dexter’s profile is calm, almost pale in the bulb-light. He nods once. “I fed it.”

“And you’re okay.” Spencer’s voice is half question, half accusation. “You don’t regret it.”

“No.” Dexter’s answer is clean, absolute. “I don’t regret it.”

The truth in that sentence thuds into the room. Spencer realizes it’s not just about hunger or ritual; it’s about a cool clarity that follows the act, a blankness that passes over pain and doubt. He imagines what that must look like in Dexter—how neat the calm must feel, how terrifyingly complete.

“And you think they want me to feel that too?” Spencer asks at last, eyes on the wilted scrap of paper.

Dexter meets his gaze in a way that used to make people confess things without realizing they’d done it. “They want you to choose it,” he says. “Consent seals it. When a man chooses, he owns it. They don’t have to force you then. That’s the point.”

Spencer presses his thumb to the pen, shorter breaths coming. “And if I choose?”

Dexter’s voice slides into a softness that isn’t used often. “Then everything you know will bend. Love will be a memory you carry like a charm. Loyalty will be a thing you keep for the sake of habit, not truth.” He leans forward a fraction. “But if you don’t choose—” he pauses, and the absence of the rest of the sentence is a threat on its own. “—they’ll keep trying.”

Outside, the villa is quiet. The basement is a small world with a new table in the middle of it. On it, a pen sits like a loaded question. Spencer looks at Dexter, then at the pen, then back at Dexter. He is still tired. He is still unsure. But the thing under his ribs has stopped whispering and started to speak.

“Then why give us these conforts at all?” Spencer asks finally, not the same as before. “Why bother making it easier?”

Dexter’s gaze slides to the bulb above them, the hum of it like a small, steady metronome. “Because the easier the edge,” he says, “the truer the cut.”

The two of them sit with that a long time. The coffee cools. The paper waits. The small domesticities Hannibal and Will left behind—bread, chairs, a pen—feel less like comforts and more like tools. Spencer can feel the question folding over itself in his chest: will he write, or will he break the page?

Dexter had leaned back against the wall, arms folded loosely across his chest, his body all angles of calm after the kill. Spencer wasn’t fooled by the posture. The stillness was as sharp as a scalpel, a rest, not an end.

Spencer picked at the edge of the paper, tracing the grain with his fingernail. “They’re watching us,” he said. “Even if there is no camera or no recorder, they’re watching.”

Dexter didn’t flinch. “Of course they are.” He tilted his head, studying Spencer as if he were already a crime scene. “They don’t want our words. They want the shift. That moment when you stop asking if it’s right or wrong and start asking how.”

Spencer looked away, staring at the small window cut high in the wall. Only daylight bled through it now, a pale, dying gold. “You make it sound inevitable.”

“It is.” Dexter’s voice was simple, stripped of drama. “You’ve already felt it. You wouldn’t still be sitting here talking about it if you hadn’t.”

Spencer bit his lip. “I don’t want to be like you.”

Dexter’s mouth flickered into something that might have been a smile, though it carried no humor. “No one ever does.”

They let the silence fall again. The paper between them stayed blank.

At length, Spencer asked, “Do you think they’ll… bring us someone else?”

Dexter’s eyes flickered, just once, to the corner of the room where the drain in the floor gleamed faintly. Then back to Spencer. “They’ll give us what they think we need.”

“And what do you need?” Spencer pressed, his voice softer now, curious in spite of himself.

Dexter hesitated. For once, the calm faltered. “It’s not about need. It’s about balance. Feed the hunger and I can breathe. Starve it and…” His gaze slid past Spencer, not seeing the wall but something further away. “Everything starts to crack.”

Spencer studied him closely, searching for that crack now, searching for proof. He didn’t find it. Instead, he saw how clean Dexter looked in his calm, how terrifyingly neat. It was like staring at a man who had built a house on fire and learned to live inside it without coughing.

Spencer shivered, though it wasn’t cold.

Dexter’s eyes cut back to him, sharp again. “And you? What happens if you never feed yours?”

Spencer swallowed. His throat felt dry, as though the bread and water had turned to dust inside him. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.” Dexter leaned forward, voice low, deliberate. “You’ve thought about it. You’ve replayed it. The times you’ve killed. The quiet after.”

Spencer pressed his palms against his knees, almost shaking. “I don’t want that to be me.”

Dexter didn’t break eye contact. “It already is.”

He leaned forward, closing the small distance between them until his voice was barely more than breath.

“I wish no one had to feel like I do,” he said. “I wish you didn’t have to feel like I do.”

Spencer’s throat worked. “What do you mean?” His voice came out too small.

Dexter blinked once, slow. “You’ve kept it down. You’ve held it at bay for years — for forty years, if that’s how it feels — with books, with routines, with the people you love. God knows that takes strength.” He paused, watching the words settle. “But the things that live in us aren’t polite. They don’t wait for a convenient hour. They press until something gives.” He tapped the tabletop once, a soft, precise knock. “You can fight it until you’re spent, and sometimes you’ll win. Sometimes you won’t. And when you don’t win, it doesn’t just go away. It grows.”

Spencer’s hand tightened on the edge of the paper. “So what? You want me to… what, then? Give up?”

“No.” Dexter’s voice was immediate. “Not give up. Make peace. Make it useful.” He inhaled, slow and careful, the way a man measures risk. “If the dark thing inside you becomes the enemy, it will eat you from the inside. If you make it an ally — shape it, bind it with rules, name it and hold it accountable — then it can be controlled. It becomes a tool instead of a contagion.”

Spencer stared at him, the pen forgotten between his fingers. “An ally,” he repeated, as if testing the syllables for danger. “You think I can do that? Take something that… that scares me and make it work for me?”

Dexter didn’t flinch. “You’ve done it already, in little ways. You’ve boxed it up with numbers and rituals and logic. You’ve trained parts of yourself to perform and to hide. Those are the first steps of discipline.” He tipped his head, not unkindly. “But hiding isn’t the same as harnessing. Hiding is exhaustion. Harnessing is intention.”

A slow, hopeless laugh escaped Spencer. “So choose the monster or be eaten by it. That’s what you’re saying.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Dexter agreed. “I wish it weren’t the only choice sometimes. I wish there were a third way. But there isn’t for people like us. We can be broken by it, or we can shape it into something we can live with. If you refuse to make a decision, the darkness will make it for you.”

Spencer pressed the pad of his thumb against the paper until it left a pale print. The room felt closer then, the bulb above them too bright, the silence too loud. “And you?” he asked finally, voice rough. “You speak like you’ve… made it an ally.”

Dexter’s mouth twitched, but there was no softness in it. “I did. I have rules. They don’t make me less of what I am, but they make me predictable. They give me structure so I don’t wake up lost. They saved people I cared about. They kept me alive without burning everything around me.”

Spencer swallowed. The idea of binding a thing that felt like a living shadow sounded both monstrous and… merciful. “And if I try and fail?”

“Then you will know the truth of what they gave you here,” Dexter said bluntly. “That they asked you to choose, and you did not. And that will change how you look at everyone who loves you. Or it will change you first.”

The words were not an argument. They were a map drawn in cold ink: choose, harness, survive — or be consumed. Spencer’s hand curled around the pen without meaning to, the tip pressing into the paper until the point left a dent. For the first time since the basement door had clanged shut, he felt the weight of a decision pressing down like a physical thing.

They sat with that until the bulb hummed low and the day crept higher through the small window. The pen lay between them like a hinge, and for all the noise in Spencer’s head, one small fact had settled into place: the choice, whatever it would be, would have to be his.

The door opened again, and daylight this time — thin, pale, but unmistakable — poured down the stairs.

Will’s voice cut through the stillness. “You need a bath. Both of you.”

Hannibal added, calm and precise, “One at a time. But you’ll come upstairs together.”

No tricks, no hidden menace. Just a statement of fact.

Spencer and Dexter obeyed. The climb was harder than either wanted to admit, legs stiff from the basement floor, skin crawling with the reminder of how long it had been since soap or hot water had touched them. Upstairs, the house smelled different — roasted coffee, polished wood, the faint metallic tang that never left Hannibal’s kitchens.

Hannibal gestured toward the corridor. “Bathroom’s ready.”

Dexter glanced at Spencer, then at their captors. “I’ll go first.”

Spencer didn’t argue. He sank into the couch in the living room while Dexter disappeared into the tiled room down the hall. The sound of running water came quickly, steady, almost jarring after the basement’s silence.

Will dropped into a chair across from Spencer, not sprawling, not looming — just present. Hannibal leaned against the doorway, hands folded loosely, every inch the patient observer.

The silence stretched until Spencer’s nerves snapped. “You really think this is how it works? A bath, some food, and suddenly I’m—what? Comfortable enough to admit what you want me to admit?”

Will’s lips curved, but it wasn’t a smile. “You already admitted it. Not to us. To yourself.”

Spencer shook his head sharply. “I didn’t admit anything. I acknowledged the possibility.” His voice faltered, then steadied, clipped and defensive. “That’s different.”

Hannibal stepped closer, his tone quiet but deliberate. “You can play with words all you want, Doctor, but you know the difference between possibility and inevitability. You feel it every time you close your eyes. Every time you remember Raphael. Every time you hear Tobias Engel’s name.”

Spencer stiffened, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “Those were circumstances. Extreme ones. I didn’t—” He broke off, forcing his voice down into something steadier. “I don’t kill people for pleasure.”

Will leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his gaze steady and merciless. “Neither did I. At first. Neither did Dexter. It isn’t about pleasure, Spencer. It’s about release. About not breaking under the weight of everything you carry.”

“I’m not Dexter.” The words came out fast, harsh.

“No,” Hannibal agreed smoothly, “you’re not. He has his code. His neat compartments. You, however—” Hannibal tilted his head, studying him as though he were an exhibit under glass. “—you have a lifetime of restraint. You have been holding your breath for forty years. One day you must inhale.”

Spencer looked away, blinking hard. “I hate you.”

Will’s voice was almost gentle. “Good. Hate me. It means you’re still fighting. But ask yourself—are you fighting us, or are you fighting yourself?”

The sound of water carried down the hall, constant and steady. Ten minutes at least, maybe more. Hannibal and Will didn’t rush, didn’t push further than they had to. They let the silence sit heavy, waiting for Spencer to fill it.

And he did.

His voice was thin but clear. “You don’t know what it’s like to… to want it and hate yourself for wanting it at the same time.”

Will let out the smallest laugh, humorless and raw. “Don’t I?” He tugged up his sleeve and showed a faded scar, pale against his skin. “Hannibal gutted me. I bled out in his arms. Do you think I didn’t want to kill him every second before I realized I loved him? You don’t get to lecture me about contradictions.”

Spencer’s eyes widened, then narrowed, suspicion and disbelief warring in them. “And now you’re here. With him. After all of that?”

Will shrugged. “Because he saw me. Because he didn’t flinch from what I am. Can you say the same for your team?”

The words struck harder than Spencer wanted them to. He swallowed, throat dry. “They love me.”

“They love the suit you wear,” Hannibal said. “The clever boy with books and magic tricks. The man who takes a bullet and still comes back to them. But what happens when they see the other side of you? When they see what you see in your own nightmares?”

Spencer’s chest tightened. He forced himself not to break eye contact. “I don’t know.”

The water stopped running. Silence fell again, thicker this time. Spencer could feel his pulse hammering in his temples.

Will finally leaned back, crossing his arms. “You’re not alone, Spencer. Not anymore. That’s what terrifies you.”

The bathroom door opened. Steam curled into the hall. Dexter stepped out, damp hair combed back, clean shirt clinging to his shoulders. He looked younger, sharper, almost reborn.

Hannibal inclined his head toward Spencer. “Your turn.”

Spencer rose without protest. As he passed Dexter, their eyes met — the briefest flicker of recognition, of solidarity, unspoken but unmistakable. Then Spencer vanished into the fogged glass and porcelain, leaving Dexter to face the two men who had just torn through Spencer’s walls piece by piece.

Dexter sat down where Spencer had been moments ago, hair still damp, shirt sticking faintly to his skin from steam. The clean clothes Hannibal had left out for him were simple, but they fit. He looked, for once, less like a prisoner than a guest.

Hannibal broke the silence first, voice calm, conversational. “The bathroom suits you. You look alive again.”

Dexter smirked faintly, leaning back into the chair. “Alive. Fed. Clean. The trifecta.” His tone was flippant, but his eyes never left Hannibal’s.

Will watched him, head tilted, a hunter’s patience in his gaze. “You’re comfortable with what you are. You’ve made peace with it.”

Dexter considered that, hands laced loosely together in his lap. “I wouldn’t call it peace. More like… arrangement. A deal with myself I don’t get to walk away from.”

Hannibal’s lips curved in a ghost of a smile. “And the arrangement works. Your passenger eats, you feel order. A neat system.”

Dexter laughed under his breath. “Neat, sure. Except now you’ve ripped me out of my routine. No tools. No plastic. No freedom to choose who, when, or how. And yet…” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You still gave me what I needed. A kill that fit Harry’s code, proof to back it up. That wasn’t cruelty. That was collaboration.”

Will’s eyes sharpened. “Is that what you think this is?”

Dexter didn’t flinch. “You wouldn’t have given me that man if you didn’t want me to see you as allies.”

Hannibal stepped closer, hands behind his back. “We don’t deal in allies, Mr. Morgan. We deal in truth. You followed your code because we gave you the space to do it. You felt the stillness afterward. And Spencer saw you. He felt it too. That is the truth we care about.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened at Spencer’s name, though whether it was protectiveness or unease, even he wasn’t sure. “You’re pushing him.”

Will leaned forward now, voice low. “He doesn’t need pushing. He’s already there, balancing on the edge. You know what that feels like better than anyone.”

Dexter looked away, eyes narrowing. “He’s not me.”

“No,” Hannibal agreed softly. “But he is not who you want him to be either. He is not fragile. He is not untouched. You of all people should see that.”

Silence settled for a moment. Dexter exhaled through his nose, almost a laugh. “You sound like Brian. My brother. He thought he was doing me a favor, trying to free me from Harry’s rules. But Brian wanted chaos. You two…” His eyes flicked between them. “You want something else. Not chaos. Not order. Something in between.”

Will smirked, dry and cutting. “We want honesty. And right now you’re the only honest one in this house besides us.”

Dexter let the words hang in the air. For the first time since he’d come upstairs, his smirk faded. He sat back in the chair, crossing his arms, not defensive but weighing something.

Finally, he said quietly, “Spencer doesn’t deserve to be dragged into this.”

Hannibal’s gaze sharpened, precise as a scalpel. “Dragged? Or recognized? He has been living blind to himself. That blindness is what destroys men like him. You know this.”

Dexter’s lips parted, then closed again. He didn’t answer.

Will’s tone softened, oddly gentle. “You don’t want him to suffer the way you did, living split between a mask and the truth. But maybe you know as well as we do — the only way forward for him is through it.”

Dexter’s hands tightened on his arms, nails digging into the fabric of his shirt. He hated how much the words resonated.

And then — a flicker. Not in the room, not really. But Dexter’s mind betrayed him. Brian appeared at Will’s side like a shadow given flesh, leaning casually against the wall. The grin was all too familiar.

“You can’t protect him forever,” Brian said, voice lazy, taunting.

Will’s mouth moved at the same time, echoing: “You can’t protect him forever.”

Dexter’s breath caught, just for a second. His eyes darted to Will, searching for any sign he’d noticed the overlap. But Will’s expression was unreadable, as if nothing at all had happened.

That unease — that crawling sense of being caught in a web not entirely of his own making — sank deep into Dexter’s chest. He hated it, and yet it rooted him to the chair.

The bathroom door opened a moment later. Steam drifted out, and Spencer stepped back into the room, his curls damp, skin scrubbed pale, a faint flush still clinging to his cheeks from the heat. He looked cleaner, sharper, more himself than he had in days.

Dexter’s eyes betrayed him with a flicker, tracing Spencer in that brief instant — not like prey, not like quarry, but with an awareness he couldn’t quite mask. He told himself it was simple contrast: Spencer renewed, while he himself still felt wrung out by words, by ghosts.

But Spencer’s gaze lingered too, just as quick, taking in Dexter’s posture, the steadiness in his eyes even after all this. And though neither said anything, though the air remained thick with Will and Hannibal’s quiet scrutiny, something unspoken hummed there between them — sharp, undeniable.

The basement smelled faintly of soap now, not only damp stone. Their skin was clean, their clothes fresher. The new mattress and sheets softened the floor, but the heavy air of captivity remained. Spencer leaned back against the wall, arms wrapped around his knees. Dexter sat a little apart, elbows on his thighs, staring at nothing.

And then Brian sat down between them. Not across the room this time, not half in shadow. Right there, casual as if he’d always been part of the conversation.

“They don’t fear you,” Brian said, smiling too wide. “Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham—they play with you like a toy. Funny, isn’t it? The Bay Harbor Butcher made monsters hide. And yet here you are, caged like a stray dog.”

Spencer glanced at Dexter, sensing the shift. The tension in his shoulders, the half-snarl of his breath. “What did he say?”

Dexter rubbed at his jaw, frustrated. “Nothing.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” Spencer shot back, voice low. “You flinched. Don’t lie to me.”

Dexter’s jaw clenched. He didn’t look at Spencer, not directly. His eyes darted sideways, toward the space Brian occupied — smug, patient, waiting.

“He’s just… noise,” Dexter muttered, the words like gravel in his throat.

Brian leaned in, close enough that Dexter could almost feel the warmth of him, though he knew there was none. “Noise? I’m your truth. Tell him, brother. Tell him what you’ve done.”

Spencer tilted his head, studying Dexter with that forensic stare, the one that stripped layers off until nothing was left but bone. “How many?” he asked suddenly, the words sharp as a blade.

Dexter exhaled hard, then finally looked at Spencer. The sharpness in Spencer’s eyes, the steadiness there — it was harder to face than any corpse. “Three hundred. Maybe more.”

The silence that followed was thick, like blood in water.

Spencer’s breath caught, but he didn’t recoil. His gaze locked on Dexter, unblinking. “Three hundred.” He repeated it, not as judgment, not as accusation. Just acknowledgment.

Brian leaned toward Dexter again, grinning wider. “And you’ll help him make it one more. Won’t you? His third.”

Spencer shook his head once, slow. But his voice betrayed no disgust, no fear. Only a dry edge of exhaustion. “You want me to run from it. You think if I turn away, it disappears. But it doesn’t. I killed Hankel. I killed Raphael. The part of me that could do it again isn’t gone.”

Dexter flinched at the name Hankel. The ache in Spencer’s tone — the raw scrape of old scars — made something twist in him.

Brian smirked at Dexter. “See? He’s yours already. You don’t need to protect him from yourself. He’s already crossed the line. You just have to admit you want him there beside you.”

Dexter tore his eyes away from the ghost, fixing them on Spencer, steadying himself in the realness of him — the damp hair falling loose against his temple, the faint tremor in his hands, the raw intelligence burning through fatigue.

“You’re standing at the edge,” Dexter said quietly. His voice was calm, but there was a weight in it, an unsettling steadiness. “Sooner or later, you’ll have to decide whether to step back—or step off.”

Spencer stared at him for a long moment. His face was unreadable, his silence heavier than chains.

Spencer’s eyes burned with a restless heat. His body felt too tight for his own skin, wound up by sleepless nights, hunger gnawing his edges, and the unbearable knowledge pressing against his skull. The basement smelled of soap and damp stone, of captivity made deceptively livable — and Dexter, sitting there so calm after confessing unspeakable things, was the final crack.

“You sound like him,” Spencer hissed. His voice was sharp, almost venomous. “You sound exactly like him.”

Dexter’s expression didn’t shift. He didn’t ask who. He knew.

The stillness made Spencer’s fury flare brighter. He surged forward, shoving Dexter hard against the wall. The hollow boom of the impact rolled through the basement, rattling against the stones.

Dexter didn’t raise his hands. Didn’t brace. He let himself be thrown.

“Fight back!” Spencer’s voice broke in frustration, though he didn’t know if it was anger at Dexter or at himself. His fist lashed out, striking Dexter’s jaw. The sound was sickeningly clean — knuckles against bone — and Dexter’s head snapped sideways, lips splitting just enough to let blood trace the corner of his mouth.

Brian leaned against the wall, grinning like a proud brother watching the family resemblance bloom. “There he is. The third kill’s always the hardest.”

Dexter blinked through the sting, the pain blooming warm. He didn’t retaliate. He turned back to Spencer, the red smear on his lip stark in the dim light. His eyes were calm, steady, even as his chest heaved from the hit.

“You needed that,” Dexter said softly.

The words only twisted the knife in Spencer’s chest. “Don’t—don’t talk like you know what I need.”

His hand still trembled in the air, knuckles throbbing. He wanted to swing again, to force Dexter into something — anger, denial, anything. But Dexter stayed quiet, letting the silence hold the weight between them.

Spencer’s shoulders sagged. The adrenaline had nowhere left to go. His breath stuttered out, sharp and broken. His fists hovered against Dexter’s chest, not hitting this time, just pressed there, as if he couldn’t decide whether to shove him away or lean closer.

Dexter moved slowly, deliberately. He lifted his hands and set them on Spencer’s shoulders, waiting for resistance. There was none. He pulled him in — carefully at first, then tighter, until Spencer’s slight frame was folded against him.

Spencer went rigid, caught off guard, but Dexter held on.

The hug wasn’t neat. It wasn’t gentle. It was raw, almost crushing. Dexter’s cheek pressed against Spencer’s hair, his own breath uneven. “You think I don’t care what happens to you?” he said, the words rasping out unsteady. “You think I want you like me? I don’t. God, I don’t.”

Spencer’s fists bunched into Dexter’s shirt, still resting against his chest. His forehead brushed Dexter’s collarbone, not intentional, just the natural place it fell. He didn’t move away.

“I hate it,” Dexter whispered. His throat felt raw. “I hate that I see you breaking the way I did. I hate that I know what’s waiting for you. And I hate that I can’t stop it.”

Spencer’s voice cracked, muffled against Dexter. “You’re still talking like him.”

Dexter flinched — but not at the words. At the truth of them. Hannibal’s voice lingered behind Spencer’s accusation, folded into the rhythm of his own. He didn’t deny it. He couldn’t.

“I’m not him,” Dexter said, holding on tighter, almost desperate now. “But I see what he sees in you. And it terrifies me.”

Brian crouched low, whispering in Dexter’s ear, eyes alight with glee. “Terrifies you because it’s beautiful. Because you know he belongs with you, in the dark. Don’t fight it, brother.”

Dexter squeezed his eyes shut, his arms iron around Spencer’s frame. His heartbeat thudded against Spencer’s temple, frantic and too human. “You don’t belong here,” Dexter murmured, though he held him as if he did. “But you’re already here. And I can’t undo it.”

Spencer didn’t answer. He sagged against Dexter, fists finally unclenching, his body too wrung out to fight anymore. The anger had burned through him, leaving only exhaustion. His head lolled against Dexter’s shoulder, and for the first time since they’d been chained, he let himself stay there.

Dexter’s eyes burned, his jaw tight where the bruise was already forming. He didn’t care. He only held Spencer closer, hating how much it felt like the only thing keeping him steady.

The basement door creaked open. Will and Hannibal descended together, the air shifting with them. Hannibal’s gaze swept across the room, precise as ever, and stopped at the faint bruise on Dexter’s cheek. The curve of his mouth was subtle, almost kind. “A quarrel,” he said softly. “Understandable. Fear has many outlets.”

Neither man answered. Spencer’s hands curled tight around his knees, and Dexter sat rigid, watching.

Will crouched, steady eyes fixed on Spencer. “Your team knows now. They’ve seen the syringe. They’ve traced the M99. They know who Dexter is.” His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. The weight of it pressed down all the same.

Spencer’s throat tightened.

“And you,” Hannibal said, not cruel, but steady, “they are beginning to wonder about you. As they once wondered about me. As they once wondered about Will.” His gaze flicked briefly to his companion, a flash of shared recognition, then back to Spencer. “You are not alone in this.”

Spencer’s voice cracked: “They’ll never look at me the same.”

Will shook his head, and for the first time, something almost tender passed over his face. “No. They won’t. And yet, you’ll still be you. That is the mercy, Spencer. That you cannot be unmade.”

Hannibal stepped closer, his voice low, but not unkind. “It is agony, yes. But it is also freedom. When the pretense is gone, what remains is only truth. And truth is survivable. Even when love is not.”

Spencer folded inward, breath shaking, the truth crashing through him like a tide. His knees buckled, the world tilting.

Dexter caught him before he hit the floor, pulling him against his chest, holding tight. Spencer’s sobs broke, raw and unguarded, against Dexter’s shoulder.

And they were not alone. Hannibal and Will stood a few feet away, watching in silence. And in Dexter’s vision, Harry, Brian, and Debra were there too, specters flanking the living. All of them witnesses to Spencer’s collapse and to the way Dexter held him — not as predator or captor, but as anchor.

As Will and Hannibal left, the basement was quiet again, the silence weighted by the carafe of water on the small table and the echo of the hug still clinging to both of them. Spencer had drawn back just enough to sit against the wall, knees pulled up, head tipped into his hands. His shoulders quivered like his body couldn’t decide whether to collapse or fight.

Dexter watched him, chest still tight from holding him, from not letting go.

“You know what this is?” Dexter said finally, voice low but steady.

Spencer dragged in a breath, muffled behind his hands. “What?”

“Detox.”

That got Spencer to lift his head, eyes rimmed red, confusion etched into the lines around his mouth. “Detox?”

Dexter leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His gaze didn’t waver. “You’ve spent forty years wearing a mask so tight it cut off your air. Pretending to be everything they wanted. The perfect agent, the perfect friend, the harmless genius who’d never…” He let the sentence fall away. “And now the mask is slipping. It hurts. It always hurts.”

Spencer swallowed hard, throat bobbing. His voice came out raw. “Feels like I’m coming apart.”

“You are,” Dexter said. “That’s what detox does. Your body fights when you take away its poison. But once it’s out…” He exhaled, slow, measured. “Once it’s out, you breathe. You live.”

Spencer shook his head, a bitter half-laugh cracking out. “Live as what? A killer?”

Dexter didn’t flinch. “Live as yourself.”

The words hung there, brutal in their simplicity. Brian’s phantom smirk flickered at the edge of Dexter’s vision, approving. Harry’s disapproval, Debra’s wary silence, all pressing in. But Dexter didn’t take them back.

Spencer’s hands curled into fists against his knees. His breath stuttered, sharp, uneven, but his eyes never left Dexter’s. For the first time, the tremor in them wasn’t fear.

Upstairs, the villa was quiet, filled with the muted light of late morning slipping through tall windows. The muffled presence of Spencer and Dexter below was there only in imagination — no rattling, no sounds of struggle, just the awareness that they were still down there, breathing, waiting.

Hannibal stood at the counter, arranging cutlery with his usual precision, as though dinner was a ceremony that could not be abandoned, even in a house where captives lay in the cellar. Will leaned nearby, arms crossed, watching him with that sharp-eyed mix of suspicion and affection that was theirs alone.

“They’re closer now,” Hannibal murmured, his hands still.

Will tilted his head. He didn’t need to ask who. His lips twitched, halfway between a smirk and something softer. “Closer than either of them expected.”

“They will fall,” Hannibal said, deliberate, not indulgent — simply stating a fact he saw unfolding. “Not only into darkness, but into each other. They will care for one another more deeply than anyone else could hope to understand. Apart from us.”

The words hung in the air. Will pushed off the counter and crossed the space between them, eyes locked on Hannibal’s face as if daring him to say it again.

“Like us,” Will said.

A faint smile touched Hannibal’s mouth. “Yes. Like us.”

Will let out a short laugh, edged, bitter but not unkind. “God help them.”

“No.” Hannibal’s reply was immediate, steady, almost tender. “God cannot touch them now. Nor would they want Him to.”

Will stood close enough to see the exact shade of light in Hannibal’s eyes, the fine lines cut by years of restraint and pleasure. He let the silence draw out, thick and pulsing with the recognition between them. Then he glanced aside, just briefly, as if remembering something far behind him.

“They don’t know what it means yet,” Will said finally. “The intimacy. The weight. They think it’s survival. They don’t understand it’s devotion.”

“They will,” Hannibal answered, and this time his hand moved, not ceremonious, not commanding — just reaching. He brushed his fingertips over Will’s wrist, lingering for a breath before releasing him. “They will learn it as we did.”

Will looked at him with a gaze that was half-dare, half-concession. “You think they’ll be able to bear it?”

Hannibal bent his head just slightly, lips close enough to Will’s shoulder that his breath warmed the skin. “If they can’t bear it, they will be consumed by it. The same choice we had.”

Will exhaled, sharp, amused despite himself. “And we didn’t really choose.”

“No.” Hannibal’s smile ghosted across Will’s skin. “We simply recognized what was already true.”

“They will learn,” Hannibal added,

and for the first time he moved, reaching not for Will’s face or his shoulder, but for his hand. He lifted it with an uncharacteristic slowness, studying the pale fingers as though they were relics, then brought Will’s left hand up to his lips.

The kiss was not a brush, not fleeting. Hannibal pressed his mouth to Will’s ring finger and lingered there, his breath warm, the gesture reverent but edged with a knowing weight. His lips curved faintly as he pulled back, not quite smiling.

Will’s eyes flicked down to the hand in Hannibal’s grasp, then up again. His voice was quieter now, stripped of sarcasm. “You keep waiting.”

Hannibal held his gaze without answering, thumb brushing the back of Will’s hand once before letting it go.

and for the first time he moved, reaching not for Will’s face or his shoulder, but for his hand. He lifted it with an uncharacteristic slowness, studying the pale fingers as though they were relics, then brought Will’s left hand up to his lips.

The kiss was not a brush, not fleeting. Hannibal pressed his mouth to Will’s ring finger and lingered there, his breath warm, the gesture reverent but edged with a knowing weight. His lips curved faintly as he pulled back, not quite smiling.

Will’s eyes flicked down to the hand in Hannibal’s grasp, then up again. His voice was quieter now, stripped of sarcasm. “You keep waiting.”

Hannibal held his gaze without answering, thumb still brushing the back of Will’s hand.

Hannibal’s lips still hovered close to his skin, his breath ghosting over the curve of Will’s shoulder. For a moment, Will let it hang there — the practiced devotion, the certainty, the way Hannibal always seemed to lead these dances. And then, without warning, Will turned, closing the scant space between them.

His hand came up not to push, not to restrain, but to rest with surprising gentleness against Hannibal’s chest. He felt the slow, steady heartbeat beneath his palm, the silk of the shirt under his fingers. Will’s gaze lifted, sharp but unwavering, pinning Hannibal in place.

“You’re not the only one who gets to make declarations,” Will said quietly. His tone wasn’t biting this time. It was steady, deliberate — as if he had chosen every word carefully.

Hannibal tilted his head, surprise flickering behind his eyes. Not shock, not resistance — but a flicker nonetheless.

Will’s mouth curved into the faintest smirk, dry, controlled. “You think I don’t know what you’re waiting for? That ring you put on the table wasn’t just a ring. You don’t do anything without intention.”

For once, Hannibal didn’t reply immediately. He studied Will instead, the faintest tension in his jaw. Will could almost hear the weight of the silence pressing down on both of them.

Then, deliberately, Will’s hand shifted from Hannibal’s chest to his own — pressing Hannibal’s palm flat against his ribcage, holding it there. “I know,” Will said simply. “I know what you mean by it. And I’m not saying no.”

It was not a confession, not a surrender — but it was enough. Hannibal’s eyes softened, and the faintest hum rose in his throat, low and satisfied. He bowed his head, not to Will’s lips, but again to that same hand — brushing a kiss, slower this time, across the knuckle of the ring finger.

Will didn’t pull away. His hand stayed atop Hannibal’s, holding it in place, pressing it harder into his chest. His breath came slower now, heavier, though his eyes stayed sharp, watching Hannibal as though he were still deciding whether to let the moment tip over the edge.

Hannibal waited — patient, silent, his lips still close to Will’s skin.

And Will moved. His free hand slid up, catching Hannibal by the collar, and he pulled him forward with deliberate force. Their mouths met hard, without hesitation, the collision fierce enough to bruise.

The kiss wasn’t tender at first — it was demand, anger, need, everything they had left unsaid. But then Hannibal’s hands framed Will’s face, slowing the urgency without breaking it, deepening it, answering Will’s pull with steady, anchored devotion.

For a moment, Will resisted the softness creeping in. Then he let it happen. The wall at his back, Hannibal pressed flush against him, heat spilling from one body into the other. The air around them thickened, the line between hunger and affection dissolving.

Hannibal broke the kiss only long enough to murmur against Will’s lips, “At last.”

Will’s answer was another kiss, deeper this time, surrender edged with fire.

The morning light crept through the blinds, but no one looked refreshed. They’d slept, some of them, but badly. The air in the room was still heavy with everything they’d said the night before. No one wasted time on coffee small talk; the table was already littered with files, open laptops, maps marked with ink that had blurred under someone’s restless hand.

JJ broke the silence first, her voice firmer than it had been hours ago, but still carrying that edge of desperation.

“We can still save Spencer,” she said, eyes fixed on the table, then lifting to meet Hotch’s. “I don’t care what Hannibal and Will think they’ve done to him. He’s not lost. He’s not. He’s ours.”

Morgan shifted in his chair, jaw tight. His anger hadn’t softened overnight, but it had sharpened. “Then we cut Lecter and Graham out of the equation. Whatever leash they’ve got on Spencer and Dexter, we break it. Fast.”

Rossi leaned back, rubbing a hand over his face. “And that’s exactly what Lecter wants. For us to rush. To stumble right where he’s waiting. He’s been playing this game too long, with too many pieces. The minute we start running on anger, we lose.”

Emily leaned forward, both hands flat on the table. Her voice didn’t waver. “But he’s leaving things for us. The staged body, the syringe. They’re breadcrumbs. He wants us to follow. Which means they’re moving. If we trace the trail, we get closer to Spencer and Dexter. That’s what matters.”

Tara cut in, sharper, colder: “Or it’s a trap. Following Hannibal Lecter’s lead is like walking into a maze he’s been designing for years. Every clue could be a diversion. Every move could be exactly what he wants.”

For a moment, no one spoke. The hum of Garcia’s laptop was the only sound. Hotch finally raised his head, his voice quiet but absolute.

“Doesn’t matter if it’s a trail or a trap. Either way, it’s all we’ve got. We follow it, but we don’t stumble blind. Every step we take, we take calculated. We don’t get to hesitate. And we don’t get to fail. Not this time.”

Garcia’s voice cut across the tension, quick and certain as her fingers flew over the keyboard. “I’ve been combing through secondary signals—traffic cameras, toll passes, even dormant utility accounts. I found something. A cluster of irregular pings outside the city. East, toward Tivoli.”

Hotch leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “How irregular?”

“Enough to matter,” Garcia said. “There’s a pocket of villas out there—half of them are listed under fake corporations that don’t even exist on paper. And two of those shell companies trace back to an old financial structure Hannibal Lecter used when he was hiding in Florence. That’s not a coincidence.”

Rossi muttered, “He’s pulling the same tricks again. Hiding in plain sight, wrapped in elegance.”

Emily’s tone was sharper. “Which means Reid and Dexter aren’t in Rome anymore. They’ve been moved. If Lecter staged the body in the city, it was to keep us looking here while he slipped them east.”

Tara’s warning followed fast, low and deliberate. “It also means they’ve bought themselves space. The countryside gives them time. Distance. And fewer eyes.”

JJ’s voice wavered, but held: “Then that’s where we go. We find the villa. We bring him back.”

Hotch’s jaw set. “Garcia, keep refining. Get me every deed, every service contract, every delivery record out there. Tara, Emily—coordinate with the Carabinieri on rural patrol grids. Rossi, JJ, Morgan—you’re with me on the entry plan. We assume Hannibal and Graham expect us. Which means we plan for everything.”

They pushed the maps forward until the paper felt scorched by the heat of a dozen sets of eyes. The printed satellite tiles of Tivoli lay across the table, pins and highlighter rings where Garcia’s cursor had paused long enough to whisper a lead. The hotel conference room smelled faintly of stale coffee and the dust of travel; the team had shed the worst of last night’s grief and left a harder thing in its place — planning.

Garcia took a breath and ran through what she had. “I refined the grid. Three villas look usable—clustered within a six-kilometer sweep just outside Tivoli proper. Two are corporate-owned, the third has a long-term private renter history but gaps in municipal records for the last year.” She toggled through windows on her tablet, eyes bright despite the dark circles. “Delivery records: a wine supplier on the corporate villas; a butcher account active in the last month for the renter property. CCTV on the access road has suspicious gaps — deliberate or technical, I can’t say yet, but I’ve flagged the timestamps and I’m pulling the raw feeds.”

Hotch absorbed it the way he absorbed everything — quietly, then with a direction. “Garcia, prioritize raw feeds and company registries. Cross-check service registrations — electricians, generators, pest control — anything that leaves a footprint. If Lecter’s name or his patterns show up in the paper trail, we need it.”

Rossi rubbed his jaw, the tiredness a map of its own. “If they’re using the countryside, they’re banking on distance. They want us distracted in the city. The staged fountain body was a bait. We can’t be baited twice.”

Emily tapped a stack of notes. “Which means we can’t assume anything about the scene we’ll arrive at. It could be a villa used as a safe house, a staging point, or theatre. We plan for evidence tampering, for bodies staged to misdirect — and we preserve every possible thread of chain-of-custody.” She looked up at Hotch. “We’ll need forensics on-site immediately when we get a green light. Portable lab, if we can swing it with Interpol.”

Tara’s voice was tight with the same practical edge she wore like armor. “We also prepare for contingencies that aren’t about the criminals. Terrain, local law enforcement protocols, civilian presence — Tivoli has tourists in pockets even now. Carabinieri will need to secure perimeter towns. We coordinate access roads, evacuation routes, and then we assume the worst: that Lecter has accounted for every straight-line movement we might take.”

JJ folded her hands on the map, fighting the tremor from becoming universal. “We keep in mind the human pieces. Reid’s condition is the first read. He’s fragile in a way we know how to hold. We need a soft extraction plan for him specifically — medical support on standby, quiet transport, someone he trusts to hold him while the team transitions back into professional gear.” Her eyes landed on Morgan and Rossi. “He won’t respond well to loud or gratuitous force.”

Derek — Derek said nothing, but the old impulse in him flared. He was a man who understood brute answers; he kept it small, “If there’s a rescue angle, it’s not just about speed. It’s about control. We secure the perimeter first. We cut off exits. We preserve the property until we can move everyone safely.” He didn’t elaborate into mechanics; his words were enough to set the tenor.

Hotch nodded. “We do both.” He outlined it the way a chess player laid out a checkmate: “We task. We coordinate. We compartmentalize. Entry teams, containment teams, an approach/security team to isolate the property, a recovery team for Reid — medically cleared, trauma-trained. Garcia will keep refining the grid live. Emily and Tara, you manage liaison with the Carabinieri and Interpol — get me the available tactical units near Tivoli, get me air support possibilities, and confirm medevac. JJ, you’ll prep the forensic team and the interview team for immediate debriefs once Reid and Dexter are recovered. Morgan, Rossi, you’re with me for strike. We assume Lecter and Graham plan deception — plan for it.”

Garcia’s fingers flew again. “I can pull up the delivery manifests by hour and see if any runs sync with the ghost pings. I can cross-reference license plates; the Carabinieri have a partial match database we can tap into. I can flag any ambulances, private vehicles, or commercial suppliers with odd routing.”

“Good,” Hotch said. “We’ll need that. Keep your comms tight and encrypted — the moment Lecter knows we’re onto their footprint they’ll change it. He’ll burn everything and move them further.”

Rossi’s voice carried the weary wisdom of someone who had seen enough improvisation backfire. “And we bring teams that don’t just do entry. Bring a negotiation-capable officer. Bring someone who reads people, not just movement. Lecter prizes the mind game. If he’s given them a script to perform, we need to be able to step outside of it.”

When it was time to name the risk nobody wanted to say aloud, Hotch did it anyway: “We must be ready for Dexter. We know who he is now. He is not an unknown variable. If he’s with Lecter and Graham, that

complicates everything. He’s not our enemy to the degree we’d hoped — he’s one of the pieces we have to move carefully.”

A low sound passed through the room — not a sound of agreement exactly, but the recognition of a new level of threat. The Bay Harbor Butcher’s shadow lingered over the operation. They were planning against a pair who had taught them brutality and a man who had been brutal for decades; the calculus was different now.

Garcia’s cursor blinked. “I’ll push the grid out as you order it. I’ll keep you live up to the second. If anything hits those villas — movement on the access roads, a delivery truck leaving, anything — you’ll know before you make the call.”

Hotch nodded once, the single motion that closed the room into motion. “We move tonight. We prepare now. Everyone gets a clear rest window if you can. Eat. Hydrate. We execute at dusk when light is friendly for the Carabinieri and visibility is low enough for controlled movement. We assume deception. We counter with patience.”

They spent the next hour filling in details that mattered and leaving out details that didn’t belong in print or in memory. Roles were assigned; backup teams were identified. Garcia fed the plan into a secure channel that would ripple out to rural units and Interpol leads. They rehearsed contingencies in their heads — not how to kick a door, but how to keep a line of command steady when panic rose. They rehearsed the smaller, softer things too: who Spencer would want to hear first, the words to say to a man who’d been stripped of illusion, how to keep Dexter from walking back into the role the world now insisted he occupied.

When the room emptied, people carried more than gear out the door. They carried that strange, iron clarity that comes when grief turns into strategy. They left the maps and the pins on the table, and the satellite tiles slowly faded back to stillness on the screen. Outside, Tivoli waited, indifferent and ancient; the team left Rome with the weight of four lives and a city’s worth of consequence tucked into the compartments of their plan.

They moved on the villa like a metronome — pieces set and counted, breaths measured, timing rehearsed until every movement had the cold geometry of something that would not be surprised. The light was falling; dusk flattened outlines and softened the colors of the hills. Carabinieri vehicles were arrayed where the road narrowed into private driveways; Hotch’s team took position with Rossi and Morgan flanking him, JJ ready with the soft-contact brief, Emily and Tara on evidence lanes, Garcia thumbing live updates into the fold. Everyone wore the same expression: professional distance that had been welded to something much harder in the past forty-eight hours.

Garcia’s voice in Hotch’s ear was a razor of certainty. “Moving vans left the property at 14:23 yesterday. Two people moved in and out on staggered patterns. The gardener’s ledger shows a single delivery of crates last week — labels: ‘kitchenware.’ License plate on the last run checked out as private, but registered to a shell company we flagged.” She paused, fingers dancing. “They’re here now. Two living patterns, one sleeping pattern. Access roads clear.”

Hotch breathed once and nodded. “We go with containment. No heroics. Morgan, Rossi — you’re point. JJ, you’re on Reid’s extraction plan; quiet route, medics on standby. Emily, Tara — you and I coordinate the Carabinieri for perimeter. Garcia, you trail us and keep eyes on the feeds. We move on my mark.”

They set the perimeter like a net. Lights cut across hedges and lawns; the hush of the countryside was replaced by shoes on gravel and the quiet chatter of radios. From the road the villa looked ordinary: a squat, stone place with shuttered windows, a mossed roof, ivy tracing an old face. But up close there were signs — too many deliveries, curtains pulled against suspicion, a faint scent of something rich and ironed into the air: cooked garlic, anise, something more complex that settled like a signature.

Hotch gave the move. The front gate was taken silently; the back entrance — chosen for the angle of approach Garcia had insisted on — was where Rossi and Morgan made entry. They were professionals: quick hands, practiced, the kind of precision that took the moment out of chance. A window gave with a small sound like a snapped twig; a door yielded; a dim house smelled of wine and soap and the odd metallic tang of old rituals.

The entry had been too clean. No crashing through basements, no chained captives waiting to be discovered. Instead, when Rossi and Morgan swept the corridor, the sight that hit them was this: Spencer and Dexter, sitting side by side in the villa’s living room.

Not bound. Not gagged. Just…present. A low table stood between them with untouched cups of water. A carafe glinted in the light. The room had the quiet air of a stage already set. Hannibal and Will were there too, standing like hosts who had been expecting company.

For one heartbeat, the team faltered. They had rehearsed for cages and cruelty, not this strange domestic tableau.

Then everything broke at once. Hannibal’s gaze flicked to Dexter, his hand sliding open a drawer, steel glinting in his fingers. The knife moved into Dexter’s grip as naturally as if it had always belonged there.

And in the same fluid instant, Dexter was on his feet. No speech, no preamble. He crossed the space with predator speed and pressed the blade hard against the throat of a Carabiniere who had stepped too far into the doorway. The uniform froze, breath caught in his chest.

Hotch’s gun was up before the words even left his mouth. “Dexter! Drop it. Now.”

But Dexter didn’t drop it. The knife was steady against the man’s skin, and the line of his jaw showed no tremor.

Dexter’s eyes flicked, once, to Hannibal and Will. Neither moved to stop him. Hannibal’s face was unreadable, but Will’s was sharper—like he had expected this all along.

“Don’t make me say it again,” Hotch pressed.

Dexter’s grip tightened on the knife, but he didn’t advance. “You already know,” he said, his voice low, almost calm. “You know who I am.”

The words hung heavy, a tacit admission.

JJ’s gun was steady beside Hotch’s, her voice cutting through the charged silence. “You don’t have to do this, Dexter. Step back. Let him go.”

“Do what?” Dexter’s mouth twitched in something between a smile and a grimace. “Go quietly? Walk out of here in cuffs while you all look at me like I’m nothing but the monster you always suspected?” His eyes flicked to Spencer, briefly, and something unreadable passed there.

Morgan barked from the flank, furious. “You are a monster, man. Let him go before you prove it again.”

That was when Spencer moved. He rose, slow but deliberate, placing himself in Hotch’s line of fire. The entire room jolted at once.

“Spencer—” Hotch’s voice cracked like a whip.

But Spencer didn’t move aside. He stood between Dexter and the gun, his thin frame a frail shield. His eyes locked on Hotch’s, unwavering. “You shoot him, you shoot through me.”

“Reid, get out of the way!” Morgan snapped, his voice half fury, half plea.

Spencer’s jaw clenched. “No.”

The single syllable cut sharper than any knife.

Dexter’s expression shifted—not triumph, not smugness, but a flicker of something rawer. Almost disbelief. The knife wavered just slightly at the Carabiniere’s throat, his attention pulled fully to Spencer.

“Why?” Hotch’s voice was quieter now, though his gun didn’t lower. “Why stand in front of him?”

“Because you don’t understand,” Spencer shot back, his voice rising for the first time. “You think you can put people in neat boxes—hero, killer, monster, savior. But it’s not that simple.”

Behind him, Hannibal’s lips curved in the faintest shadow of a smile. Will’s gaze tracked every face in the room, alert, calculating.

The Carabiniere shifted, swallowing against the edge of the knife. Dexter noticed, pressed the blade just enough to remind him stillness was survival. Then, quieter: “They do know. You were telling the truth,” he said, to Hannibal this time.

“Of course,” Hannibal answered smoothly.

The villa’s air cracked open with chaos.

Boots thundered across stone. Italian voices shouted, overlapping, urgent: “Fermi! Armi a terra!” The sharp click of safeties being released, the ricochet of bullets against plaster, the deafening crack of Hotch’s order—

“Don’t shoot them unless you have to!”

But the Carabinieri weren’t trained to hesitate. They surged in like a tide.

Dexter moved first. Hannibal’s knife was in his hand before anyone had seen the pass, before anyone could react. His movements were instinct, honed to ritual: he twisted behind a Carabiniere, dragging the man close, blade pressed tight against his throat. The officer froze, pulse hammering under the knife’s edge.

“Back off!” Dexter barked, voice raw with adrenaline. His eyes swept the room, calculating every angle, every gun trained on him. “Drop your weapons or he dies!”

“Dexter, don’t!” JJ’s voice split through the din, desperate, breaking. “Please, you don’t have to do this!”

“Let him go!” Hotch roared, his gun steady. His face was unreadable, a mask of command, but his eyes locked with Dexter’s. “You’re not walking away from this. Not anymore.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. The blade pressed harder, the Carabiniere’s breath rasping against steel.

In the middle of it, Spencer moved.

A Carabiniere lunged toward him, shouting, reaching for his weapon—but the chaos tripped him, sent him sprawling to the ground, gun skidding away. Spencer’s hand closed on the knife Dexter had dropped in his pivot, cool metal hot in his grip.

And then—silence in his head.

He was on the man in an instant, pressing him down, the knife hovering above his throat. The Carabiniere’s eyes bulged, his pulse a frantic beat under thin skin. Spencer’s own chest heaved with something dangerously close to exhilaration. He could. He could carve the man open. He could control this moment, this life.

“Spencer, no!” Emily’s voice cracked, raw panic.

“Reid!” Morgan’s shout was fury, disbelief. “Put the knife down! That’s not you!”

But it was. He felt it now, clearer than he had ever admitted. Not a flash of defense, not necessity. Choice.

“Spencer,” JJ’s voice trembled, pleading through tears. “Please. Look at me. Don’t let them win. Don’t let Hannibal take you from us.”

But it wasn’t Hannibal’s voice that cut through.

It was Will’s. Calm. Deliberate. A tether. “Not now.”

And then Hannibal, closer, hand slipping over Spencer’s wrist with the authority of someone who understood. “Control. Not impulse.”

Spencer froze, the knife a breath away from slicing skin. His lungs burned, his vision tunneled. He wanted—God, he wanted.

But Hannibal tugged sharply, and Will dragged him up by the shoulder. The Carabiniere scrambled back, half-choking, dragging himself behind cover.

The spell broke.

“Reid!” Morgan shouted again, voice shattering. “What the hell are you doing? That’s a cop! That’s a human being!”

Spencer’s chest heaved, but no words came. He couldn’t even look at them.

Dexter had seen it all. His knife pressed harder against his hostage’s neck, his own eyes burning with recognition. He saw himself in Spencer now, reflected so cleanly it terrified him.

“Spencer!” Hotch’s voice cut like a whip. “Step away from them! Both of you! This ends now!”

But it didn’t.

Hannibal shoved open the heavy side door, calculated and precise, the escape already prepared. Will yanked Spencer with him, half-guiding, half-forcing, while Hannibal pulled Dexter close like an ally, not a prisoner.

“Don’t you dare take him!” JJ screamed, her gun trembling in her hands.

The team surged forward. Bullets sparked against stone, grazing the frame as the four disappeared into the narrow passage.

The Carabinieri shouted after them, chaos spilling into the courtyard.

The team stood frozen in the wake of it, guns raised but too late, hearts broken by what they had just seen.

Spencer Reid had nearly slit a man’s throat—and then walked out the door with them.

The door slammed back against the stone wall as Hannibal pushed it wide, guiding the others into the blinding glare of the courtyard.

Sunlight hit Spencer like a slap, the air raw and sharp after days in the basement. His pupils shrank against the sudden brilliance. The world spun with gunmetal and shouts.

Carabinieri scattered across the grounds—rifles up, radios crackling in Italian, “Sono qui! Li vedo!”—their formation breaking into frantic movement as the fugitives appeared.

Dexter’s knife flashed in his hand, the blade catching light like a warning. His stance was taut, ready, a predator’s coil. “Stay back!” Dexter barked, his voice guttural, an animal warning.

“Drop it, Dexter!” Hotch’s voice rang across the yard like a gunshot. He and the team burst through the villa’s front, sweeping into position with professional precision. Guns leveled, bodies squared, eyes burning. “This isn’t you!”

Dexter’s jaw clenched. “This is exactly me.” His words were cold steel, but his grip on the knife trembled just slightly. He knew he was buying time. He knew it couldn’t last.

Spencer stumbled half a step forward, Hannibal’s grip iron on his arm, keeping him tethered. He wanted to shout something—an explanation, a denial—but his throat locked. He could still feel the weight of temptation, the raw hunger that had almost owned him.

“Spence!” Morgan’s shout cracked, fury and grief in equal measure. His gun wavered, aimed now at Hannibal, now at Dexter. “They’ve got you twisted, man, but you’re still one of us! Don’t let them drag you into this!”

Spencer’s lips parted, but no words came. His eyes met Morgan’s across the space, and the shame nearly buckled him.

And then a rifle cocked. One of the younger Carabinieri broke formation, too jittery, his weapon snapping up toward Dexter.

“Don’t!” Will’s warning snapped too late.

The barrel swung. The trigger flexed.

Dexter reacted first. He shifted into the open, knife raised, body angling like a predator into the gap. The bullet struck the stone at his feet, splintering the courtyard with dust and fragments.

Gunfire erupted again.

Stone shattered, chips raining across the cobbles. Spencer ducked on instinct, Hannibal pulling him low, maneuvering them toward the villa’s flank. Will moved with brutal economy, one shot fired, precise, dropping a light above the courtyard gate so glass and sparks showered the advancing Carabinieri.

“Cover!” JJ screamed, dropping into a crouch, firing three sharp bursts toward the flank. “Spencer, run to us!”

For half a heartbeat, Spencer faltered. His body tilted toward them, toward the safety of his family.

But Hannibal’s hand pressed steady against his back, not rough, not coercive—just sure. This is where you belong.

Spencer froze, torn between the two magnets pulling him apart.

Then Dexter shouted, voice raw, torn open: “Spencer—move!”

And Spencer moved—with them.

The team’s screams chased him, a cacophony of disbelief and despair.

“Reid!” JJ’s sob cracked her voice.

“Spence, don’t you do this!” Morgan’s roar cut through the chaos.

“Hotch!” Rossi barked, firing to suppress the advancing Carabinieri.

Hotch’s voice was a whip of command: “Hold your fire! Do not hit Reid!”

Spencer’s chest burned as if he’d been shot already. Every step toward Hannibal and Will felt like betrayal, every breath like treason. But he couldn’t stop. The pull was too strong.

Dexter swung the knife up in a smooth arc, not striking, but holding the blade high, glinting in the sun. He didn’t lash out—it wasn’t about killing. It was about control, space, escape. His eyes burned over the sight line, not at the team but above their heads, daring them to risk a shot.

“Leave him alone!” JJ’s gun trembled, aimed at Dexter now, her tears blurring her aim. “You son of a bitch, you leave him—”

“Stop it!” Spencer’s shout tore out of him, ragged and fierce. His voice silenced the yard for a beat, raw with anguish. “Stop pointing your guns at him!”

Every eye locked on him. His chest heaved, face flushed, hands trembling. He looked—God, he looked almost feral.

“Spence,” Morgan whispered, lowering his gun slightly. His voice cracked with something close to begging. “Don’t do this. Don’t go with them. Please.”

“I already have,” Spencer said. His voice was low but steady. Deadly final.

Hannibal’s eyes gleamed with quiet satisfaction. Will’s mouth curved into the faintest shadow of a smile.

And Dexter—Dexter looked at Spencer as if he’d been branded, claimed, bound.

Bullets cracked again, closer now, Carabinieri swarming the outer gate. Hannibal barked something sharp to Will, and the four moved in unison, slipping through the villa’s side passage, covering each other with clinical precision.

The last sight the team had was Spencer glancing back over his shoulder, eyes wet, lips parted—as if he wanted to say I’m sorry.

Then the stone door clanged shut behind them.

The courtyard rang with silence and gun smoke.

JJ dropped to her knees, her gun falling limp at her side. Emily caught her before she hit the ground. Morgan slammed his fist against the wall so hard his knuckles split. Rossi stood, staring at the sealed passage, his face set in stone.

And Hotch holstered his weapon with slow precision, his voice low, final.

“We don’t get him back by chasing. We get them back by outthinking him. Move.”

The stone door sealed behind them, shutting out the courtyard, the shouting, the guns. The echo of Spencer’s name still carried in his skull, lodged like shrapnel.

They spilled into a narrow alley behind the villa, lungs burning, shoes slamming against uneven stone. Hannibal was first, but this was no cultivated stride, no tailored walk. His jacket flared like torn wings as he darted, half animal, half conductor leading an orchestra of chaos. His face was lit with something bright, almost rapturous—instinct burning clean through the person-suit.

Will followed close, eyes sharp, cutting ahead with uncanny clarity. He didn’t run like prey, and he didn’t run like predator. He ran like a man counting variables, every alley corner, every shadow, every distant wail of sirens slotting into a grid in his head. His shirt clung damp to his back, curls pasted to his forehead, but his gaze was unshaken, a cold compass.

Dexter trailed a step back, still gripping the knife Hannibal had given him, the weight still singing in his hand. He didn’t look like a man on the run—he looked like he was gliding, steady, measured. His jaw was set, his calm deeper than it should have been, but his knuckles were white. His calm was the kind that could break in an instant.

Spencer stumbled between them, thinner than the rest, sweat plastering his shirt to his ribs. His breath came too fast, too ragged, but his eyes—God, his eyes were wide and bright, fevered with the fracture of someone who had already broken and found something truer beneath. He kept pace because Hannibal’s hand would not let him falter, dragging him forward when his body sagged.

Police sirens wailed in the distance, bouncing between the hills. Shouts of “Carabinieri! Lì! Lì!” floated like ghosts through the alleys.

They ducked into a side street, the stench of piss and stone thick in the air. Hannibal pressed them against the wall, chest heaving, eyes darting like a wolf scenting wind. He didn’t look like a doctor, or a killer with cultivated taste—he looked like something uncaged.

Will’s hand pressed flat against Spencer’s chest, holding him still. His voice cut low, sharp, commanding: “We can’t go south. Too exposed. We move east, keep the river at our backs until the hills thin. Then we vanish.”

Hannibal’s lips curled, not disagreement, but a feral smile at hearing Will command with such precision. He leaned close, whispering like a secret lover: “Yes.”

Dexter wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. His calm cracked just enough to show the heat underneath. “They’ll expect us to circle back toward the station. East buys us time. But if we’re spotted—” He broke off, glancing at Spencer, almost unwilling to finish.

Spencer’s voice was raw when it came, almost unrecognizable: “If we’re spotted, then we kill.”

The words dropped into the silence like a stone into water. Hannibal’s eyes gleamed. Dexter’s lips parted just slightly, some unspoken recognition there. Will’s jaw worked, but his face didn’t flicker. He had already counted that possibility.

Spencer trembled, but it wasn’t fear. It was something closer to release.

Above them, the faint whirr of a police helicopter cut through the air. A searchlight skimmed the edge of the alleys, throwing sharp shapes against the stone. Hannibal yanked Spencer deeper into the shadows, his grip unyielding, while Will raised his gun, calm enough to look like a statue.

The beam swept, then passed.

They didn’t breathe for three heartbeats.

Then they ran again, deeper into Tivoli’s veins, hunted men without masks, stripped to what they truly were.

The alleys narrowed, twisting into paths that seemed designed to trap them. Cobbled stone gleamed with damp, slick under their soles. Hannibal led them down a cut so narrow that Spencer’s shoulder scraped against the wall, the roughness tearing at his shirt. Every corner promised a barricade, every echo of boots might be the team, the Carabinieri, closing in.

Will halted them with a sharp hand, palm raised. He tilted his head, listening — not just hearing, but dissecting the sounds. A single voice shouting in Italian, close. Another, answering from farther off. The rhythm of boots splitting. He drew it like a map in his head. “Two streets north,” he whispered. “One unit. If we stay low, we’ll pass under them.”

Dexter looked at him, eyes narrowed but impressed. This wasn’t FBI field procedure. This was something colder, purer. Will wasn’t guiding them like an agent — he was tracking their hunters like prey animals, dissecting their movements as though he were already skinning them.

Hannibal’s hand brushed Will’s briefly as they shifted into motion, the touch almost reverent, as though recognizing the predator unveiled beneath the man. Then Hannibal’s grip was back on Spencer’s arm, steady and inexorable, dragging him forward when his lungs threatened to collapse.

Spencer felt the weight of it — not just the pull of Hannibal’s hand, but the inevitability. The team was somewhere behind them, he knew, but what good would that be now? If they caught him, would they save him? Or would they see only what Hannibal had named — the monster, the potential killer?

His voice cracked, not loud, but enough for Dexter to hear as they ducked into another shadowed lane. “They’ll never forgive me.”

Dexter shot him a quick glance, breath heavy, knife still in his hand. “They already don’t forgive me. But you—” He broke off, not knowing whether to shield Spencer or to drag him deeper into the same darkness.

Brian’s voice was suddenly there beside him — no, not him — oily and amused. “Don’t lie to him, brother. You saw it. He tasted it back there with the cop. He wanted it. He’ll want it again.”

Dexter’s jaw clenched, his hand tightening on the knife until his knuckles cracked. He didn’t answer — not to Brian, not to Spencer.

The alleys spat them out onto a sloping street that bent toward the hills. The town stretched below, quiet courtyards and shuttered windows, the hum of night muffled by tension. And above all, the sound of sirens rolling closer, pinning them in.

Hannibal’s eyes darted east, the faintest smile curling his lips. “We’ll use the aqueduct,” he murmured. “The arches will shield us. And if necessary—” His gaze cut toward Spencer and Dexter, sharp as glass. “—we’ll make use of the chaos.”

Will didn’t flinch. He just nodded once.

They sprinted again, breath burning, shadows swallowing them.

And behind them, the team drew closer.

The streets bled into the edge of town, cobblestones giving way to dirt paths, then the first hint of scrub and trees. Sirens ricocheted off the stone behind them, too close, too loud. The team was pressing, faster than expected.

They broke into a courtyard, low wall, rusted gate. Will shoved it open with his shoulder, Hannibal pushing Spencer through before he faltered. That’s when the shot cracked the night.

Spencer stumbled, a startled cry ripped from his throat as heat seared across his upper arm. He pressed his palm against it instinctively, feeling the slick warmth seeping through.

“Spence—” Dexter reached, but Hannibal was already there, steadying him. “It’s clean. Through the muscle,” Hannibal muttered, tone clinical even as his jaw tightened.

Another shot whined past. Hannibal jerked slightly, hand flying to his side. The red blossomed fast against his shirt. He didn’t slow, didn’t falter — he just pushed Spencer forward again.

“Go,” Hannibal barked, his voice iron.

Will spun, firing two sharp bursts back down the alley — not to kill, but to scatter the advance. The answering shouts of the Carabinieri and the pounding boots split in confusion, buying them seconds, no more.

“Car,” Dexter hissed, eyes scanning. He spotted it: an old Fiat, tucked half in shadow, keys dangling stupidly in the ignition as if waiting for them.

They piled in without ceremony, Hannibal dragging Spencer into the backseat, clamping his own hand over his wound. Will threw himself into the passenger seat, snapping, “Drive.”

Dexter didn’t need telling twice. The engine roared, tires screeching as they burst from the alley into the open road. Behind them, sirens swelled, but the Fiat leapt forward, weaving through the narrow lanes and out toward the dark hills.

The city lights shrank behind them, swallowed by the black mouth of countryside. Woods rose around them, dense and pressing, moonlight streaking through the canopy. Spencer clutched his bleeding arm, breathing fast but steady, while Hannibal leaned back, blood seeping between his fingers.

“Both of you hold on,” Will said, voice clipped, one hand braced against the dash as the car jolted over uneven ground. “We’re not stopping until the mountains.”

Dexter’s grip was white-knuckled on the wheel, but his eyes were bright, alert. He could hear the faint sirens still, distant now, fading behind them. For the first time that night, there was space to breathe.

The woods thickened. Branches clawed at the car as it rattled up a dirt incline. No lights but the dull yellow beams ahead, carving tunnels through the black.

Spencer shifted, his voice breaking the silence. “They hit us. Both of us. They won’t stop now.”

“No,” Hannibal agreed, his tone quieter, almost amused despite the blood soaking his shirt. “Which makes it all the more necessary to make them bleed first.”

No one corrected him. The Fiat surged higher, deeper into the mountains, swallowed whole by the night.

The Fiat jolted over a rut in the road, its shocks groaning. Dexter kept the wheel steady, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the dirt track unspooling in the beams. Sirens were gone now, but the silence was heavier, worse — the kind that pressed on ribs and made every breath count.

In the back seat, Spencer leaned against the door, his good hand wrapped tight over the torn sleeve of his arm. Blood welled stubbornly, soaking through his palm. He clenched his jaw, biting back the hiss each time the car lurched.

Beside him, Hannibal sat too still. His shirt, once pale, was darkening fast, crimson spreading beneath his fingers. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even grit his teeth. He just pressed down, calm as a corpse.

Will twisted in the front seat, his eyes locking on the bloom of red. “Stop trying to look composed,” he snapped, more fear than anger. Without hesitation, he clambered into the back, knees braced awkwardly on the seat as he pushed Dexter’s jacket off the floor.

“Hannibal,” Will said, voice low, sharp, urgent. “Look at me.”

“I’m looking,” Hannibal murmured, though his eyes had that faraway sheen Will despised — that distance, that detachment, the man who thought pain was beneath him.

“Shut up.” Will wrenched open the buttons of Hannibal’s jacket, then his shirt. The wound glistened, ugly, high along his flank. The exit wound in his back was worse. But the bullet was gone — through and through. Bleeding, but survivable if he could keep him from losing too much.

Will balled the jacket tight and shoved it against Hannibal’s side, hard enough that Hannibal’s breath caught sharp through his teeth.

“Good,” Will said, forcing his own voice calm, steady. “That means you can still feel.”

Hannibal’s lips curved faintly, maddening even now. “I always feel more when it’s you.”

“Shut up,” Will muttered again, holding the fabric in place with one hand, his other pressing flat on Hannibal’s chest as if he could keep him tethered, here, alive.

Spencer shifted against the window, pale but watching. His own blood soaked the cloth around his arm, slower now but still insistent. “He’ll be fine,” Spencer said, voice thin, brittle. “The bullet went through. Mine didn’t.”

Will didn’t look at him. His eyes stayed on Hannibal, watching the flutter of his lashes, the rise and fall of his chest. “You’re not my priority,” he said flatly, the words harsher than he intended.

“I noticed,” Spencer muttered, turning his gaze back to the night rushing past.

Dexter’s knuckles whitened on the wheel. He glanced once in the mirror, catching Will’s bent form, Hannibal’s slack face, Spencer’s bloodied sleeve. His voice broke the silence, rough but steady. “Both of you are going to live. I’ll get us there. Just hold on.”

Will pressed harder, feeling Hannibal’s warmth seeping through the fabric, staining his hands. He leaned close, his forehead brushing Hannibal’s temple for a fleeting second. Not a kiss — an anchor.

“You don’t get to leave me here,” Will whispered.

Hannibal’s eyes opened then, slow, deliberate. The faintest ghost of a smile touched his lips. “As if I would.”

The Fiat roared on into the night, four fugitives pressed close, blood binding them as tightly as chains once had.

Spencer’s voice broke the silence, brittle and dry. “Through and through?”

Will nodded without looking up. “Yes. Clean shot.” His eyes flicked to Spencer’s arm. “Yours isn’t.”

“I know,” Spencer said, quiet.

Dexter spoke then, voice steady but edged. “We’ll have to take it out. If we don’t, infection will take you before the police do.”

Spencer’s gaze snapped toward him. “And you’re volunteering for the surgery?”

“If it has to be done,” Dexter said simply.

Hannibal let out a weak chuckle, blood still seeping under Will’s hands. “I’ll manage to do it”

Will shot him a look sharp enough to silence. “Don’t talk now.”

The car jolted, throwing them all sideways for a moment. Spencer hissed at the jolt of pain in his arm. Hannibal caught his breath, jaw tightening against another wave of blood loss.

Dexter didn’t slow. His voice was low, clinical, but not unkind. “We’ll find somewhere to stop. Somewhere off the road. Then we deal with the bullets.”

“Then what?” Spencer asked, his tone sharper than he intended. “We keep running until we collapse? We’re bleeding out in a stolen Fiat on a mountain road. You think this doesn’t end?”

Silence filled the car, heavy and suffocating. The only sounds were the whine of the engine and Hannibal’s shallow breaths.

Then Hannibal stirred, his eyes fluttering open, his lips pale but curved into the faintest smile. “It ends when we say it ends,” he whispered.

Will pressed harder against his side, jaw locked. “Not before.”

The Fiat finally gave up after another mile of climbing, its cough rattling into silence. They pushed it off the road into a shadowed ditch and set out on foot, stumbling under the thin moonlight. The mountains pressed close, black shapes against the night sky, every breath sharp in the cooling air.

It was Will who spotted the hut — a squat stone building set back from the track, roof sagging but walls intact. Its door groaned open to a single room, stripped of comforts but blessedly dry. The air smelled of earth and dust.

“Here,” Will muttered, guiding Hannibal down onto a rough bench against the wall. He tore off his own jacket, pressing it against the wound at Hannibal’s side.

“I can manage—” Hannibal began, but Will’s glare cut him down.

“No,” Will said. “Not this time. You bleed, I stop it. That’s how it is.”

Dexter scavenged the room, his efficiency unnerving. He found a rusted tin basin, filled it with water from a rain barrel outside, and set it beside Will without a word. Spencer lowered himself onto the floor, his injured arm resting heavily in his lap, eyes fixed on Hannibal.

Hannibal’s shirt was peeled back, the entry and exit wounds raw but clean. Blood still seeped, but slower now. Will’s hands were steady, his breath not. “Through and through. Lucky.”

“Luck has little to do with it,” Hannibal rasped, then exhaled as Will pressed cloth to the wound. “But I enjoy your touch, even when it hurts.”

Will ignored him, jaw tight. Dexter handed over strips of fabric torn from an old blanket, and together they bound Hannibal’s side. When it was done, Hannibal was pale but sitting upright, his eyes sharp even through the pain.

“Now,” Hannibal said softly, looking toward Spencer. “You.”

Spencer shifted uncomfortably. “I can wait—”

“No,” Hannibal interrupted, his tone final. “It festers as we speak.”

Spencer’s eyes flicked to Will, as if asking silently whether to trust him. Will nodded once, grim but sure. “Let him.”

Dexter lit a candle stub he’d found, its flickering glow casting long shadows over the stone walls. Hannibal washed his hands in the basin, his movements careful despite the strain in his body. Then he knelt before Spencer, taking the younger man’s arm as though it were something fragile.

The bullet had lodged in the upper muscle, angry and swollen. Hannibal’s fingers were precise, tracing the edges, feeling for its seat. Spencer’s breath caught, but Hannibal’s voice was calm, almost tender. “You’ve carried worse pain, haven’t you?”

Spencer gave a sharp laugh. “That’s what everyone says when they’re about to hurt you.”

Hannibal’s lips curved faintly. “And yet, I mean it as reassurance.”

With a small knife from his pocket, sterilized briefly in the candle flame, Hannibal worked with slow precision. Will stayed at Spencer’s side, his hand gripping Spencer’s shoulder, grounding him. Dexter crouched opposite, eyes fixed, unreadable.

Spencer’s breath hitched, his knuckles whitening on the bench, but Hannibal’s touch never wavered — precise, delicate, almost gentle. When the bullet slid free into his palm, Hannibal showed it briefly before setting it aside. “There. Out of you.”

Spencer sagged against the wall, sweat slicking his temples. Hannibal cleaned the wound with water, then bound it carefully, his fingers almost reverent. “Your body is yours again,” Hannibal murmured.

For once, Spencer couldn’t summon sarcasm. He only nodded, exhausted, his gaze drifting to Dexter across from him.

Dexter’s eyes lingered too long on the bandages, then lifted to meet Spencer’s. A flicker of something raw passed between them — recognition, gratitude, and something neither of them dared name.

Morning hung heavy in the command post, thick with stale coffee and the scrape of tension. Garcia’s monitors painted the room in pale blue and green light, maps flickering, data feeds churning. The hum of electronics underscored the silence between words.

“They’ve gone further east,” Garcia said finally, her voice thin with strain. She tapped the glowing map, a moving trace that faded into mountainous terrain. “Carabinieri drones picked up a car heading toward the Apennines. Four occupants. Then—nothing. Vehicle either abandoned or hidden. We lost heat signatures five klicks outside a village near the foothills.”

JJ leaned over, her breath quick. “That’s them.”

Hotch didn’t answer right away. He studied the screen, then Garcia. “Four signatures. Still all together.”

Emily cut in, her tone clipped. “Not hostages anymore. We all saw it back at the villa—whatever else this is, Spencer and Dexter are with Lecter and Graham by choice now.”

Morgan’s hands balled into fists. “Choice? You think Reid’s choosing this? After everything? He’s not—he can’t—”

Tara’s voice cut through, calm but edged. “Denial won’t change it, Derek. They didn’t expect us at that villa. And when we came in, Reid didn’t run to us. He didn’t even try. He stood with them. That wasn’t coercion. That was alignment.”

The words hung sharp in the air.

Rossi exhaled, rubbing his temple. “The fact is, Lecter and Graham didn’t just let them live. Reid and Dexter are alive because they’ve been folded in. Whatever twisted bond’s there, it’s solid enough now that we can’t treat them as victims.”

JJ shook her head, pain flashing across her face. “Reid isn’t them. He’s not. He’s still—”

Emily’s tone softened, but only slightly. “He’s still ours, yes. But look at the pattern: Lecter doesn’t take hostages. He takes companions. He did it with Will. Now with Reid. And Dexter…” she hesitated, jaw tight, “Dexter isn’t a project. He’s an equal. That’s what makes this worse.”

Morgan paced the length of the room, his fury like static. “So what? We just accept that Reid’s gone to them? That Dexter’s the Bay Harbor Butcher and they’re some kind of freak show foursome out there?”

Hotch’s voice cut clean, steady. “No. We don’t accept it. But we plan with the truth. Reid is no longer passive in this. And Dexter Morgan isn’t a colleague—we now know exactly who he is. The Butcher. Which means if he’s aligned with Lecter and Graham, they’ve gained strength we underestimated.”

Garcia swiveled from her screens, her face pale. “And they’re still together. Whatever they’re doing out there in those mountains, they’re not breaking apart.”

Silence swallowed the room for a long moment.

Finally Tara spoke, her words sharp as glass. “So we stop thinking rescue. We stop thinking extraction. Our goal is containment. Because if they stay together long enough, if Lecter and Graham keep feeding this… then Spencer Reid becomes more than a liability. He becomes exactly what they want him to be.”

JJ’s eyes flashed, but she didn’t speak. She couldn’t.

Emily broke the silence. “We tighten the perimeter. Push into the mountains, lock down every approach. Assume they’re armed. Assume they’ll resist. And assume—” her gaze cut to Hotch, unflinching, “—that Reid won’t come quietly.”

Rossi’s voice was lower now, but no less firm. “Then we prepare for all possibilities. Even the ones we don’t want to say out loud.”

Hotch nodded once. “We move in two hours. Garcia, keep feeding us every satellite feed, every drone scan. If they surface, I want eyes before boots. Everyone else—gear up. Plan for mountains. Plan for resistance.”

Morgan’s voice came raw, quiet but fierce: “Plan for war.”

No one corrected him.

The hut was half-collapsed, stone walls damp, roof sagging. No light. Only the thin spill of moon through a jagged crack in the beams above. The air smelled of wet earth and mildew, sharp with blood.

Hannibal leaned against the wall, his shirt ripped open, skin pallid. Will crouched beside him, hands stained where he’d done what he could with cloth and pressure.

“It’s holding,” Will muttered. His voice was steady, but his eyes betrayed the strain. “The bleeding’s stopped.”

Hannibal studied the crimson patch seeping through the bandage. “Stopped is not enough. A through-and-through carries its own dangers. Dirt, cloth fibers… infection will come if it is not addressed.”

Spencer looked over sharply, his own arm bound in a strip of Hannibal’s torn shirt. “So what do you need to do?”

“Debridement,” Hannibal said. His voice was almost clinical. “It must be cleaned — cut where necessary.”

Dexter’s tone was flat. “You don’t have the tools.”

But Hannibal had insisted on keeping the small knife he had used for Spencer. He turned it in his hand, eyes narrowing at the faint rust along its edge. No way to sterilize. Then Will’s gaze caught something in the shadows: a shelf leaning in the corner, half-rotted, littered with glass. He rose, rummaged, and came back with a dust-coated bottle. He cracked it open. The sharp bite of alcohol rushed out.

“Old grappa,” Will said shortly. “It’ll do.”

Hannibal’s gaze lingered on him — something soft flickering beneath the pain — before he dipped the blade in the liquid and tipped the rest over the wound. The sting tore a sound from his throat, low, guttural, quickly smothered. The moonlight caught the sweat on his face, the twitch of muscles around his mouth as he forced himself still. Will steadied him with both hands, one on his shoulder, the other gripping his wrist.

When Hannibal finally pulled the blade back, the silence was brittle. He sagged slightly, but Will caught him before he could slump too far. “Stay with me,” Will hissed. “Don’t you dare—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Hannibal whispered back, voice rough but sure.

The others shifted closer in the darkness. Spencer sat against the wall, knees drawn up, head tipped back. Dexter moved beside him deliberately, shoulder brushing his, quiet solidarity. Spencer didn’t pull away.

Will pulled Hannibal against his chest, holding him upright. Hannibal let himself rest there, his weight heavy, but trusting.

The hut was silent but for breathing — ragged, uneven, shared. No words. No warmth. Just four figures pressed together in the cold, each tethered to the others, hunted in the dark.

Moonlight thinned through the cracks in the roof, striping the hut in pale ribbons. Will had shifted, his arms curved protectively around Hannibal, holding him steady. Hannibal’s breathing was shallow, but even, his face pressed against Will’s chest. The surgeon, the killer, the monster — asleep, trusting.

Spencer’s gaze lingered on them. His voice broke the quiet, low and deliberate.

“Four days ago,” he murmured, “I would’ve given everything for this. Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham asleep in front of us. No guards. No weapons in their hands. You could’ve ended it.”

Dexter’s eyes flicked to him. The faintest trace of a smile — bitter, knowing — ghosted his mouth. “And you’re wondering why I haven’t.”

Spencer didn’t deny it. His long fingers curled against his knees, restless. “You’ve killed for less.”

Dexter let the silence hang before answering. He turned his head, studying the outline of Will’s hand splayed against Hannibal’s back, the curve of trust binding them. Then his gaze came back to Spencer, sharp in the dim.

“I could,” he said evenly. “But it wouldn’t be a kill. It would be a mistake.”

Spencer frowned. “A mistake?”

“They’re not prey,” Dexter went on, voice softer. “They see us. Killing them now wouldn’t satisfy the Passenger — it would just cut the thread keeping you… keeping us steady.”

Spencer’s lips parted, but no retort came. He hated that it made sense. Hated more that it sounded like mercy.

Dexter leaned closer, his shoulder brushing Spencer’s. The touch was deliberate this time, not accidental. “We don’t kill them,” he said, “because they’re the only ones who understand.”

Spencer turned, meeting his eyes in the dark. Something unguarded flickered there — fear, fury, relief. He didn’t trust his voice, so instead he let himself move, small but decisive: his head dropped against Dexter’s shoulder.

Dexter stilled. His breath caught for the briefest second before he let it go, slow, careful. He lifted his arm, hesitated — and then settled it across Spencer’s back, drawing him in.

Spencer didn’t pull away. He shifted closer, until his temple rested against Dexter’s jaw, until Dexter could feel the tremor of exhaustion running through him.

Dexter bent his head, his lips brushing Spencer’s hair, just once, a fleeting press that could have been nothing — but wasn’t.

“You’re not alone,” Dexter whispered. “Not anymore.”

Spencer’s eyes shut tight, his throat working around words he couldn’t say. His hand found Dexter’s wrist, fingers curling there in silent answer.

And so they sat, bound not by chains or threats but by something rarer, something neither of them would name. Across the hut, Will and Hannibal lay tangled in each other. Here, in their own fragile quiet, Dexter and Spencer had found a mirror of it — raw, dangerous, and tender.

The conference room was too quiet, every tick of the clock scraping at nerves already raw. The team had been up since dawn, pouring over maps, chatter intercepted from local police, scraps of witness accounts that contradicted each other. But none of it mattered until the question of what to tell the outside world had been settled.

Hotch was the one who finally broke the silence. His tone was clipped, but his face betrayed the strain.

“No one outside this circle gets the truth. Not Interpol, not the press. Not yet.”

JJ lifted her head sharply. “The press is already circling. They’ve got whispers of a firefight, and you know they’ll dig until they find names.”

“They won’t find them from us,” Rossi cut in, voice hard. “We start feeding them the truth, we lose control. And the truth is unthinkable.” He spread his hands flat on the table, leaning forward. “Four fugitives, together. Lecter, Graham, the Bay Harbor Butcher, and Reid—” His jaw clenched before he spat the words. “It’s gasoline on open fire.”

Emily’s eyes flicked to JJ, then back to Hotch. “And if the story breaks without us, if they get even a fragment right, it will detonate. The families…”

JJ’s hands curled so tightly her knuckles went white. “Henry and Michael can’t read this on a front page. They can’t.” Her voice trembled but she forced it down. “They can’t hear the world call their godfather a monster before we’ve even had the chance to bring him home.”

Hotch nodded once, grim. “And Harrison. He’s just a child. He doesn’t deserve to have his father’s name dragged into this by proxy.”

Morgan’s hands balled into fists, fury and helplessness coiled together. “We don’t let the public into this mess. We contain it.”

“Containment,” Tara said quietly, but firmly. “We tell a minimal, controlled story: a local incident, a small unit response. Nothing about who they are or what they represent.”

“And Alana and Margot?” Emily asked, voice low as if naming them might conjure them into the room.

“They don’t hear it,” Rossi said flatly. “Not a word. Not now. Not ever, if we can help it.”

“And Diana Reid?” JJ’s voice cracked on the name. She closed her eyes briefly, forcing herself to continue. “We don’t put her through that. We don’t let any family member read the world’s verdict before we can act.”

No one argued. The silence that followed was heavier than shouting.

Hotch leaned forward, his tone final. “This stays contained. Need-to-know only. Our job is to stop them, not to let the world dissect them. If we leak even a hint, we risk turning this into a spectacle—and that puts innocent people in danger.”

Emily’s jaw tightened. “Then we shut it down. No press releases that identify suspects. No public naming of victims connected to this quartet. We give as little as is legally and practically possible.”

Rossi exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And if anyone leaks? Then it’s not just the fugitives we’re chasing. It’s the whole world. We’ll have vigilantes, thrill-seekers, armchair sleuths out there — and people will get hurt.”

Hotch didn’t sit back. He stayed leaned over the table like a man holding the roof up with his own shoulders.

“Then here’s how we do it. Rossi, you and I will take point with the Italians. We keep their commanders briefed just enough to keep them cooperative. Nothing more. They’ll want details for their reports—don’t give them ammunition.”

Rossi nodded grimly. “I can manage them. Half of them want to be legends, the other half just want this nightmare out of their city. I’ll make sure neither gets their wish.”

“Tara,” Hotch continued, “I want you drafting the language we’ll use in any official paperwork. Clinical. Sanitized. If the word ‘serial killer’ crosses a desk, it will be because we put it there. No one else.”

Tara scribbled a note, already calculating phrasing. “Local suspects, ongoing investigation. Nothing traceable. I’ll filter it until it’s water.”

Emily leaned forward, voice sharp. “And if a leak comes from the ground? Because it will. Somebody saw too much during the raid in Tivoli. Somebody will talk.”

“Then we control the narrative before it grows legs,” Hotch said. His eyes slid to JJ. “You’re our media line. Nothing goes public that you don’t shape first.”

JJ looked pale, but her jaw set like iron. “I’ll feed them smoke. Make it sound routine, messy but nothing special. By the time the story cools, they won’t know what they were even chasing.”

Morgan’s fist came down lightly against the table, not in anger but to punctuate. “And Garcia?”

“She’s already in,” Emily answered before Hotch could. “She’s combing chatter, back channels, social platforms. If someone types the word ‘Lecter’ within fifty miles of this city, she’ll know.”

Hotch gave a single sharp nod. “Good. Then she runs interference too. If posts show up, they vanish. If rumors spread, she smothers them. Fast.”

JJ’s gaze dropped to her folded hands, but when she spoke, her voice carried. “And when we bring them back? What then? We can’t keep it hidden forever.”

Rossi’s response was quiet, but it landed like a hammer. “Then it’s not our problem. It’ll be a courtroom’s, or a morgue’s. But right now—” he tapped the table sharply— “our problem is control.”

The silence that followed was taut, strung between resolve and despair. They all knew what they were agreeing to: secrets stacked on secrets, not just to catch the fugitives, but to protect children, families, reputations, even ghosts.

Finally, Hotch straightened. “We move forward as if the world is blind. Because as far as we’re concerned—it is. And it stays that way until we end this.”

Morning crept into the hut in slivers of pale light through the warped wood, sharpening the dust motes that hung like ghosts in the air. The night had been cruel to all of them: cold, shallow rest, the ache of wounds and nerves stretched too thin.

Hannibal was the first to stir. His side burned with a deeper throb than the night before. He shifted carefully, unwilling to wake Will, whose arm was still draped protectively across him, fingers tangled in his shirt as though even in sleep Will refused to let go. Hannibal laid his own hand over that grip for a moment, silent acknowledgment, before easing upright.

Spencer woke next, flinching at the dull pain in his arm where the bullet had been removed. His eyes swept the dim space and caught on Dexter. Dexter was already awake, sitting near the door, knife balanced across his knee, watching the forest through a crack in the wood. His posture was easy, but Spencer could read the tension behind it—the way Dexter’s focus cut through the morning silence.

“You didn’t sleep,” Spencer murmured, voice raw from disuse.

Dexter didn’t look back. “I did. Just not much. Someone had to keep watch.”

Spencer sat up slowly, wincing. He glanced at Hannibal, now propped against the wall, pale but composed. Will stirred beside him, eyes opening with the instant alertness of a man too used to waking in danger.

“We’re still here,” Will said, voice low, not quite surprise, not quite relief. He pushed upright and scanned the hut. His gaze lingered on Dexter with the knife, then on Spencer. “No one came in the night.”

“Not yet,” Dexter said flatly. “They’ll come. You know that.”

Hannibal’s lips curved faintly, though his face was still drained of color. “Of course they will. But not today. Not if we move quickly enough.”

Will turned back to him immediately, checking the bandages he’d tightened hours before. “You shouldn’t be moving at all. That wound—”

“Will.” Hannibal’s tone was soft, almost indulgent. “I can move. I must. Weakness is not an option, not now.”

Spencer watched them with an expression he couldn’t quite name. That devotion—so open, so unashamed—burned in the air between Will and Hannibal. He dropped his gaze, suddenly aware of the closeness of Dexter’s presence the night before. Dexter finally turned his head. His voice was quiet, measured. “Four fugitives, hunted, bleeding, cornered in the woods. Doesn’t sound sustainable, does it?”

“No,” Spencer admitted. His throat tightened. “But it’s what we have.”

Will pressed a hand against Hannibal’s side, feeling heat radiating beneath the bandages. His brow furrowed. “You’re burning up. It’s worse than last night.”

Hannibal looked at him with deliberate calm. “The fever is expected. It means my body remembers what to do.”

“That’s not an answer,” Will muttered, tugging his jacket tighter around Hannibal’s shoulders. He leaned in closer, voice harsh with worry. “It means we need to move, get you somewhere I can do more than improvise with rags.”

Dexter, who hadn’t let the knife leave his hand all morning, finally turned from the sliver of forest beyond the door. “Move where? Roads will be crawling with Carabinieri by now. And every hour we sit here, they close the circle.”

“Then we don’t sit,” Will snapped, sharper than intended. He hadn’t slept, not really—just fragments of half-rest with Hannibal’s weight pressed into him. The adrenaline was thinning now, leaving only raw nerves.

Spencer shifted, pushing his back against the wall, trying to breathe through the dull ache in his arm. His voice was quiet but steady. “He’s right. We can’t stay here. If they sweep the woods, they’ll find us.”

“They will,” Hannibal agreed mildly, as though discussing the weather. “But not yet. The terrain favors us. They search as men, with grids and maps. We move as prey, unbound by lines on paper.”

“You mean as predators,” Will corrected, his eyes catching Hannibal’s.

The faintest trace of a smile touched Hannibal’s mouth. “That too.”

Dexter gave a dry snort. “Poetic. But poetry doesn’t get us supplies. Food. Weapons. A car.”

Will finally looked at him, hard. “So what do you suggest?”

Dexter leaned the knife against his knee again, thinking. “We take what we need. There are villages scattered around these hills. Old farms. Abandoned sheds. People hide things, even in the quietest places. Canned food, an old rifle, maybe a working truck if we’re lucky. You’d be surprised what people leave behind.”

Spencer’s stomach tightened. He could hear the practical truth in Dexter’s voice, the way it flattened the reality of stealing into simple necessity. He hugged his knees tighter. “And if someone’s there?”

“Then we deal with it,” Dexter said without hesitation.

Silence pressed in. Will’s gaze shifted from Dexter to Spencer, then back. He didn’t miss the flicker of tension that crossed Spencer’s face, or the way Dexter watched him—too closely, as if reading every breath.

Finally, Hannibal broke the silence. “We leave at dusk,” he said. His tone brooked no argument. “By then, patrols will be tired, less vigilant. We’ll move like shadows, not quarry.”

Will nodded once, but his hand stayed on Hannibal’s shoulder, grounding him. “Until then, you’re not moving. You’re resting. That’s not negotiable.”

Hannibal inclined his head, as though indulging him. But when Will turned to adjust the bandage again, Hannibal’s gaze lingered on Dexter and Spencer, sitting closer than they had the night before. He watched the almost invisible shift of Spencer’s body, leaning fractionally toward Dexter as though gravity had changed.

The room had gone still when Garcia’s phone lit up first. She didn’t even need to say the name before everyone knew. Harrison.

She swallowed hard, then answered on speaker.

“Penelope?” the boy’s voice cracked, too old and too young at the same time. “People at school—they’re saying things. About my dad. They’re saying he was—” His breath hitched. “Is it true?”

No one spoke. The weight of it pressed down, heavier than the silence of any crime scene.

Garcia’s eyes filled, but she forced brightness into her voice. “Sweetheart, listen to me. You don’t believe what kids say at school, okay? We’re still figuring things out. And you’re not alone.”

There was a long pause on the other end. Then: “Please find him.” The line cut before anyone could respond.

Before the silence could settle, JJ’s phone buzzed. She stared at the screen—Henry. Michael’s number underneath. Her throat tightened. She answered, turning away slightly.

“Mom? Why isn’t Uncle Spencer picking up?” Henry asked. Michael shouted in the background, tell her we miss him!

JJ closed her eyes. Her voice was steady only because she willed it to be. “He’s… he’s working. Really important work. But I promise you, he knows you love him. And he loves you.”

Michael’s voice broke through, softer now: “You’ll bring him home, right?”

JJ bit her lip hard enough to taste blood. “That’s what we’re doing. That’s what all of us are doing.”

When she hung up, the room was heavy with things unsaid. Rossi finally spoke, rough but certain: “No press. No leaks. Not a word outside this room. Kids don’t carry this weight. We do.”

No one disagreed.

They spent the day like surgeons around a body — careful hands, quiet voices, instruments improvised from the hut’s bones. The decision-making was methodical because panic would have destroyed them: a map scratched in charcoal on the floor, lines for patrol sweeps, circles for fields and hamlets, shaded marks where a shed or barn might hold tools. Eight hours condensed into a single, deliberate plan.

Hannibal sat propped against the far wall for most of it, eyes half-closed but alert, issuing small, exact orders about dressings and infection control. Will moved like a man on a single, simple axis: keep Hannibal alive. Dexter worked the perimeter, methodical and restless, testing weak beams, turning over crates for nails and rope, making lists and crossing them off with a pencil’s pitiless motion. Spencer did the math — distances, patrol rhythms, light and shadow — and when his voice spoke, the others listened because the numbers were stubborn and honest.

They began with supplies. The list was short and uncompromising: proper dressings, an antiseptic cleaner, clean water, canned food, a little fuel, duct tape, a tarp, twine, a stout knife, and something motorized — even an old farm tractor or a handcart would change the geometry of their escape. Dexter also added the things that mattered to him in a quieter register: disposable gloves, extra blades, cleaning tools for instruments. Hannibal approved each revision without sentiment.

“All of it can be stolen in an afternoon, provided we move with purpose,” Dexter said. He traced a route with a finger along the charcoal map — two small hamlets, the first with a cluster of storage sheds, the second a small workshop where an old man might leave a utility vehicle to sleep.

“You can’t go alone,” Will said, instantly. It was less a question than a statement of possession: you will not risk yourself to this without at least another one of us. He looked at Spencer and then at Dexter.

“We won’t leave you here,” Spencer said, surprising himself by how steady he sounded. He had one good arm now; it would be enough to carry a small pack or a pistol. “You’re not an object to be secured.” The honesty in him was raw and necessary.

Will’s hand brushed Hannibal’s forearm with the smallest movement — a request, not a command. “You will not be alone,” he said. “We will not leave one of us defenseless.”

That settled the central problem: Hannibal would not be abandoned, but he could not fight. They needed mobility for the assault and immobility for the patient. The compromise shaped itself with a brutal logic.

They would make a litter — a pack-litter that could be carried short distances and pushed the rest of the way on a wheelbarrow or improvised handcart. Will would not be tied to a single position in the hut; Will would be mobile with Hannibal, always within reach. Dexter and Spencer would move as their pair: one for speed, one for range. Will would position Hannibal where a line of trees broke the sightline from the nearest dirt road; he would be a moving anchor. Dexter and Spencer would be the fast, silent hands that took supplies and returned before the circle tightened.

The hut yielded what they needed. Planks pried from a rotten bed frame, blanket strips cut for straps, an old garden wheelbarrow found half-rotted beneath a lean-to and made functional with new nails. The bundle was heavy but serviceable; they tested it, hoisting Hannibal gently, the two of them — Will at the shoulders, Dexter at the feet — carrying him into the open and lowering him into the wheelbarrow as if placing a fragile piece of art into a crate. It fit. It moved.

“We’ll push him to the line of cedars,” Will said, breath loud in the cold air. “There’s a hollow behind the rock. We can keep him covered there, close enough for me to run interference, close enough that Dexter and Spencer can hit two targets in the villages and still come back in an hour.” He looked at both men. “Quick in and out. No staying. No making a show.”

Spencer’s hands shook a little when he secured the straps. Dexter watched him without comment, then slipped a small, old service pistol from a cabinet behind the hearth — an old thing but loaded, the kind of weapon a shepherd might keep. Hannibal’s fingers found 

— a request, not a command. “You will not be alone,” he said. “We will not leave one of us defenseless.”

That settled the central problem: Hannibal would not be abandoned, but he could not fight. They needed mobility for the assault and immobility for the patient. The compromise shaped itself with a brutal logic.

They would make a litter — a pack-litter that could be carried short distances and pushed the rest of the way on a wheelbarrow or improvised handcart. Will would not be tied to a single position in the hut; Will would be mobile with Hannibal, always within reach. Dexter and Spencer would move as their pair: one for speed, one for range. Will would position Hannibal where a line of trees broke the sightline from the nearest dirt road; he would be a moving anchor. Dexter and Spencer would be the fast, silent hands that took supplies and returned before the circle tightened.

The hut yielded what they needed. Planks pried from a rotten bed frame, blanket strips cut for straps, an old garden wheelbarrow found half-rotted beneath a lean-to and made functional with new nails. The bundle was heavy but serviceable; they tested it, hoisting Hannibal gently, the two of them — Will at the shoulders, Dexter at the feet — carrying him into the open and lowering him into the wheelbarrow as if placing a fragile piece of art into a crate. It fit. It moved.

“We’ll push him to the line of cedars,” Will said, breath loud in the cold air. “There’s a hollow behind the rock. We can keep him covered there, close enough for me to run interference, close enough that Dexter and Spencer can hit two targets in the villages and still come back in an hour.” He looked at both men. “Quick in and out. No staying. No making a show.”

Spencer’s hands shook a little when he secured the straps. Dexter watched him without comment, then slipped a small, old service pistol from a cabinet behind the hearth — an old thing but loaded, the kind of weapon a shepherd might keep. Hannibal’s fingers found Spencer’s free hand and squeezed it, that small, cold confidence that passed between them like permission.

“You can hold it,” Hannibal murmured. “One-handed. Practice the weight. If you fire, aim to end the threat. Do not be ceremonial.”

“You trust me?” Spencer asked, before he could stop himself.

Dexter’s reply was not the sudden, visceral thing Spencer had expected. It was a small, flat acknowledgement, like an accord signed in ink. “Enough to go with me.”

They spent the afternoon sealing wounds and rehearsing exits. Hannibal’s ministrations were precise and coldly tender; he cleaned and sutured the skin with a care that would have been tender had it not been clinical. Will squeezed his hand until his knuckles whitened. Hannibal did not look away.

At one point, Spencer asked a question he hadn’t expected to voice: “If we do this… if we get supplies… then what? We’re still being chased.”

“We change the geometry of the chase,” Dexter said. “We’ll have food, fuel, a means of moving Hannibal if we find a vehicle. At night we sleep in different places. We become noise in the wind.”

“And if one of you is captured while the others are out?” Spencer’s voice became small around the edges.

“Then we accept contingency,” Will said, the words crude but true. “Garcia and the team will think we’re fugitives. We will not let it be broadcast. They will hunt. We will move. But if it comes to a trade—” He did not finish. The implication hung thick.

Hannibal’s laugh then was a soft, humorless thing. “We are not chess pieces to be handed across a table. But contingency requires that we not be sentimental. There is a limit to what any of us will sacrifice.” He paused, eyes bright with fever or calculation. “And we will not lose one another because we are sentimental.”

They named the targets. The first hamlet had three storage sheds clustered behind a church — fertilizer, jars, a toolshed with a lock that looked tired. The second had an old mechanic’s shop where a battered tractor was sometimes left in rust. Two targets, close enough that a fast pair could do both in a single window if the stars aligned.

Training ended with a small ritual in the doorway. Dexter checked Spencer’s pack, added a handful of bandages and a small can of petroleum jelly. Spencer tucked the pistol into the waistband of his trousers in a way that made him feel hollow and real at the same time. Will folded a clean scarf into Hannibal’s neck and wrapped his bandages like a vow. Hannibal closed his eyes for a moment and breathed, as if memorizing the four of them.

“Go like foxes,” Hannibal said, voice low. “Be unseen. Take only what keeps you unseen. Return without scent.”

They left at dusk. The wheelbarrow creaked as Will pushed it between low stones, the moon a thin coin above them. Hannibal’s face was pale and composed; he held Will’s hand with fingers that betrayed a slight tremor. Spencer walked beside Dexter, the pistol pressing a cold curve into his hip. Their outlines were lean and purposeful against the dark.

They did not travel far before they split into their rhythm: Will pushing, Hannibal walking when he could, Spencer scanning, Dexter labeling every shadow, every sound. The plan was simple and brutal: put distance between the hut and the road, move to the first cluster of sheds, remove tools and fuel, then to the mechanic for the vehicle.

No one said the thing that trembled at the edge of all their planning — that any step could be the last where plans were possible. They had built a way forward, and for now that was enough. The mountains closed above them like an oath, and they walked into the night carrying each other’s breath.

They moved like shadows because shadows were all they could be: compact, silent, a choreography practiced in the dark and built on the edge of necessity. Dusk had flattened the world into two tones; the sheds crouched at the hamlet’s edge like animals taking cover. They had walked the route Spencer had drawn in charcoal and memorized it in a dozen different ways. They knew, roughly, where the sheds’ doors faced the lane, roughly how the wind moved, roughly how long a farmer might linger on a back step. “Roughly” would have to be enough.

Will went first, wheelbarrow rolled ahead of him as a carriage for the wounded — Hannibal’s weight nested behind a blanket, his breath shallow and steady. Will’s palms were steady on the handles, but his jaw worked with a tension that wouldn’t let itself ease. Dexter and Spencer were shoulder to shoulder, the two of them cutting a small arc toward the first cluster of storage sheds. The pistol in Spencer’s waistband felt both foreign and necessary; his left shoulder sent a dull, constant complaint whenever he moved wrong, but his face was composed, eyes drawing in light and shadow in careful measure. Dexter carried only the knife he had been refusing to put away, its steel a cold line against his thigh.

They kept to the shadow of hedgerows until the last stretch, then slid between low fences with the practiced quiet of those who understood that sound could end more than plans. No one spoke. The hut’s plan had become a rhythm: two fast hands, one to fetch and return, one to watch; a moving anchor with the wounded where the line of cedars broke the sightline from the lane; a timebox measured in breaths.

The first shed was older than memory and leaned a little where the earth had shifted. A padlock hung from the hasp, dry and rusted. They had not come to pick its lock as a lesson in technique; they came because the lock, like everything else in the countryside, had long since surrendered to weather and neglect. Dexter’s hand eased the hasp; the metal object yielded with the sickening little sound of corrosion giving way. Even that small noise felt obscene.

Inside: the smell of old oil and dust, a row of shelves crooked with jars, work-scarred benchtops; a coil of rope; a stack of spare tins of fuel. Not every shed was a treasure; some were thrift stores of forgotten labor. They took only what their plan allowed: a couple of cans that would serve for the tractor, a length of heavy twine, a roll of duct tape, a battered toolbox with the kind of nails and hammer you could not buy in good conscience. Dexter’s fingers closed on a small can of antiseptic, and for a second he held it like contraband and like salvation both.

They moved with the economy of people who had rehearsed scarcity. Spencer’s injured arm worked uncertainly as he handed items to Dexter, who in turn passed them to Will at the wheelbarrow. Will stacked and wrapped, the wheel squeaking faintly as the metal rim found a sticky rut. No one lingered over brightness. Nothing was sentimental.

They were almost done with the first cluster when a shadow shifted near the second shed — not large enough to be a truck, not the kind of casual presence a neighbor would show, but someone up and about. Voices carried, low and prosaic, the sound of two men finishing the day’s work with the slippered care of people who had very little to fear. For a breath they froze, the four of them holding time in their chests. Then the other shape moved into a slant of moonlight and the world changed.

It was a man in a stained jacket, the kind of hands you saw on people who had lived their lives with their palms open to work. He paused at his lean-to, fumbled in a pocket, and spat. He did not notice the wheelbarrow at first. Not that he would have, perhaps; the human eye is trained to see what it expects. But the rustle of a stray can, the small shift of paper against metal, nudged him, and he looked.

The man’s eyes fixed on the wheelbarrow and on the deserted shed at once, and something like suspicion sharpened his face. He called out, brittle and casual, “Chi c’è?” Who’s there?

Spencer’s breath went thin. He looked at Dexter, then at Will, and in that quick exchange a dozen decisions were made without words. Will gave a single, almost imperceptible shake of his head — the signal to stay dark and still. Dexter’s hand closed tighter on the knife. Spencer’s other hand went instinctively to the pistol. The man moved closer, expecting a neighbor, a lost dog, a young boy sneaking a bottle. He brought a little light with him: the exact domesticity of someone who expected to find mundane trespass, not the imagined myth of fugitives.

The man’s voice rang out sharp in Italian, words quick, sharper because they carried unease. “Chi siete? Cosa fate qui?” Who are you? What are you doing here? His eyes darted over the four strangers, his back stiff with the realization that none of them spoke like him, none of them looked like neighbors.

Fear broke through his mask of annoyance. He took a half-step back, glancing toward the lane where another shout might bring help.

Spencer’s pulse thudded in his ears. The foreign cadence of the words didn’t matter — fear was a language he could read without translation. “He’s going to bolt,” he whispered, breath tight.

Dexter was already moving. One quick stride, knife low, not stabbing but barring. His free hand shot out, clamping down on the man’s wrist before it could swing wide. The farmer jerked, panicked, and Spencer lunged too, ignoring the throb in his shoulder. His good arm pressed the man’s other side, cutting off the retreat.

The old man’s eyes went wide, whites flashing in the dim shed light. He twisted, tried to wrench free, muttered fast, frightened Italian — “Lasciatemi, lasciatemi andare!” Let me go!

“Not yet,” Dexter muttered under his breath, voice even, though Spencer was the only one who could hear the English.

Spencer’s grip trembled, not from weakness but from the rush of adrenaline. His pistol stayed at his side, but his body blocked the exit with absolute clarity. For a heartbeat he felt the same raw power he had in the chaos outside the villa — someone else’s life bent beneath his choice. He swallowed hard, jaw clenching.

The man’s heels scraped against the floorboards, desperation mounting. But between Dexter’s knife angled near his ribs and Spencer’s unyielding frame at his shoulder, he couldn’t move. His breath came in ragged spurts, eyes rolling from face to face, looking for mercy, for explanation, for a way out.

“Calmati,” Hannibal said softly from the wheelbarrow, his Italian precise, velvet and cold. “Nessuno ti farà del male se rimani in silenzio.” Calm yourself. No one will hurt you if you remain quiet.

The farmer froze, Hannibal’s authority cutting through his panic. His chest heaved, but he stilled, trapped in the strange circle of four figures who didn’t belong in his shed, his world suddenly turned inside out.

Will’s voice was low, steel beneath it. “We can’t let him go yet.”

Dexter’s grip on the man’s wrist tightened fractionally. Spencer’s knuckles were white where they pressed against the man’s shoulder.

The man’s fear showed in the quick jerks of his hands, the way he backpedalled toward the lane. He said something in Italian that came out clipped and frantic; then, in a flicker of instinct, he reached for his waist, for whatever tool a man might keep when he thought himself threatened. He spoke again, this time with raw English as if English could make him understood by strangers: “You go — now! You hear? Leave!”

Dexter’s hand closed on the man’s wrist, a bright, practiced clamp. Spencer lunged, blocking the doorway and taking the burden of the run with a wince from his shoulder. For a second the shed was a theater of too many small motions: the old man’s quick, frightened breath; the creak of wood; Will’s hand on the wheelbarrow, tensed; Hannibal’s voice — soft, unnervingly calm — in Italian, “Sta fermo.” Be still.

The man broke. He moved to flee, feet scuffing, voice thick with a new panic. No one in the hut had time left for the civilized versions of things. Spencer’s control unspooled — not because he wanted to, but because something in him finally felt permitted to unspool. He saw the motion, the reach, the hand move toward the lane, and something hard and hullabalooing inside him snapped free.

Spencer didn’t calculate. He reacted. His hand closed on the knife — not in the studied, cold way Dexter used it, but with a raw, brutal need for a halt. He stepped forward and pressed the blade against the man’s jacket, then, without thinking of angles or technique, he clamped his free arm around the man’s throat. The farmer’s eyes bulged, pleading, then went wild with the primal terror of someone who understands the end is close and can’t do the math to stop it.

He kicked. He cursed. He fumbled for purchase on wood and air. Spencer’s breathing was a horse’s half-run; his shoulder flared, pain and adrenaline coiled together into one blunt instrument. He squeezed until the sounds strangled in the man’s throat, until limbs went slack and the last ragged exhale looked like a question that would never be answered.

When it was over, the shed felt impossibly loud. The heavy scent of fear — sweat, dust, spilled oil — hung thick. Spencer’s hands were trembling on the man’s neck, then in his lap, then clenching at his pockets as if to anchor himself against the suddenness of what he’d done. The knife slipped from his fingers and thudded dull and obscene against the warped floorboards.

The sound hung there, final, like a judge’s gavel. For the briefest of moments, silence pressed in around them.

Then Will’s eyes cut toward Hannibal’s, and in that flicker of a glance lay something coldly satisfied. Relief. Even approval. Spencer had done it — not with calculation, not with the scholar’s restraint that had always defined him, but with instinct, with raw emotion tearing through his carefully woven skin. It bought them hours. But more than that, it proved what both of them had seen: Spencer’s mask had cracked wide enough for his true self to breathe.

Hannibal’s lips curved, faint but unmistakable. “A rebirth,” he murmured, voice pitched low, as if to himself.

Dexter moved before the words could linger. He stepped in fast, closing the space between him and Spencer, grounding him with hands firm at his arms, then pulling him into a rough, steady embrace. The hug was uncharacteristically tight — not a gesture Dexter gave freely, not often — but it came without hesitation.

His voice was a rasp in Spencer’s ear, urgent but searching. “That was you, wasn’t it? Not fear. Not panic. You chose it. You felt it.”

Spencer’s breath shuddered, but he didn’t flinch away. His chest pressed hard against Dexter’s, his fingers clutching at the fabric of Dexter’s shirt as though the contact alone could anchor him. His eyes were wide, caught somewhere between shock and clarity, but he managed the faintest nod against Dexter’s shoulder.

Dexter shut his own eyes, almost in relief. “Good,” he whispered, the word nearly breaking with something like certainty. “That’s what I needed to know.”

Behind them, Will and Hannibal watched without interference. Hannibal’s expression remained cool, but there was a glimmer in his gaze — pride, interest, a private acknowledgment. Will’s jaw was tight, his eyes unreadable, yet the faint curve of his mouth betrayed something like satisfaction.

Dexter finally eased back just enough to meet Spencer’s face, keeping his hands on his shoulders. “We move him,” he said, steady, practical now. “Hide him before daylight climbs higher. Come on. We do it together.”

And so they did. The four of them bent to the grim work with unspoken coordination. The body was wrapped, hefted with awkward grunts and muted effort, carried beyond the hedgerow. The wet earth swallowed weight under their hands. They buried him shallow but hidden, roots and brush pulled back into place like the stitching of a wound.

By the time they returned to the hut, dirt clung to their fingers, their clothes, their silence. Spencer’s pulse still beat too fast, but his face was calmer now, steadier — not untouched by what had happened, but marked by it. Marked in a way none of them tried to deny.

Hannibal broke the silence first, his gaze lingering on Spencer as though assessing the symmetry of a finished portrait. “Now,” he said, voice quiet but sure, “he is one of us.”

And no one contradicted him.

The earth still clung damp to Spencer’s palms when Will finally moved closer. Hannibal had gone quiet, watching with a predator’s patience, and Dexter lingered near, the grounding weight of his presence still heavy in Spencer’s veins. But it was Will who crouched low, who leaned in close enough for Spencer to see the raw honesty in his eyes.

“You feel sorry for him,” Will said softly, no judgment in the words. “Of course you do. I do too.”

Spencer’s throat worked, but no words came. His gaze flicked down, toward the mound of disturbed soil beyond the hedge, and then back up, searching Will’s face like it might offer him permission.

Will gave it. “That man was terrified. You felt it as much as I did. That’s what empathy is for us, Spencer. It doesn’t vanish just because the Darkness is out. It stays. It twists. It hurts.” His voice tightened, memory flashing sharp across his features. “Every kill I ever made with Hannibal—I felt it. Their fear, their pain, right inside me. You’re not weak for feeling sorry. You’re strong, because you can feel it and still do what you have to.”

Spencer’s breath caught. His shoulders hunched as if Will had pressed a hand to the base of his neck, pushing down. But there was no resistance, no rejection. Just relief that someone else understood the collision inside him.

“I—” Spencer started, voice low, breaking. “I hated how scared he was. But… I liked it too. I liked knowing it. I liked that I could feel it, and then decide.”

Will nodded once, steady, his hand lifting to Spencer’s shoulder. He didn’t flinch at the dirt or the faint trace of blood there. His palm was warm, firm, anchoring. “That’s the Darkness, Spencer. Not a passenger. Not something outside you. It’s you. And you’re right—it feels good to let it breathe.”

Spencer’s lips parted, but nothing came out. His heart was thundering, but the trembling in his hands began to slow. Because Will wasn’t condemning him. Will wasn’t recoiling.

Dexter, standing just behind, watched the exchange with sharp eyes. His jaw was tight, his own relief complicated, but his silence was agreement enough.

For the first time since the knife had slipped from his fingers, Spencer let himself breathe.

Hannibal’s cough broke the fragile stillness. It was soft, restrained, but it carried that faint wet edge that Will knew too well. Spencer’s head snapped toward the sound, his moment of fragile anchoring yanked away. Dexter was already moving, practical, brisk.

“We don’t have time,” Dexter said flatly. “The body buys us hours at best. We need to move.”

Will’s hand squeezed Spencer’s shoulder once before letting go. He was already pulling Hannibal closer, easing him down against the wall of the shed. Hannibal did not protest, though his pallor had gone stark under the morning light seeping through the cracks.

Spencer, automatic, reached for the small tin box they had scavenged during the night.

His fingers shook, but the motions were steady enough — gauze, antiseptic, blister packs of unfamiliar pills with Italian labels.

“Codeine,” Hannibal murmured, voice frayed but still precise. His hand caught Spencer’s wrist, steadying the bottle. “Two, no more.”

Spencer obeyed, slipping the tablets into Hannibal’s palm. Hannibal swallowed without hesitation, his jaw tightening as the liquid burned his throat.

“Bandage it tighter,” Will instructed, tearing a strip of cloth from his own sleeve. His voice was sharp, not unkind, but clipped with urgency. “Enough pressure to hold until we can find more supplies.”

Spencer bound the wound quickly, his breath uneven. Hannibal’s eyes followed every motion, calm despite the pain, as though studying Spencer’s hands mattered more than his own survival.

Dexter broke the silence. “We run. Now.”

They didn’t argue.

The four of them slipped out the back of the shed, into the gray light of dawn. The village was beginning to stir — shutters creaking open, the faint sound of animals stirring.

“On foot, we won’t make a mile before they’re on us,” Dexter muttered, eyes scanning the narrow lane. And then he saw it: the bulk of a tractor, its red paint dulled by years of use, parked just beyond a low fence. A man’s jacket hung from the seat, abandoned.

Will’s lips twitched with bitter amusement. “You’ve stolen worse.”

Dexter didn’t waste time with a reply. He vaulted the fence, checked the ignition — keys still dangling. He threw a sharp look back at the others. “Get in. Now.”

Hannibal moved first, his body stiff but still controlled, with Will steadying him by the arm. Spencer followed, his shoulder still aching, but his eyes hard now, sharp with adrenaline.

Dexter turned the engine. The machine rumbled to life with a shudder, louder than he liked, but they didn’t have the luxury of subtlety.

As the tractor lurched forward, Will looked back once, scanning the village fading behind them. A corpse buried shallow in a shed. Blood on Spencer’s hands. Hannibal beside him, pale but breathing.

They were monsters on the move again, rattling down a dirt road that cut through the fields, toward the uncertain dark of the mountains.

No plan beyond distance. No safety but each other.

And still — for the briefest moment — Will felt something dangerously close to exhilaration.

The dawn spread pale light across the mountains, staining the peaks with gold. The air was cold enough to bite, thin enough to make every breath sharper. Their stolen tractor groaned along the winding road, its engine coughing, its pace too slow for fugitives but steady enough to carry them deeper into the Apennines.

Hannibal sat propped against the rattling cabin wall, his skin no longer waxen. The painkillers dulled the edge of his wound, and the antiseptic sting had faded to a manageable burn. He was still hurt — though the blood was no longer seeping into his bandage — but his eyes remained alert, predatory even in weakness.

Spencer, pressed beside him on the bench seat, couldn’t stop tapping his good hand against his knee. His shoulder throbbed where the bullet had sat lodged beneath muscle, but it wasn’t the pain that kept him restless. His mind flashed back to the villager’s wide, terrified eyes. The strangled gasp. The knife slipping from his hand. The rush of it all — sickening, glorious, impossible to erase.

Dexter drove. Hands steady on the wheel, jaw locked, he kept his eyes fixed on the road but his ears tuned to every breath behind him. The knife Hannibal had returned to him sat sheathed in his belt again. He felt calmer now, more centered, though he could sense Spencer’s rawness like static beside him.

Will leaned forward in the passenger seat, one hand braced on the cracked dash, watching the road twist between fir trees and stone. His voice broke the silence first.

“We can’t keep moving blind,” he said, low and firm. “We need direction, not just distance.”

Dexter gave a short nod, not taking his eyes off the road. “North is cleaner. Less traffic, fewer eyes. And the further from the capital, the harder for them to pin us.”

“Agreed,” Will said. His tone had that measured cadence, the calm that had always unnerved people — not panic, not fury, just decision. “We head north into the high ridges, then look for another vehicle. Something faster, something that won’t draw attention.”

Spencer let out a short, almost bitter laugh. “We’re four men on the run, two of them wounded, and you’re worried about attention?”

Dexter glanced at him in the rearview mirror, voice sharp but controlled. “Attention is what gets us caught, Spencer. You’ve read enough cases to know that.”

The rebuke hit home, and Spencer bit his tongue. He knew Dexter was right — he just hated the truth of it.

Hannibal shifted, his voice silkier, quiet but still authoritative. “We cannot afford more improvisation. Improvisation breeds mistakes. Will is right — we must act with intention.”

Spencer turned to him, eyes hot. “Intention? You think what happened back there was a mistake?”

Will twisted in his seat, meeting Spencer’s eyes. “No. It was instinct. And instinct saved us. But instinct can’t carry us forward. Discipline will.” His words were cold, but there was no judgment in them — just fact.

Spencer flinched at the word discipline. The taste of the villager’s terror was still raw in his throat. He wanted to protest, but Dexter cut in, steady, commanding.

“Spencer, listen.” His hands tightened on the wheel. “What you did… it proves something. That you can act. That you can survive this. But you can’t let it run wild. The rush will eat you alive if you don’t control it. That’s where Will is right. That’s where Hannibal is right.”

The silence that followed was heavy, filled only by the tractor’s grind. Spencer stared at Dexter’s reflection in the mirror — the calm in his voice, the steadiness in his hands. It felt unbearable and comforting all at once.

Finally, Hannibal broke the quiet, his words clipped but precise. “We will need supplies. Food, proper medical tools, clean clothing. And another car. Without these, we are only buying hours, not days.”

Will gave a small nod. “Then we raid again. But not like last night. We do it carefully, surgically. No noise, no mess.”

Dexter exhaled through his nose, almost a grim smile. “Now you’re speaking my language.”

The tractor shuddered as it climbed another bend. The mountains loomed taller, shadows cutting across the road. For the first time since fleeing, the four of them seemed to fall into rhythm — Will charting the path, Dexter holding the wheel steady, Hannibal’s calm slicing through weakness, Spencer vibrating between fury and awe.

It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t safety. But it was a plan.

And in their world, that was enough.

They moved like a single animal: hushed, economical, the four of them slipping through the low scrub as though the whole night had been engineered for cover. The tractor crouched under cedars where they had left it; the hamlet lay a mile behind, a stitched memory. Dawn had not yet burned the fog from the hollows; the world felt soft and forgiving, which was its cruelest lie.

Will and Dexter took the lead automatically — not because they wanted to show strength, but because both of them had the kind of calm that other people mistook for command. Will’s eyes scanned avenues and rooflines the way a cartographer read maps; Dexter’s fingers traced small checks in the air, mentally counting and cataloguing. Hannibal walked with a steadier gait than the night before. The codeine had softened the cliff-edge of pain; the bandage held; the antiseptic had done its small miracle. He could move now without the constant low scream in his side. Spencer’s shoulder still complained when he twisted, but the savage flash of his earlier violence had not undone the practised intelligence in him; if anything, it sat beside a new, more dangerous calm.

They had agreed: precise, fast, nothing indulgent. They would not take what was sentimental. They would take what would buy them breath and remove brittle, unnecessary risk.

The farmhouse they chose crouched at the lip of a shallow valley — not a mansion, not even a proper homestead, just a workman’s house and a long shed behind it. A single lamp glowed at a window; someone slept inside, or pretended to. They skirted the paling fence and folded into the hedgerow, bodies flattened to the ground though no one else passed by. The idea of being seen had the sudden, electric sharpness of a threat.

Dexter eased the back door and it gave without protest; wood that had swollen and split over winters was the kind of thing that made him grateful for small weaknesses. Inside smelled of cooked grain and the dusty comfort of long use: baskets, a pot on a stove not quite cold, a braided rug with a child’s scuff. They were not monsters; they were thieves. They moved with the efficiency of men who had stripped scenes clean before: cupboards opened, cans lifted, bandage packs seized, a small medical kit that had cloths and scissors and a few sterile things still in wrappers.

Hannibal stood with his back to the lamplight and watched more than took. He selected a jar of preserves as though choosing a pleasure for company, then handed it to Will with the same deliberation he had shown on nights when food had been ceremony rather than survival. Spencer, hands sure despite the shoulder, gathered a crate of canned vegetables and a packet of fuel tablets. Dexter closed and reclosed drawers like a man making a checklist against panic: matches, a coil of rope, a roll of tape, a strip of thick canvas.

Nobody lingered over trinkets. No one took jewelry, no one opened personal letters. They left the house as unchanged as they could, though their footprints would melt in the fields and the heavy scent of their bodies would not. Will paused in the doorway. For a second there was the private, almost soft look he gave Hannibal — a small oath conveyed in a glance — and then he slid out and they became shadows again.

The return through the forest took longer than the outward arc. The tractor waited like a bulky animal. They shoved the tins into its bed, cinched down the canvas, and drove deeper, higher. The road narrowed, ruts deepened, and the trees pressed closer, muffling the little noises of their movement. The air thinned. The tractor’s growl became a small heartbeat lost under oak branches.

They stopped at last when the undergrowth opened into a shame of stone — the slabwork of something older than the hamlet, a ruin half swallowed by the mountain. Vines ran like veins across broken walls; a low cavern opened beyond a fallen arch, and inside the mouth of that rock the world felt instantly safer because it had no witnesses. Will eased the tractor to a stop and killed the engine as if the sudden silence might keep them whole.

The cave was not a salubrious place for a long life, but it was enough for the present: dry ledges, a small pool where rainwater collected, a shelf of stone that made a kind of table. They hauled the wheelbarrow into the mouth and stacked what they had taken in a small, practical order. Lights — a torch Hannibal had insisted upon, a lantern Dexter had filched — were kept low; they did not want anything that would catch the attention of a search plane or a passing hunter with curiosity. It was the same economy of movement and presence they had used on the raid: simple, unsentimental.

Hannibal sat on a flat stone and bared his side to them with the clinical interest of a man who understood flesh as a material to be repaired. He had washed the wound once already; now they cleaned it again with the distilled water Spencer produced from a small flask and the antiseptic Hannibal had insisted on keeping. Dexter’s movements were precise and quick; he knew which touches would sting and which would soothe. Spencer held the bandage on in place with a grim steadiness that made even Will’s guarded face soften.

“You should rest,” Will said, kneeling to look into Hannibal’s eyes with the soft authority he reserved for private moments. “Stay. Sleep. I’ll keep watch.” He reached for the small cloth to lay across Hannibal’s brow not as a nurse but as a man whose gentleness was its own kind of weapon.

Hannibal’s hand rested on Will’s for a moment longer than necessary. “I am aware of my limits,” he murmured. “But I do not intend to be the weak link.” His smile was a thin, private thing that could be read as amusement or as danger.

They rationed the food without ceremony: a little preserved fruit, a can of beans warmed over the lantern’s faint flame, a strip of fabric for a cushion. The conversation that mapped itself around the maintenance of the machine and the dressing of skin was practical and ferocious in its quiet. Will and Dexter outlined the next arc — not a map of anti-detection, but a simple choreography of movement: keep high, keep moving, stop only to take what keeps you moving. They did not discuss escapes that would teach criminals anything; they discussed small, human things: where to barter for a change of clothes, which monasteries might offer refuge to an exhausted stranger, which paths through the hills were likely to be empty because shepherds rarely used them this time of year.

Spencer listened, fingers stained with soil from the dig, and at intervals he spoke up with lines of geography and memory: a ruined hermitage two valleys over; an old caretaker who might have keys and blind spots. His suggestions were less about evasion and more about places where people thought to look for danger less often. Will nodded, cataloguing, folding each note into strategy like a man folding cloth into a pack.

Night loosened its hold and then tightened again as they spoke. There was a domestic quality to the cave that both soothed and unsettled — cups warmed in palms, a blanket draped over shoulders, a quiet joke from Dexter that landed with a small thump of humor. It felt almost like the domestic moments Dexter had once treasured: the simplicity of someone clearing a plate, the absurdity of a small comfort in the midst of a life unlived by normal rules.

They slept in turns: Will first, one eye always open; Dexter second, hands within reach of the knife; Spencer later, fitful and muttering; Hannibal keeping a measured attention that looked like rest. The mountain kept its secrets by being too large to mind individuals. For a few hours, that sufficed.

When they woke, it was to the heavy blue of late morning and the soft clatter of rain beginning somewhere in the higher ridges. They moved as they had all day: practical, deliberate, each gesture a stitch in the fragile patchwork of survival. Plans made under the cave’s dark mouth would be tested by the road they chose next. None of them pretended it would be easy, none of them pretended it would last.

But for the present — bandaged, fed, and with a new set of tins and a warm place to sit — they felt, absurdly, more themselves than they had in the flayed light of towns. The mountains gave them the shape of an argument: keep climbing, keep distance, keep chosen company. They pushed the tarp back, bundled their small stores, and moved deeper into the stone-shadowed world.

The conference room hummed with conversation and the slow, clinical thump of the air-conditioning. A map of the region — a printout age-stained and scrawled with notes — lay at the center of the table. Strings of push-pins marked the villa, the fountain, the shed; a yellow legal pad collected the fracture lines of an investigation that had suddenly become personal.

Hotch stood at the head of the table and folded his hands as the room fell toward him. He was all the things a leader must be: economy of gesture, no wasted noise. “We brief, we act. Short rounds. Updates first, then options.” His eyes scanned the faces he’d trusted for years. “Garcia?”

Garcia’s fingers flew over a laptop, the screen reflecting in her glasses like a pulse. Her voice came thin and wired through the speakerphone. “I’ve got intercepts open on all known accounts associated with—” she halted, anger and fear in the same syllable, then forced herself to continue in a clipped, professional register. “—we’ve got traffic on the phones they had in Parioli. We lost two pings in the mountain ridges northwest of Tivoli. After that they went silent. It’s like they dropped into analog. I’ve lit every camera feed within a twenty-mile radius and there’s nothing but goats and nothing-that-likes-shadows.”

“Helicopters?” Rossi asked.

“Helicopters were up all night,” Garcia said. “Thermal picked up something moving through tree cover — a cluster that matched four signatures — but resolution’s crap in the canopy. The Carabinieri had two choppers, Interpol rented night optics. We ran that footage against known vehicle movements; nothing consistent. Whatever they’re using for concealment is working. And yes — Hotch — I’ve pushed a sealed alert: No press.” Her voice softened and then hardened. “For now, the names do not leave this room.”

Hotch nodded once. “Good. That stays. JJ?”

JJ set her phone face-down on the table. “Henry and Michael have called again this morning. They don’t know everything. They know fear. I tried to be honest without telling them things that could hurt them. They’re children.” Her hands flexed, knuckles white. “I’ll be available for them. I’ll rotate out if it becomes necessary. I’m still responsible for my family first.” Her voice had the iron edge of someone trying to keep different loyalties from colliding.

Rossi sighed, then—gravel and affection—“We keep this tight. No leaks. Not to the press, not to anyone. We protect the kids. We protect you, JJ.”

Morgan sat forward, elbows on his knees, the ache of practicality turning bright and raw in his face. “Fuck secrecy if it means they get time to plan. They’ve stolen an engine, they’ve buried a guy in a shed overnight — they’re bold and they’re fed. If they get to move on the meteor of that confidence, we lose them for good.” His voice was a physical thing, half-rage, half-plea. “We go hard, now.”

Emily’s voice cut in with the steadiness of someone rapidly assembling a scenario. “Hard now is five things: helicopters with better optics, full sweep of roads north and east with roadblocks, satellite imagery tasking, canine units on probable egress points, and public-works checks on small vehicles — tractors, pickups — that have gone missing in the last 48 hours. We do this quietly, but we do it expansive.” She tapped the map with a pen. “If they’re in the Apennines, they’re using terrain as a force multiplier. We can’t brute-force them; we have to constrict vectors of escape.”

Garcia chimed, “I’ve pushed a micro-targeting list to Carabinieri databases: recent purchases of antiseptic, large quantities of canned fuel, purchases of heavy tarpaulin. That narrows oddities in the supply chain. I’ve got a growler on the classifieds and municipal sale boards — people sell farm stuff online here, too. If they had to pick up fuel or medical supplies, they might leave a trace.”

Tara, clinical and precise, looked up from a folder. “We need forensics-on-site continuity we didn’t have in Rome. If they’ve been staging bodies and moving materials, there’s a forensics signature. We have the slide. We have the syringe residue matched to the Bay Harbor protocol. Our job isn’t just to find them; it’s to predict the signature they leave and anticipate the next stage. Behavioral modeling suggests—” she shook one hand, as if to clear the statistic from the air, “—that if they intend to make a series, they will escalate in symbolism. The crucifix, the fountain, the halves — they were statements. They want their message to be legible. That makes them creative but also predictable.”

Hotch steepled his fingers. “Rossi, you coordinate Carabinieri liaison. Derek—” he checked the roster, then corrected himself with the ease of habit, “—Derek and the tactical will run the roadblocks and the interdiction points on the routes Emily’s flagged. Garcia, give us an updated overlay of any thermal picks with timestamp cross-reference. I want a current picture within forty-five minutes. Tara and Emily, you two hold forensics-on-call. If the Carabinieri need a warrant, you get it. JJ, if you can’t be in this room, be on watch with Henry. Someone else cover the family piece.”

Derek had sat quiet until then, his hands folded, the knife-edge of himself scabbed and tucked behind a composed face. When he spoke, it was simple. “If they’re moving with purpose, what’s the likely next marker? If this is not just about spectacle but about recruiting attention, they’ll stage something that draws the team — something we can’t ignore. That means they probably won’t kill where the team can get traction immediately. They will create distance and then bait us. We should expect a staged tableau in a public place again, but more complex. Prepare Interpol to treat any staged scene as theater with a signature.”

Rossi rubbed his jaw. “They did that in Rome. The fountain. The black blood. People saw it. It made them visible. It also split the focus of local forces. A genius move, and someone with taste. That pushes us to think like patrons of their art. They want eyes. Where would eyes gather now? Smaller centers. Religious events. Monasteries. Pilgrimages.”

“Then we can’t give them an audience,” Emily said. “No public gatherings within a two-hundred-kilometer radius. We call a federal notice. Quietly, but with teeth.”

Morgan’s anger cooled into something like hard calculation. “We have to bait them, too. A controlled leak — we feign a supply of what they need and watch who shows up. Hannibal’s group is theatrical; they’ll take the bait if it hums with the right provocation.” He glared toward Hotch. “You want them, we have to make the right trap.”

Hotch’s voice was low. “We’re not setting pyres. We set containment and rescue. If we go to bait, it must be surgical and under control. Garcia, are your comms hardened enough to keep a false trail?”

Garcia’s fingers didn’t stop moving. “We can create a convincing sniff. We can seed two or three plausible purchase points with dummy info that looks real to an e-commerce record. But if they’re careful — and they have been — they’ll validate with eyes on the ground. It’s dangerous.”

A tense hush fell; even Morgan’s energy was channelled now into the plan rather than into talk. Rossi exhaled, the small sound of a man who’d run through forty years of lies and grief.

“Work fast,” Rossi said. “We start with roadblocks. We push a static perimeter at the ridgelines Emily recommended. We slot helicopters to sweep morning light where heat will still be uneven under branches. We task dogs on obvious exit trails. We insert Interpol teams in the valley roads.”

The room tightened into operational focus. Papers were folded into envelopes. Files were handed down the line. Hotch’s last words landed like an anchor. “We move on intel and with care. We will not become what we hunt. We will be precise. We will be fast. Everyone knows their lane.”

As the team dispersed, a distant, industrial thumping rose and fell — not from the room but from the valley beyond, a sound that announced rotating blades. Outside, two helicopters circled on different vectors: one with a police insignia, another a rented craft from Interpol’s tactical division. Their searchlights swept the folds of the hills like slow eyelids, painting the world in intermittent white. Cameras on gimbals tracked tree lines for heat above canopies; thermal feeds flickered on Garcia’s screen back at headquarters.

Garcia’s voice came over Hotch’s shoulder as he gathered the last of the maps. “We have a signature on a heat bloom near an abandoned quarry at 03:14. Not definitive, but worth a fly-by.” She keyed the comms. “I’m tasking the chopper with an infrared pass. If nothing else, we flush movement.”

Rossi put his hand on Hotch’s shoulder. “We’re close.”

Hotch’s eyes were steady, but they were tired in a way that the team had all seen before — that professional tired, the kind that meant a man had swallowed fear and made a plan. “Close isn’t capture,” he said. “Close is work. We do the work.”

Outside the building, as the routes began to hum and the Carabinieri mobilized in walnut-colored vans, the team moved like a unit forced into new moral arithmetic: protect the innocent, contain the spectacle, stop the four who had crossed the line together. The farmer’s body, unearthed in the woods, told them what they hadn’t wanted to admit — Spencer Reid had killed.

The confirmation from the morgue came in within hours, clinical and merciless. The farmer had fought — bruising along the forearms, scratches embedded in the skin — but the pattern around the throat left little room for doubt. The grip had been narrow, precise, not the wild clutch of a desperate man. It had been deliberate.

DNA sealed the rest. Skin cells under the farmer’s nails, Reid’s. Tiny flecks where his fingers had dug in, a last defense that now testified against him. The autopsy phrased it without judgment: manual strangulation, sustained pressure until unconsciousness, continuing until death.

There was no panic in the evidence. No accident. Just intent.

And in the sterile prose of the coroner’s findings, the team saw the shadow of what Will and Hannibal must have already seen: Spencer Reid was no longer only a victim. He was complicit.

The cave’s damp air carried the faintest tang of turned earth, the ghost of the body they had buried hours before. But inside, it was quiet. The kind of quiet that followed after blood had been spilled and accepted.

Spencer sat against the stone wall, his arm still bandaged, his breathing even. Not trembling, not breaking. Calm. Too calm. His eyes, sharp and clear in the half-light, held none of the denial or guilt Will half-expected.

He had fed it. And it had fed him.Will lowered himself down beside him, leaving only a hand’s breadth between them. Hannibal was stretched out deeper in the cave, recovering but awake, eyes closed like a patient listening to the heartbeat of the room. Dexter was on watch near the entrance, a shadow against the night.

“You’re not fighting it,” Will said finally. His voice was steady, not accusing, just matter-of-fact.

Spencer turned his head, almost slow, like he’d been expecting the question. “There’s nothing to fight.” His voice didn’t waver. “I thought there would be. Guilt. Panic. But it wasn’t like that. It was… quiet. Clear.” He looked down at his own hands, flexing them as if remembering the moment they’d closed around the farmer’s throat. “It felt like I’d finally stopped lying to myself.”

Will nodded once. He knew that look. That peace was more dangerous than rage. “That’s what it was like with Hannibal,” he admitted. His tone softened, almost confessional. “I thought I was drowning for years. Fighting every violent impulse, every dark thought, because I thought it meant I was broken. Hannibal showed me it didn’t mean I was broken. It meant I was whole. My empathy wasn’t a curse—it was the key. The moment I stopped resisting him…” He exhaled, a faint, humorless smile curving his mouth. “The moment I gave in, it was like breathing for the first time.”

Spencer’s gaze flicked toward Hannibal’s still form, then back to Will. He didn’t speak, but the question was written in his eyes.

Will answered it anyway. “I love him,” he said, simple and unguarded. “Not because he changed me, but because he let me be what I already was. No judgment. No shame. Just… recognition.” His hand ghosted through the air, like he wanted to reach out but thought better of it. “It’s the only kind of love that makes sense for people like us.”

Spencer swallowed, his throat tight though his face remained calm. “And you think… Dexter and I…”

Will allowed himself a faint smirk, dry, knowing. “I think you already know. I see it. Hannibal sees it. Even Dexter knows, though he’s too careful to admit it yet. What you two have—it’s steadier than what Hannibal and I had at first. Calmer. More united.” He tilted his head, the shadow of his curls falling across his eyes. “Hannibal and I… we tore each other apart before we ever held each other together. But you and Dexter? You’re already holding.”

The words hit something in Spencer, though he tried to school his features. He glanced toward the cave entrance where Dexter stood watch, knife resting in his hand, posture relaxed but alert. A protector. A mirror.

Will leaned in just enough that his voice dropped to something private, for Spencer alone. “You felt power today. You fed it. But what you felt after—when Dexter held you? That’s the part that will keep you whole. You don’t have to shatter like I almost did.”

For a moment, Spencer said nothing. His lips pressed tight, his eyes burning not with tears, but with something rawer, sharper—recognition. When he did speak, his voice was barely above a whisper.

“I liked it,” he admitted. The words were stark, naked. “Killing him. I liked it. And I like… this. Me. Me when I am with him.”

His gaze flicked again toward Dexter.

Will’s expression softened. Not pity. Not fear. Just quiet understanding. He reached out at last, his hand resting on Spencer’s uninjured arm. A grounding touch, steady and warm.

“I know,” Will said simply. “So did I.”

The cave breathed damp air around them, the stone walls seeming to hold their secrets tight. With Will and Spencer gone to the river, quiet pressed in, broken only by the faint drip of condensation.

Hannibal sat upright, spine straight despite the wound that tugged at his side, his hands folded with surgical precision. Across from him, Dexter leaned against the wall, forearms on his knees, his body restless, coiled.

“You fascinate me,” Hannibal said at last, his voice low, deliberate. “Three hundred killings, perhaps more. Each hidden, each unseen. You wrapped a vast slaughter in the mask of normalcy.” His head tilted slightly. “I dislike the manner of your work — too little aesthetic, no flourish, no sense of theatre. Yet I cannot deny its effectiveness. You thrived where others were exposed. Every one of us could learn something from you.”

Dexter gave a short, sharp laugh, more exhale than amusement. “Learn what? How to be a ghost in daylight? You already wear your mask better than anyone.” His eyes flicked over Hannibal. “Lecter, the impeccable doctor. Lecter, the gourmet. No one suspected, not for years. Don’t give me credit for hiding when you’re the master of it.”

Hannibal’s lips curved faintly. “Flattery from the Bay Harbor Butcher. Unexpected.” He let the name linger, savoring it. “But your camouflage was different from mine. Mine invited admiration. Yours deflected it. I dressed in velvet; you in khaki. Yet both endured.”

Dexter bristled. “And now it’s over. You and Will pulled the curtain down. You told them what I am. They know.”

Hannibal inclined his head, as if conceding the point. “Yes. They know. And yet you are here, unshackled, armed, alive. Knowledge does not always translate to power.”

“Tell that to the team pointing guns at us.” Dexter’s jaw clenched. “You unearthed me to them, and now I’m done hiding. You’ve turned my life into open season.”

“You were never hiding from them,” Hannibal countered smoothly. “You were hiding from yourself. Now the mask has slipped, the passenger is fed, and you breathe freer than you ever did in Miami.”

Dexter flinched at the precision of it, at the calm dissection of truths he rarely voiced aloud. “That’s not your victory. That’s mine.”

“Claim it, then.” Hannibal’s tone sharpened, cutting through the damp air. “Own it. Every kill, every concealment, every adaptation — survival written in flesh. That is what you are. Not diminished. Not exposed. Not ruined. Fulfilled.”

Dexter stared at him, torn between anger and reluctant agreement, between resentment and a strange spark of respect. “You make it sound noble.”

“Not noble,” Hannibal corrected softly. “Necessary.”

The word hung between them, taut, dangerous.

Silence settled again, only the drip of water punctuating it. Hannibal’s gaze flicked once toward the cave mouth, where the faint voices of Will and Spencer carried, indistinct.

“You’re not the only predator here who has found someone to stand beside him,” Hannibal said, almost conversational. But his eyes didn’t leave Dexter’s. “Spencer may not be your mirror — but he is your balance. That much is obvious.”

Dexter’s mouth pressed into a line, unreadable.

Hannibal allowed himself the faintest smile. “You will not admit it yet. But soon you will find that his survival and yours have become inseparable.”

The scrape of stone on stone announced their return before either man appeared. Spencer ducked into the cave first, arms taut as he carried two buckets of river water. The effort tugged at his mended shoulder, but his face was calm, almost proud, as he set them down with a splash. Behind him came Will, sleeves rolled to his elbows, another bucket in hand — not water this time, but fish, slick and silvery, still flopping faintly against the wood.

Dexter’s eyebrows lifted. “You caught those?”

Will smirked, dropping the bucket beside the water. “Bare hands.”

Hannibal’s gaze lingered on him, dark and glinting, then slid down to his hands, slow enough that even in the half-light the movement was unmistakable. “You’ve always been good with your hands,” Hannibal said, smooth as silk, his voice a low curl of amusement.

Will’s mouth twitched, as though trying and failing to hide his own grin.

Dexter blinked, expression blank. “Practical skill,” he said, nodding once, as if agreeing with some technical point.

Spencer, on the other hand, went scarlet to the tips of his ears. “Oh my god,” he muttered, dragging a hand down his face. “Seriously? In front of us?” He shot Hannibal a look that was half-annoyed, half-exasperated, but Hannibal only inclined his head as though acknowledging the complaint — without the slightest trace of apology.

Dexter glanced between them, still missing the undertone entirely, and frowned faintly. “What?”

Spencer groaned, sinking down beside the water buckets. “Never mind.”

Will chuckled under his breath, crouching to sort the fish, his hands still wet and gleaming in the dim light. Hannibal, for his part, looked perfectly content — as though this cave, these fugitives, and Spencer’s embarrassment were just another fine dinner party in his repertoire.

Morning light barely filtered in, the opening half-hidden by brush, keeping them cloaked in shadow. A small fireless meal of roasted fish had been picked clean, the bones laid neatly aside on a flat rock. They had water, they had quiet, and for a few hours, that was enough.

Spencer sat cross-legged near the wall, a jacket draped loosely around his shoulders. His left arm was bound in fresh bandages, the skin beneath still raw from where Hannibal’s scalpel had dug out the bullet. He held himself with that slight tilt of someone learning to trust their body again.

Dexter settled near him, his knife balanced across his thighs as he scraped its edge against a stone, slow and deliberate. Sparks of grit whispered into the stillness. His movements were steady, calming, the rhythm of someone who needed control where there was none.

Hannibal reclined with his back against the rock, legs stretched out. His color had returned somewhat; the painkillers dulled his wound enough for his mind to sharpen again. Will stayed close, always close, one hand braced on Hannibal’s thigh, anchoring him with presence more than touch. Their closeness was so natural now that Spencer, despite himself, sometimes had to look away.

“Does it hurt?” Spencer asked suddenly, eyes flicking toward Hannibal before darting down again.

“It reminds me I’m alive,” Hannibal answered, voice low, threaded with something almost amused.

Will’s mouth tugged faintly — not quite a smile, not quite not. “He’s fine,” he said, but his hand stayed on Hannibal, thumb circling once, unconsciously, against the fabric.

Dexter’s knife scraped again, a long hiss of metal on stone. “He’ll heal,” Dexter said simply. His tone wasn’t sympathy, wasn’t concern — just a fact.

Silence fell again, heavy but not hostile. Only the sound of breathing, the occasional drip of water from some unseen crack deeper in the cave.

Spencer pulled his knees to his chest, resting his chin against them. He watched the faint gleam of Dexter’s blade, the easy tension in Will’s posture, Hannibal’s unflinching stillness. Four predators in hiding.

It was almost domestic. Almost.

Then, the sound came. A sharp snap of twigs outside, the unmistakable shift of weight on undergrowth.

Everyone froze.

Will’s hand slid from Hannibal’s leg to his gun in one smooth, silent motion. Dexter’s knife stilled against the stone, his whole body tightening like a spring. Spencer’s pulse jumped in his throat, but he didn’t move — he waited. Hannibal only tilted his head, listening, eyes bright and watchful.

Another sound: the faint murmur of voices, in Italian, distant but close enough to carry. A laugh, casual, human. Not hunters. Not yet.

Spencer’s breath eased out, quiet but sharp. He turned his head toward Dexter, just a fraction. Their eyes met. Neither of them spoke, but the exchange was clear: we could be seen, we could be found, we’re still alive.

The voices faded, footsteps carrying away, swallowed again by the forest.

Inside, no one moved for a long while. Even Will stayed still, gun poised, until the silence had stretched thin. Finally, he lowered it, though not fully.

Spencer shifted closer to Dexter then, instinctive, the brush of his knee against Dexter’s. Not bold, not conscious — just a body searching for something solid after the scare. Dexter didn’t pull away. He set the knife down beside him and let the contact stay.

“You see?” Hannibal’s voice was quiet, almost gentle, directed at Spencer. “Fear sharpens. You didn’t freeze. You leaned toward survival.”

Spencer swallowed, jaw tight. “I leaned toward him,” he said, almost before he realized it. His eyes flicked toward Dexter, then down again, ashamed of his own honesty.

Debra materialized at Dexter’s side like she had always been crouched there, elbows braced on her knees, eyes sharp but softer than usual. She gave a little snort that was almost approval.

“’Bout damn time you said it out loud,” she muttered, her voice cutting through Dexter though no one else could hear. “You’re not the only one carrying something heavy, Dex. He’s got it too. And he just fucking handed it to you like that.”

Dexter didn’t answer her — not out loud — but his shoulders eased, a breath uncoiling from somewhere deep in his chest.

No one laughed. Not even Hannibal. Will’s gaze lingered on Spencer for a moment, steady, unreadable, before turning back to Hannibal, fingers brushing once against his hand.

The cave grew quiet again, but not the same quiet as before. This one was heavier, more intimate. Four shadows pressed close together, waiting for nightfall, waiting for whatever came next.

The mountains had kept them hidden for two days, but the cave had become a coffin of damp stone and silence. At dawn, Will said what they all already knew: they had to move.

By mid-morning, they slipped down into a small village on the edge of the Abruzzo, keeping to alleys, shoulders brushing close. It wasn’t a raid like the others — not wild or bloody. This was quiet, surgical. Hannibal’s gaze caught a general store, the kind with everything from soap to shirts, and they entered one by one, as if they had no connection.

Inside, Spencer’s hands trembled faintly as he folded two plain shirts into a bag. Dexter moved faster, practical: razors, cheap sunglasses, bread, water bottles. Will handled the exits, timing every passerby, waiting for the shopkeeper to glance away before sliding another item under his jacket. Hannibal, of course, was deliberate. He ran his fingers over the fabric of trousers until he found a pair that didn’t feel like rags. “If we are to blend in,” he murmured, voice low, “we do it convincingly.”

Minutes later they were gone, leaving behind only the faint rattle of the shop’s door swinging shut.

They regrouped in an abandoned shed just beyond the village. A single shaft of sunlight cut through the wood slats, dust motes hanging in the air. There, they changed.

Dexter shaved in a cracked mirror, scraping away the roughness of the past week until a stranger looked back. Spencer scrubbed his face raw, the water cold, his hair pushed back neatly. He slid into a clean shirt and felt, for the first time since the man in the shed, that he might almost pass for ordinary. Hannibal combed his hair with a thief’s stolen comb, movements careful, unhurried. His wound still throbbed, but painkillers steadied him. Will watched the others, then shaved too, his features sharpening into something cleaner, controlled.

And then they looked at each other.

It was impossible not to notice. The filth and exhaustion had hidden much, but stripped away, they were revealed again: men of sharp lines, keen eyes, bodies still strong despite hunger. Hannibal’s suitless frame still carried elegance. Will’s wildness, once tempered by a razor and a pressed collar, gleamed. Dexter’s shoulders looked broader in a clean shirt, his face striking now that the stubble was gone. And Spencer—he startled even himself, running a hand through his damp hair, color high in his cheeks. He didn’t look like a prisoner anymore. He looked like himself, and yet, not.

Something flickered in each of them. Recognition. Admiration. Desire, barely spoken but undeniable.

Hannibal adjusted his cuff and looked to Will. His lips curved faintly. “We shouldn’t act like a couple,” he said soflty. “Couples are being hunted. We act as strangers who happen to share a carriage.”

Will’s gaze lingered on him a beat too long, but he gave a small nod. Dexter caught none of it, already focused on packing the last of the stolen food into a bag. Spencer did catch it, though. He dropped his eyes quickly, as if embarrassed to have seen — though his pulse betrayed him.

By late afternoon, they reached Avezzano. The station was modest, worn, a place of workers and students, not tourists. On the platform, announcements echoed in Italian, sharp against the steel tracks.

Hannibal walked ahead, composed, as if he belonged here. At the ticket counter, his Italian flowed — accented, yes, but polished. He bought four tickets north without hesitation. First class.

Will leaned close as they stepped away, voice low. “First class is a risk.”

Hannibal’s eyes flickered, amused. “Risk is standing out. And nothing stands out more than men who look like they don’t belong where they are. We belong.”

Dexter accepted the logic with a short nod. Spencer clutched the paper ticket in his hand as though it might dissolve if he let go.

The train slid into the station with a rush of air and iron. Families with children pressed forward. A priest hefted a small suitcase. Two businessmen checked their watches, impatient. No one looked twice at four men in sunglasses and fresh shirts waiting quietly among them.

When they stepped into the first-class carriage, it was almost too easy. The leather seats, the hush of conditioned air, the muted chatter of strangers. For a moment Spencer felt dizzy. Five days ago, he’d been chained in a basement. Now, he was in first class with Hannibal Lecter, Dexter Morgan, and Will Graham. His old world was gone.

The doors hissed shut. The train pulled north.

The conference room hummed with static tension. Screens flickered to life one by one, each loaded with feeds Garcia had pulled from municipal archives, private security servers, and every grainy street cam she could hack into without sounding alarms.

“Another raid reported,” Tara said, scanning her tablet. “This time in a hamlet two valleys east of the last one. Same pattern — a farmer’s shed stripped of food, clothing, razors, some basic medicine.” She glanced up, meeting Rossi’s eyes. “No signs of struggle. Just clean, systematic theft.”

“Calculated,” Rossi muttered. “They’re rebuilding themselves.”

Emily leaned against the table, jaw tight. “That’s their rhythm. Two days in a hide, one night to raid. They’re covering tracks as best they can. But the pattern is widening. They’re moving.”

Morgan rubbed at the back of his neck, restless. “We’ve had boots in those villages. Locals are nervous, but nobody’s seen them. You’re telling me four wounded fugitives can just vanish into the mountains?”

“Not vanish,” Garcia’s voice broke in from the speaker, bright but thin with fatigue. “More like… slipstream. They’re ghosts until they need something. Then they pop, just enough, like blips on a radar. You only see them if you’re watching in the right five-minute window.”

JJ exhaled, pushing her hands against the table. “So where do we catch them?”

Garcia’s fingers clattered in the background, faster than the human ear could follow. On the screen, boxes opened, camera stills sharpened. Empty platforms, deserted roads, the blur of early morning traffic. “Airports? Checked. Hotels? Checked. They’re too smart for that. But… trains? Trains I like.”

Rossi frowned. “They wouldn’t risk—”

The feed clicked again. A frozen frame: Avezzano station, a modest platform bathed in the grey of early dawn. At first it looked empty, commuters blurred in motion. Then Garcia zoomed, enhanced, adjusted contrast. Four figures emerged from shadow: bearded gone, faces shaved, clothes fresh, but unmistakable.

Hannibal, moving with the straight-backed calm of a man in control despite the wound hidden under his coat. Will, close at his side, a steadying shadow. Behind them, Dexter — taller, darker, eyes forward with predatory watchfulness. And Spencer. His hair neat again, a bucket gripped in one hand, his step aligned with theirs.

“Jesus,” Morgan whispered. “That’s them.”

“They look… normal,” JJ said softly. Her throat caught on the word. “Like they’ve just blended in.”

Emily leaned in, narrowing her eyes. “Not normal. Composed. Calculated. They knew exactly which station to hit — small enough for weak security, big enough for connections north.”

Tara’s voice was quiet, but certain. “They’re going to Venice.”

Silence pressed the room for a beat, broken only by the hum of Garcia’s equipment.

Rossi nodded slowly. “Venice makes sense. Crowds to disappear into. Waterways instead of roads. Tourists by the thousands.”

Morgan slammed his hand against the table. “Then what the hell are we waiting for?”

Emily raised a hand, steady. “We don’t spook them. No leaks, no local police swarm. We tighten the perimeter. We anticipate their stops. They’re not phantoms. They leave trails. And we just found the biggest one yet.”

The frozen image on the screen lingered. Four fugitives caught mid-stride, faces sharper now than memory wanted them to be.

Spencer Reid, walking beside monsters as though he belonged there.

Chapter Text

The train hissed into the lagoon like a beast sighing its last breath. When the quartet stepped onto the stone platform of Venezia Santa Lucia, the air itself felt different — thick with salt, and brimming with the hum of water and human voices. Gondolas bobbed beyond the station doors, church bells rang across invisible canals, and the entire city seemed to shimmer with the careless distraction of tourists who had come here to lose themselves.

“Venice,” Hannibal murmured, voice low but tinged with a private satisfaction. His eyes flickered toward the canals as though greeting an old friend.

Dexter adjusted the collar of his stolen shirt, scanning crowds with predator’s precision. “You’re telling me this place is easier to hide in than the mountains?”

Will smirked faintly. “Four men with fresh shaves, clean clothes, and a little silence blend better among tourists than they do in empty valleys. Everyone here is already looking at the scenery, not each other.”

Spencer had lagged a half-step behind, his injured arm tucked carefully against his side. He paused at the top of the station steps, staring down at the chaos of vaporetto stops, gondoliers hawking rides, and narrow streets already flooded with people. “It feels like… too much,” he said quietly. “Noise everywhere. No shadows.”

“There are always shadows,” Hannibal corrected, gently.

They did not head toward any hotel — that would have been suicide. Instead, Hannibal guided them with the certainty of a man who understood cities as though they were maps in his mind. Narrow alleys twisted away from the Grand Canal, slipping into quieter sestieri where laundry hung between stone walls and shutters creaked in the breeze.

It was Will who spotted the refuge: an abandoned building, half-flooded at the ground level, shutters bolted but not impenetrable. The kind of place tourists passed without notice, assuming it was condemned.

“Empty,” Will said after a glance inside. He forced one of the doors, wood groaning, until the four of them slipped into stale darkness.

The air smelled of mold and damp stone, but it was shelter. A crumbling palazzo that had once belonged to someone rich centuries ago, now forgotten by everyone but the pigeons on the roof. The upper floors were dry enough, habitable enough.

Spencer dropped onto a dusty chair with a sharp exhale, relief flashing briefly in his face. Dexter crossed to a shutter, peering out through the slats, eyes constantly calculating.

Will set down the small bag of food and clothes they had lifted from their last raid. “This will do. For tonight, at least.”

Hannibal moved slower, favoring his wound though it had begun to heal. He let his gaze sweep over the cracked plaster, the faded fresco on one ceiling, the grandeur left to rot. And for a moment, his smile turned strange. “Venice always was a city for masks.”

The morning after their arrival, the quartet stepped back into the bright air of the city. They had spent the night in their abandoned palazzo, sleeping fitfully on makeshift bedding, but daylight drew them out.

“Moving through Venice is safer than staying in one place,” Will said as they emerged into the labyrinth of calli and canals. “Crowds are cover.”

Spencer adjusted the cuff of his borrowed jacket, still unused to the feel of clean fabric against his skin after weeks of damp clothes. His eyes darted over the streams of tourists, the couples posing on bridges, the shop windows cluttered with masks. “This feels… surreal. Like we don’t belong. And yet—” He trailed off, shaking his head.

Dexter, walking just behind him, finished the thought dryly. “And yet nobody notices us. Too busy taking selfies.” His lips quirked in a humorless smirk. “Perfect camouflage.”

Hannibal, despite the heaviness of his healing wound, moved with a certain deliberate grace. He paused at a vaporetto stop, eyes on the gondolas swaying gently below. The black hulls gleamed under the sun; the gondoliers called out in practiced rhythm. Hannibal tilted his head toward Will, an almost playful glint in his gaze. “Shall we?”

Spencer blinked. “We’re fugitives. We can’t exactly—”

“Blend,” Hannibal interrupted smoothly. “Sometimes the most audacious move is the safest. A gondola ride is not suspicious here. It is expected.”

Will gave a soft huff of laughter. “He’s right. Everyone’s doing it. A family of four, a honeymoon couple, us.” He let the words hang, deliberate in their irony.

Dexter raised an eyebrow, scanning the area for police presence. Then, after a pause, he gave a curt nod. “Fine. But if the gondolier looks too closely, I’ll handle it.”

The gondola dipped as Spencer and Dexter settled into the seat that faced the gondolier. The man, wiry and sun-browned, barely glanced at them before setting his pole into the water with a grunt. He muttered something perfunctory in Italian about the weather, then turned his eyes back to the canal, as if four more passengers were just another part of his day.

Spencer’s knees brushed Dexter’s in the narrow boat. He shifted slightly but couldn’t make space without looking obvious. He tried instead to focus on the buildings sliding past, their worn facades broken by flowerboxes and laundry strung across balconies.

“Feels like stepping into a painting,” Spencer murmured.

Dexter followed his gaze. His voice was lower, more pragmatic. “A painting that smells like diesel and salt.”

Across from them, Hannibal’s lips twitched in amusement. “Every masterpiece has its imperfections, Dexter. The flaws are what make it unique.”

Spencer glanced at Hannibal, then back at the water, almost embarrassed by the elegance of the reply. “I still think it’s… beautiful.”

Will leaned his forearms on his knees, watching the young man closely. “You sound surprised.”

“I guess I am.” Spencer’s voice wavered between sincerity and self-consciousness. “I thought being here would feel… I don’t know, wrong. But it doesn’t. Not completely.”

Dexter gave him a sidelong look. His mouth tugged into something halfway between a smirk and a grimace. “You’re adapting faster than you think.”

Spencer stiffened, but before he could answer, Hannibal’s voice cut in, smooth as ever. “Adaptation is survival. You’re both proving yourselves adept.”

Spencer flushed faintly. He looked down at his hands, clasped tight in his lap, then let them loosen.

The gondolier called something to another boatman as they drifted under a low bridge, his words carrying in a casual sing-song. Will used the cover of the noise to glance at Dexter, voice pitched soft but sure. “Do you even hear yourself? You sound almost… content.”

Dexter’s eyes slid back to the water. For a moment, his reflection broke into ripples, distorted, unsteady. “Maybe I am. For the first time in a long time.”

Spencer blinked at him, startled, but didn’t push. His shoulder brushed Dexter’s again as the gondola rocked, and this time he didn’t pull away.

From the opposite seat, Hannibal noted the contact with a cool, knowing glance, his hand brushing briefly over Will’s as though to anchor them both in this strange, fleeting normalcy.

The gondolier hummed to himself, oblivious. To him, they were just four more passengers. But inside the boat, the currents ran deeper — a fragile moment of calm, strangeness, and something perilously close to intimacy.

The gondolier’s pole struck the canal floor with a steady rhythm. As the gondola slid beneath a sun-faded arch, he lifted his chin toward a pale pink façade streaked with centuries of damp.

“Questa era la casa di Giacomo Casanova,” he said, his accent carrying even over the water. Then, as if remembering the tourists might not follow, he added in halting English: “Casanova. Famous… lover. Writer.”

Spencer’s brows rose, curious despite himself. Hannibal’s mouth curved faintly. “He wrote his life as if it were an opera, full of drama and appetites. A man more remembered for indulgence than restraint.”

Will gave him a sideways look. “Sounds familiar.”

Hannibal allowed himself a chuckle, low and brief.

The gondolier steered them past another building, ochre walls flaking, wrought iron balconies leaning slightly outward. He lifted a hand: “Tasso. Torquato Tasso, poeta.”

Spencer’s head turned sharply. “Tasso? Gerusalemme Liberata?” His voice carried an unexpected awe.

“Yes,” Hannibal said smoothly, clearly pleased. “ ‘Non è più tempo da perdersi in vano, che l’opra è degna e il ciel ne chiama a lei.’” His Italian rolled effortlessly, though Spencer caught the meaning without translation.

Dexter frowned faintly, lost, his gaze on the rippling water instead. “Translation?”

Spencer supplied, his voice soft, almost reverent: “It’s not time to waste in vain—the work is worthy, and heaven calls us to it.” He glanced at Hannibal, then quickly away, embarrassed at the way it felt to echo the words aloud.

“Appropriate,” Hannibal murmured.

The gondolier, oblivious to the undercurrent, gestured toward another building: “Wagner. Richard Wagner. Musicista tedesco. He die here.”

Will’s eyes flickered to Hannibal, amused. “You going to sing too?”

Hannibal tilted his head, feigning thoughtfulness. “Not today. Though Wagner did understand one thing: that love and death are not opposites, but echoes.”

Dexter exhaled, half a laugh, half disbelief. “You really can’t help yourself, can you?”

Spencer, however, looked caught between fascination and unease. His hands twitched restlessly on his knees, as if the weight of poetry, history, and Hannibal’s voice all pressed on him at once.

Will leaned back against the curved seat, letting the gondola sway beneath them. His hand brushed deliberately against Hannibal’s, grounding the moment before it turned too heavy.

The gondolier tapped his pole against stone, guiding them through another narrow turn. His eyes barely skimmed over the four passengers. To him, they were silent men, maybe a bit strange, maybe not. But to themselves, the words lingered: Casanova’s appetites, Tasso’s call to action, Wagner’s echo of love and death.

The gondola curved into a narrow side canal and glided to a stop at a chipped stone step. The gondolier gave a brief nod, hardly looking at them, already preparing to turn back into the main channel.

They climbed out two by two—Spencer and Dexter first, the unknown faces, the safer ones. Hannibal and Will followed, careful not to let their gazes linger on each other in public view.

The street was quiet. Too early for the crowds that would swarm the city later. Laundry fluttered above their heads, voices drifted from unseen windows, and the canals reflected strips of morning light. They could almost look like four men wandering aimlessly—tourists lost without a map.

Spencer glanced back at Hannibal. He caught something in the older man’s eyes—not words, not even a look directed at him, but at Will. A flicker that lasted less than a breath. The same flicker he’d seen before, when Will’s shoulder brushed Hannibal’s in passing, when Hannibal leaned half an inch too close to murmur something quiet.

Dexter noticed too, though he said nothing. His jaw tightened, not in judgment but in recognition. He knew hunger when he saw it, no matter the form.

They moved together through the side streets, slipping under archways and past closed shutters. Their footsteps echoed in the damp stillness. And all the while, Will and Hannibal did not touch, not beyond a brush of shoulders, not beyond the tilt of a head to catch a word whispered too low for the others.

But restraint did not still the need. If anything, it sharpened it.

They reached a small campo, empty but for pigeons. Hannibal paused, gloved hand resting briefly against the rough stone of a wall as if simply admiring the building. In truth, he needed the moment to steady himself—not from pain, but from the swell of proximity.

Will stepped close enough that his sleeve grazed Hannibal’s. He bent his head, speaking just for him. “Later.” A single word, but enough.

Hannibal’s lips barely curved, the faintest acknowledgment, as though they had agreed on a secret rendezvous.

Dexter’s eyes narrowed at them, then slid away. He didn’t understand the shape of their bond, not fully, but he understood the force of it. He glanced at Spencer—awkward, still walking as if he wanted to vanish into the stones. For a moment Dexter wondered if, someday, Spencer would look at him the way Will looked at Hannibal.

The thought surprised him. He didn’t dismiss it.

They turned another corner, the day opening wider before them. The city was waking, the masks of Venice waiting.

The crowd pressed closer the further they walked, the tight alleys spilling them into open campos full of sunlight and voices. Dexter and Spencer moved like shadows at first, uncertain what to do with their freedom, until the scent of coffee, baked bread, and sugar pulled them toward a small piazza.

A gelateria stood there, bright awnings and glass cases catching the light. Families leaned against the stone steps of a fountain, children clutching cones that dripped faster than they could lick.

Dexter stopped without meaning to, watching the swirl of pistachio and hazelnut in the display case. Something loosened in his chest, something almost laughable given where they’d been days ago. He nudged Spencer with an elbow. “Gelato?”

Spencer blinked, surprised by the suggestion, then gave the smallest smile. “Yeah. Why not?”

They bought cones—Dexter, chocolate and hazelnut; Spencer, stracciatella—and drifted toward the edge of the piazza, leaning against the worn stone of a balustrade overlooking a canal.

For a moment, neither spoke. They ate like men starved, but not only of food—starved of quiet, of a world that wasn’t staring back at them with fear.

It was Spencer who broke the silence, voice softer than the crowd behind them. “I came here once. With my mom. I must have been… four, maybe five. I don’t remember much. Just… the water. And the sound of it. She told me it was a city that floated.” He gave a quick laugh, almost embarrassed. “I thought that meant it could sink at any moment.”

Dexter licked a smear of chocolate from his thumb, gaze fixed on the ripples below. “I always wanted to come here with Harrison. Thought he’d like the boats. The masks, too. Kids like masks.” His jaw tightened around the next words. “Now he’s… officially an orphan.”

Spencer glanced sideways at him, the gelato melting fast in his hand. He wanted to say something, but nothing felt right. Instead, he nudged Dexter’s shoulder gently with his own. It wasn’t comfort, exactly—it was acknowledgment.

Dexter breathed out, the sound almost a laugh, almost a sigh. “Funny, huh? Two men with blood all over them, eating ice cream in Venice.”

Spencer smirked, just a little, and took another bite of his stracciatella before it could drip onto his shirt. “It’s good ice cream, though.”

Dexter let himself smile—small, fleeting, but real. 

They walked without urgency, the heat of the sun softened by narrow streets and the press of stone. Their cones were gone, hands sticky, and Spencer wiped his fingers on a folded napkin he’d saved, while Dexter just licked his clean, practical as ever.

The bells of a nearby church tolled, the sound rolling heavy across the canals. Spencer tilted his head toward it. “Let’s go inside. They don’t check tickets for the smaller ones.”

Dexter raised a brow, but followed. The church they stepped into was dim and cool, the kind of silence that made you lower your voice without thinking. Candles flickered in iron stands.

Spencer moved down the nave, gaze tugged upward toward the faded frescoes and gilded edges. But what caught him most wasn’t Christ or Mary—it was a stone relief along the wall, worn by centuries. A lion with wings, claws sunk into a serpent, its eyes still sharp despite the erosion of time.

“Saint Mark,” Spencer murmured. “Patron of Venice. He’s always shown with a winged lion.”

Dexter joined him, staring up at it. The candlelight threw sharp shadows over the carved muscles, the frozen violence of beast over prey. “Looks more pagan than saintly.”

“Because it is,” Spencer said, lowering his voice further. “They folded old symbols into new ones. Easier to convert people that way. You keep the lion, but give it a halo.”

Dexter smirked faintly. “So the mask just got a different paint job.”

Spencer turned toward him, lips twitching in agreement. “Exactly.”

They walked further, pausing before a reliquary tucked behind glass. The bone inside, pale and fragile, was framed by gilt sunbursts. Dexter leaned closer, his reflection catching against the glass, eyes narrowing. “Strange way to honor the dead. Lock them in boxes, decorate them like trophies.”

Spencer studied his face, the way the candlelight carved his features into sharper lines. “And yet you understand it.”

Dexter didn’t deny it. He stepped back, folding his hands behind his back, gaze still fixed on the reliquary. “Power in fragments. People like to carry it. To believe it.”

Spencer’s throat tightened, something unnamed pulling at him. He thought of bones, of masks, of the way he’d felt when the farmer’s breath had rattled and stopped under his hands. He thought of Dexter’s arms around him after, grounding him like he was worth carrying too.

They left the church without lighting a candle. Outside, the light was almost blinding, the noise of tourists jarring after the hush of relics and incense.

Dexter shaded his eyes with one hand, scanning the water. “Another?”

Spencer blinked. “Church?”

“Yeah. You pick.”

So they wandered again, slipping into another chapel where saints’ faces were worn nearly blank by centuries, but in the corner, carved into the floor, was a wheel of stone — zodiac signs etched faintly, nearly erased. Pagan bones under Christian skin.

Spencer crouched to trace it with his finger. “See? They kept it. Pretended it meant something else. But it’s still here.”

Dexter crouched too, watching him. He didn’t touch the stone, just watched Spencer’s hand move across the grooves. “Maybe it’s not pretending. Maybe it means both.”

Spencer looked up at him then, caught by the calm certainty in Dexter’s voice. And for a second, in the heart of a Venetian church, he felt like Dexter had just handed him a piece of permission no saint ever could.

They walked without speaking for a while, past bridges arched like question marks and alleys that narrowed until they could feel the cool damp of the brick on either arm.

Spencer’s gaze flicked upward, drawn by the sudden opening of space, a square empty of stalls and chatter, dominated by the hulking facade of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Its Gothic stone pressed against the sky, as if the weight of it alone kept Venice from slipping into the sea.

“Let’s go in,” Spencer murmured, more to himself than to Dexter.

Dexter followed.

Inside, the noise of Venice collapsed into silence. The cool air smelled faintly of incense and dust. Their footsteps echoed off the stones, too loud for how small they tried to make themselves. Light fell in shafts through narrow windows, catching on motes of dust and gilded frames.

Spencer’s eyes were wide, not with faith, but with recognition of something he could never quite explain. He drifted toward the tomb of Titian, the painter’s name carved deep into marble. “It’s strange,” he whispered. “The most beautiful works are housed alongside the dead. Like beauty can’t exist without death watching.”

Dexter’s gaze slid over the same monument, but his focus lingered on the outlines of skeletal faces in the carvings, the dust caked in the crevices. “Or maybe death makes beauty matter at all.”

They walked further, and Spencer stopped before the massive monument to Canova — a pyramidal tomb, angelic figures bearing torches, draped in grief. Spencer’s throat tightened. “Do you feel it?”

Dexter glanced at him, brow tightening. “Feel what?”

“This… weight.” Spencer’s voice broke a little, but not from sorrow. From awe. “It’s like—every stone was meant to remind you you’re small. That everything you do, no matter how terrible or great, disappears into this kind of silence.”

Dexter stared at him. The gears turned behind his eyes, that strange, clinical calculation that usually stripped things to bone. But now it hesitated. Now it softened. “You sound like you belong here,” he said, low.

Spencer huffed a quiet laugh. “I don’t. I was dragged to churches as a kid, but my mother… it wasn’t this. This feels like—like something older. Something watching.”

Dexter’s lips pressed into a thin line, but his hand brushed the edge of the marble as though testing its permanence. “I don’t see saints. I see stone, and I see dust. But—” he looked at Spencer, really looked at him, clean-shaven now, his hair pushed back into something almost boyish again, eyes lit by reverence. “—I see you seeing it. And that’s… enough.”

Spencer froze, caught in the blunt honesty of it. For a moment he felt fourteen again, too raw for compliments, too unprepared for sincerity. He turned his face away, staring up at the shadowed arches above them.

But he leaned—just slightly—closer, as though the silence required him not to break it with words, but to answer it with proximity.

And beside him, Dexter let the moment stand, like a prayer he didn’t know how to say.

Spencer lingered in front of Canova’s tomb, lips parted as if words might come but failed him. Dexter stood beside him, pretending calm, but something in the vast emptiness of the basilica pressed too hard against his ribs.

And then, across the nave, near the darkened crucifix that hung over the altar, Brian appeared.

Not in shadows. Not half-formed. No — full, solid, smirking as though he’d been waiting centuries for Dexter to step into this place. He leaned against the base of the cross, hands loose in his pockets, eyes gleaming with derision.

“Well,” Brian drawled, tilting his head up at the dying figure nailed above him. “Quite the décor. Always thought the whole ‘tortured man on a stick’ thing was a little… excessive.” His smirk widened. “But hey, blood sells. Guess you and I get that better than most.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. He glanced sideways — Spencer hadn’t noticed, still absorbed in the weight of the architecture, the strange hush of history.

Brian sauntered forward, circling the crucifix like a predator mocking prey. “Look at him. Crown of thorns, nails through the wrists, all so people could kneel and feel small. A martyr, they call him. A savior.” Brian’s gaze snapped back to Dexter, wicked sharp. “You kill a few hundred, you’re a monster. He dies once, and the whole world kneels. Tell me, little brother, who’s really got the better deal?”

Dexter swallowed, throat dry. His fingers twitched, brushing the knife hidden beneath his jacket — not to use it, but to feel something solid. Something real.

“You don’t get it,” he muttered under his breath.

Brian laughed, low and cruel. “Oh, I get it. You’re just jealous. He gets churches, prayers, stained glass. You get whispers, chains, and hiding in caves.” He leaned closer, voice like poison in Dexter’s ear. “Unless, of course, you rewrite the story. Give them something new to worship.”

Dexter’s vision swam for a moment — the crucified Christ blurred, face reshaping, softening into Brian’s grin. The blood on the marble figure looked redder, fresher. Alive.

He blinked hard, chest tightening. Spencer’s hand brushed his sleeve, grounding him.

“You okay?” Spencer asked softly, eyes searching Dexter’s face.

Dexter forced a nod. “Fine.”

Brian’s smirk lingered in Dexter’s head long after his figure melted back into nothing. The crucifix stood bare again, Christ’s carved face a mask of agony, silent and remote. Dexter exhaled hard through his nose, trying to steady the thrum in his chest.

Spencer had already moved a few paces, tracing the outline of a column with his fingertips.

And then — light.

A soft glow caught Dexter’s eye from a side chapel. A Madonna, bathed in candles, her marble face serene. But it wasn’t Mary anymore. It was Rita. Her features softened in the flicker of flame, her eyes not carved stone but alive, full of impossible warmth.

She didn’t smile. She didn’t weep. She only lifted one hand, palm outward, the timeless gesture of blessing.

Dexter’s throat closed. His knees felt weak. He took half a step forward before he could stop himself.

Her lips didn’t move, yet the words were inside him, gentle as a whisper across skin:

“You can move on.”

The phrase shuddered through him, piercing deeper than any knife. For an instant he was back in his kitchen, blood on the floor, Rita’s body pale and still. Harrison crying. The weight of failure crushing him.

But here — here she was untouched, untouchable, radiant. Not accusing. Not demanding. Just blessing.

Spencer’s voice pulled him back: “Dexter?”

He blinked. The Madonna was marble again, faceless and remote, haloed only by waxlight smoke. Rita was gone.

Dexter swallowed and turned toward Spencer. “Nothing,” he lied softly. But his pulse still rang with her words: You can move on.

The basilica’s doors shut behind them with a hollow sigh, leaving the incense haze clinging to Dexter’s shirt and Spencer’s cuffs. Neither spoke as they threaded back through narrow calli that smelled of salt and wet stone, their footsteps quick and sure. It wasn’t logic that pulled them back toward the piazza — it was something older, some pulse that told them Will and Hannibal would be waiting.

And they were.

The square stretched open, light mellowing into gold with the late afternoon. Tourists drifted in eddies, snapping pictures, following guidebooks, oblivious. At the edge of the piazza, half-shadowed by a column, Hannibal and Will stood together as though they had always been there. No urgency, no searching glances. Just stillness — as if they had never left at all.

Spencer slowed, adjusting the strap of the empty water bucket against his shoulder. Dexter felt the last trace of Rita’s phantom blessing burn away with the heat of the stone beneath his shoes.

Will’s eyes caught Spencer first, then Dexter, reading them both in a single sweep. A faint flicker — not a smile, not quite — passed between the four men like acknowledgment. No questions asked.

Hannibal’s gaze lingered a fraction longer on Spencer, then shifted to Dexter, and only then to Will. It was all the welcome they were going to get.

They had no phones, no watches, no schedules. But none were needed. 

“We know what comes next,” Will said, glancing sidelong at Hannibal.

“A kill,” Hannibal finished, voice velvety. “And a meal.”

Spencer’s laugh was dry, humorless. “Of course. You two fuck in the dark, and the next thing on the menu is blood. Sex and death—predictable.” His eyes flicked between them, sharp, cutting. “Do you ever separate one from the other?”

The remark hung there, souring the air for a beat.

Hannibal’s expression didn’t falter, but his gaze lingered on Spencer with something keener, as if he savored the bite in the words. “They are companions, not twins,” he said smoothly. “But both are sustenance. Both remind us we are alive.”

Will’s mouth curved, faint amusement sparking. “He’s not wrong, though. We do tend to sharpen our appetites in pairs.”

Dexter shifted, silent, watching the exchange with a taut jaw. He didn’t step in; he didn’t have to. Spencer had already taken the blade and turned it.

Spencer leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, refusing to flinch under Hannibal’s steady gaze. “At least you’re consistent. Everyone else hides their hungers under tablecloths and wedding rings. You just don’t bother pretending.”

Hannibal’s expression didn’t falter, but his hand drifted unconsciously toward the ring he still carried, fingers brushing the cool metal. Will didn’t notice—but at the mention of wedding rings, he faltered. Just for a breath, his voice caught in his throat before he steadied again, as though Spencer had pressed a bruise without knowing it.

Spencer’s hunger had a temperature. It came up like fever, a bright, quick thing behind his ribs that made the world too loud and too small at once. Days that had been steady lines now unspooled into jagged possibilities; every crowd felt like prey, every shadow like a throat. He had tasted release at the farmer’s shed and it had opened something in him that was not remorse so much as relief. He had not expected the relief to feel like appetite.

They walked back into the piazza like four men who had rehearsed a converging silence. Will, the slowness soft on his face; Hannibal, the attentive hunger of an aesthete finally given a canvas; Dexter, the quiet cage that had been leaned open and then closed again; and Spencer, whose hands would not stop moving, as if to will the fire down.

“Do you feel it?” Will asked without asking, his tone threaded with the afterglow of what he and Hannibal had shared. There was no accusation in it, only inventory.

Spencer nodded. His breath hitched. “It’s like I’m new to my mouth,” he said. “Like the words don’t fit anymore.”

Dexter watched him with that diagnostic calm that in other circumstances came across as compassion. Tonight it was something fiercer: a man learning, from scratch, how to hold a thing that might destroy him. He stepped closer to Spencer and laid a hand on his forearm. It was a small, practical touch — steadying, rooted in the same muscle memory that had kept him alive. “It’s a hunger,” he said. “Hunger has rules. You make the rules.”

Hannibal’s smile was not unkind. It was the smile of someone who had spent a lifetime refining appetite into ritual. “Rules are the difference between savagery and ceremony,” he said. “We could do without rules and become noise. Or we could make something that means.”

“Meaning,” Will echoed, as if tasting the word for the first time in a long time. “We are not here to become a spectacle. Not unless the spectacle itself is a work of art.” He rubbed his thumb across his palm, a small, private habit. “Venice is a fragile stage.”

Spencer’s laugh came out small and raw. “Fragile. Of course. You two want art at the end of everything.” He barked a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. “I don’t care about art. I care about the ache.” The confession landed with a blunt honesty that had no room for ceremony.

Dexter’s eyes lingered on Spencer’s face, trying to map the new geography of appetite there. “Art doesn’t feed the ache,” he said quietly, “but it gives it shape. Sometimes that’s enough to stop it from tearing us open.” He saw how little meaning that might hold for a man newly unbound, and still — he offered the idea because it felt like something he could provide: structure. He had lived by rules his whole life; he could give one to Spencer and not lie.

Hannibal’s fingers found Will’s, and they both looked at the younger men as if at a well-composed still life. “We do not conflate ways of feeding,” he said. “We acknowledge them. To call them art is not to beautify the wound but to understand its place.” There was a tenderness under his words, a savoring that was almost, on the best of days, reverent. “You feed your hunger, Dexter, in private and with rules. We do so in other ways. That does not make either method less true.”

Spencer’s hunger prodded him forward, a blunt insistence. “When will it feel less like a knife in me?” he asked. He did not look away; he wanted them to see the ache. “When does this stop being novelty and become something I can live with?”

Will’s response was quiet, and it reached into the part of Spencer that had always been shaped by words and lecture halls. “It becomes part of you when you own it,” he said. “Not when you hide it, not when you explain it away, but when you put it inside your life and say, ‘This is mine, and so are the consequences.’” He reached out, head tilted, and for a moment the piazza was all small gestures and the clack of the city around them. “Owning it doesn’t mean absence of cost.”

Dexter’s voice was a steadier instrument. “Owning it also means rules. If you let hunger run, it will not quiet. It will ask for more.” He watched Spencer carefully, because the last thing he wanted was to be a tutor to someone who would become a mirror of himself. He had tried that and failed, and the failure had cost him everything. “Make rules with us,” he said. “Not to cage you — to keep the parts of you that still work.”

Spencer wanted to bristle at the phrasing. He wanted to be defiant. Instead, he surprised himself by answering almost too quickly. “I don’t want their theatre,” he said, meaning the tourist cameras, the stage. “But I don’t want to be a coward either.”

Hannibal’s hands moved — slowly, not a flourish but a shaping of air — as he considered the balance of wants. “We can make something that speaks. Not to the crowd, but to those who read between lines.” He had already imagined the shape of meaning: halves, mirror, bone, verse. “We can make a thing that will be felt rather than gawked at.” There was the faint twitch of a plan, and with it the authority that always seemed to find him.

Will caught Hannibal’s meaning with a nod. “Something private, but legible,” he agreed. “An offering that is read as an argument, not a carnival.”

Spencer listened, the hunger inside of him mutating into something like purpose. “If I’m going to do this,” he said slowly, each syllable careful as a step across a wet stone, “I don’t want to be an accessory to someone else’s art. I want to do the thing that will make the ache quiet.” He surprised himself by adding, in a voice small enough for only Dexter to hear, “Not to be loved for it. Just to be forgiven by myself.”

Dexter met his eyes, and for a moment the island between them shrank. He did not promise absolution; he could not. He had learned the cruelty of promises. But he could promise something else — presence. “You will have me there,” he said. “I will be with you. Not to make it pretty, not to make it right, but to keep us both from splintering.”

Will watched, his expression open, neither judgmental nor wholly approving. “You will not be alone,” he said. “And we will not perform for the city.”

Hannibal’s smile was a private thing shared with people who understood the grammar of hunger. “Let us make a language that teaches them to look,” he murmured. “Not to the spectacle, but to the significance. If we must feed, then let the feeding have a grammar.”

Spencer’s mouth twisted into something between a sneer and a smile. It was relief, and fear, and a dawning idea of belonging. “Then teach me the grammar,” he said. “Teach me how to move without being moved.”

Dexter’s hand closed around Spencer’s shoulder, a firm, uncomplicated weight. “We teach you rules,” he said. “You teach us what it is to be less alone with the thing.” It was not heroic. It was not poetry. It was a trade: hunger for steadiness.

Hannibal’s eyes glittered. There was no moralizing in them this night—only attention paid to texture. “And I will compose,” he promised softly. “Not a spectacle. A structure. A commentary. Something that will sit in a mind like an ache finally named.”

Will took Hannibal’s hand, letting it rest there as if the contact itself were a vow. “We move at dusk,” he said. “We will not announce. We will leave language for those whose work it is to read it.”

Spencer swallowed. The hunger thinned from a roar to a steady hum; it had not gone away, but it had been steadied into something he could hold. It would not be easy. It would not be clean. But here, in the plaza, between men who had become a small, dangerous family, it felt possible that the ache could be translated into something that left less wreckage behind them than had been left in their wake.

Around them, Venice went on: gondoliers funked by with late-river reeds, tourists argued about maps, pigeons threaded their small quarrels. In the little private gravity of the four men, plans formed as a map of ethics rather than instruction, promises made not to the public but to one another.

“Teach me to be less alone with it,” Spencer said again, softer now.

“You already aren’t,” Will answered, and the words had the steadiness of a man who had once thought himself forever broken and then had been tended back together.

Dexter did not say more. He slid an arm along Spencer’s back in a way that was both practical and intimate. Hannibal watched the exchange with a contented gravity, the artist not for theater but for containment.

That night, they would decide details that did not need to be spoken in the piazza. They would refine the grammar of their compact — private, constrained, sacramental. They would mark lines that none would cross and promises that none would break: no spectacle, no needless harm to innocents, privacy for what followed.

Spencer’s hunger would be fed — not erased — and the appetite would teach them new compensation: rules as ritual, ritual as marrow. In the delicate architecture of that agreement, the four men shaped themselves into something like a coven and something like a household, breathing in opposite directions but at least breathing together.

They came in small, furtive pieces rather than a single triumphant wave — because that was how the team had learned to move when the world had grown raw and dangerous. The plane from Rome folded them down into Venice under a low, heat-stung sky; when they spilled from the terminal into the crushed, old-city light, each face carried the pressure of the last weeks: the crucifix in the church, the fountain with ink-black water, the syringe, the escape, Avezzano. Nothing here felt like relief. It felt like the other side of waiting.

Hotch walked with the measured, careful gait of someone who had kept himself tight in order to hold others. Rossi was right beside him, old hands already tucking and untucking the small comforts of a longtime traveler — a flask kept for himself, a story always in the pocket. Derek moved like a man who would rather act than talk; he kept scanning the crowd, not because he saw a threat but because he had trained himself to keep the body moving. Luke kept his focus steady, jaw tight, the weight of Reid’s absence hitting him harder than he let on, though his eyes tracked every corner of Venice with a soldier’s precision. JJ’s face was softer than it had been at the airport: exhausted, raw, grief threaded through with a stubborn calm. Emily walked with a practiced economy — focused, meticulous; Tara stayed close to Garcia, whose palms hovered over a laptop and a tangle of wires in the rented room that would become, for a while, their hub.

For once, the team did not run toward the hunt with naive certainty. They ran toward work that had already repelled sleep.

They met the Carabinieri at the quiet edge of a square. The liaison was competent and taut, as if it he too hadn’t slept. He had a file folder, a copy of the footage from Avezzano — not a how-to, just the bloody, small truth of four silhouettes on a platform and later on a train. The footage was a fact, not a verdict. It was what it was: a reason to be in Venice.

Hotch listened, the flat plane of his face not giving much away, and then he thanked the liaison in a quiet voice that asked for discretion. “We keep this closed,” he said. “No press. No rumor. We work with you, and we contain information to what’s necessary.” The man nodded; the necessary was the only thing that mattered now.

They set up, then, not a command post but a cluster of human hands that knew how to make meaning from small things: hotel rooms for the watchers, a plan to keep family informed quietly, a way to keep Harrison and Spencer’s godsons out of any chatter. They did not want strangers on the hunt; they did not want gossip. They wanted the kind of containment that protected the innocent and let them do the hard, ugly work without the theatre. That was Hotch’s insistence: protect the people who didn’t have to be in the war, and let them fight in the dark.

“In the meantime,” Rossi said, propping his elbows on the table and looking at the map of the city pinned to a placard, “we figure out how to read what they want to say.” He had the tired, comfortable cadence of a man who told stories to keep the dark from swallowing him. “Lecter and Graham love their symbolism. They always sign what they do, even when they try to hide it.”

“It’s not theatrics this time,” Emily said. “They’re being more careful. Less spectacle.” Her fingers tapped the lip of a coffee cup. “But they want the message read by people who know how to read it — not the tourists.”

JJ’s shoulders dropped a fraction. She folded her hands around her coffee like a lifeline. “They’re not just making statements about themselves,” she said. “They’re making statements about us. About the team.”

“And that’s the dangerous part,” Tara added. “If they want to provoke a reaction, get the city to look at something and read it the wrong way, people get hurt. Tourists, families. We don’t let that happen.”

Garcia pulled up the stills silently, her green-streaked hair a bright island in the low-lit room. She didn’t offer details — she couldn’t and wouldn’t — but her fingers danced and she said, “I can stitch their footprints. I can watch the places they touched. I can’t tell you what they’ll do next, but I can tell you this: they’re choosing places with history, with liturgy. They want readers, not policemen.”

Something in Derek’s face shifted; he’d been listening to the women for a long moment. He reached across to squeeze Garcia’s shoulder in a quiet thank you, half-awkward because Derek Morgan didn’t always know how to be small and tender, but he tried. “Good work,” he said. “Keep it quiet.”

Hotch put the plan simply: they would fan with restraint. They would work with the Italian authorities and they would do it without shouting; they would test nothing that would cause public panic; they would move quietly and always keep family out of the story. “We keep this small,” he said. “We keep it surgical in its focus — not in the method, but in the purpose. We find what we need and we come back.”

Rossi snorted softly. “Surgical, he says.” But his eyes, older, wetter, were fixed on the column of notes that listed the people at risk. names that were more like shadows than people. He tapped two of them with a pen. “We start there.”

They split like people who trusted each other more than the city they walked through. Derek and Rossi took the streets; Hotch and Emily went to meet liaisons; Luke and Garcia stayed to monitor cameras and talk to local contacts. Tara sat with JJ for a while, and for a moment the day felt unbearably ordinary: two friends sharing fearful, exhausted gossip over too-strong coffee. “How are the boys?” Tara asked, and the question was the small, human thread that made the rest of the day possible.

“Sleeping with a stuffed shark and convinced I left the kettle on,” JJ said, performing a tiny domesticity that cracked into real worry. “We send messages to keep them out of anything. We keep their world small and warm.”

The team moved through Venice with the same guarded tenderness they used on the job. Passageways smelled of sea and fried dough. A gondolier laughed at the idea of tourists pausing to look at altars no guidebook listed. Travelers eyed them sometimes — a patch of Americans standing in a piazza tended by Italian uniforms — but mostly the city moved on, its life and its small mercies untouched.

They found, bit by bit, the things left in a hurry and the things left deliberately. A field of pigeons spiralled away from a fountain, one leg lifted as though in protest. A small church door left slightly ajar. An empty shop with the scent of oil lamps and dust where someone had stacked crates and left in a rush. These were small observations, not evidence — and yet the team had learned to listen to them the way a priest might read a Bible.

Hotch convened them in a borrowed, plain room they used as a base: cheap chairs, a whiteboard, maps. The long low hum of the city filtered through the window. He listened to each voice and then folded their concerns into a plan that was less about fireworks and more about containment.

“We’ll move on the leads we have,” he said. “We’ll keep pressure on the liaison. We keep the city out of it publicly. We prepare for their animals — their taste for language. But we don’t answer language with spectacle.”

Rossi broke and then softened, his fingers thumping the map. “They like the sacrament and the stage. We know that. But they are—” He searched for the right word. “They’re intimate about it. They don’t want a crowd. We can use that. We don’t feed them sight lines.”

“You don’t feed them sight lines,” Derek repeated, and in the way he said it there was a history of doing wrong and wanting to do right. It landed between them like a promise.

JJ thought of Spencer — of the way a man could be two things at once — a teacher, a scholar, and now something else. The discovery of Dexter had already burned them. To add Spencer to the list of possible monsters felt like a physical ache. 

Emily’s voice broke, but she didn’t let it shatter. “We don’t want to lose him either,” she whispered, clutching the folder with trembling fingers. “But he killed that farmer. That wasn’t a fugitive covering tracks, that wasn’t a mission gone wrong. That was—” She faltered. “It was personal.”

Morgan shook his head hard, anger fighting grief. “That’s not Reid. That’s not our Reid.” But the denial sounded weaker than he wanted. His fists curled tight, his shoulders rigid. “He’s not some random butcher. Somebody’s twisting him. Has to be.”

Tara leaned forward, eyes steady and dark. “Denial won’t change the evidence. The farmer was restrained, his injuries showed rage. Spencer’s DNA was under his fingernails. That wasn’t Lecter’s hand, or Graham’s. That was Spencer.”

The words sat heavy. No one wanted to say it, but silence had no mercy.

Emily finally spoke, her voice thin but firm. “We’ve lost people before. But Spencer… Spencer’s different. We built this team with him. And if he’s falling—if they’ve broken him—then what we’re facing isn’t just another unsub. It’s family.”

The word family left the air raw.

Hotch’s voice cut in at last, quiet but unyielding. “We don’t get to look away. Reid killed that man. That is the truth we carry now. The question isn’t whether he’s guilty. It’s what we’re going to do when we find him.”

The team froze, struck by the sharpness of it.

JJ shook her head, tears bright in her eyes. “You’re saying we might have to—” She couldn’t finish.

Hotch’s silence was an answer.

Morgan slammed his fist into the table. “Damn it, Hotch, that’s Reid! That’s our kid brother, that’s—” His voice cracked and he swallowed hard. “We save him. I don’t care what it takes, we save him.”

Emily’s gaze flicked between them. “Save him from Lecter and Graham, yes. But save him from himself? That’s not something we’ve ever had to do before.”

Tara leaned back, exhaling slow, her tone sharp with precision. “We’re not talking about innocence anymore. We’re talking about containment. About whether his loyalty to us can survive what he’s becoming.”

No one answered immediately. The only sound was Garcia’s fingers tapping nervously against her laptop casing, the rhythm unsteady. She whispered, “He still loves us. I know he does. That has to mean something.”

But in the silence that followed, each of them felt the same hollow truth: love didn’t erase what Spencer had done.

Night had thickened in Venice, the canals carrying light like veins of molten glass. The four of them didn’t walk together — not in a way that looked coordinated. Hannibal drifted first, his eyes combing the crowds of tourists spilling out of trattorias, pausing at bridges. He took in shoes, posture, the offhand gesture of a man waving away a beggar. His kind of prey revealed themselves quickly: the arrogant, the dismissive, those who wore power in the small cruelties they thought invisible.

Will lingered at the edges of those same crowds, but his gaze was less selective, more restless. His type was not type at all: any pulse that intersected with his need. Innocence had never been an obstacle. He could feel himself tightening whenever a body brushed too close, whenever laughter rang just a little too freely. His eyes darted to stone, to water — places where flesh could be displayed, where silence would bloom afterward.

Spencer kept pace with Dexter, deliberately close. He tried not to stare too long, but every time his gaze caught a banker’s sneer, or a politician’s swagger in a tailored suit, he felt it — that prickle down his spine, the urge to lunge, to erase arrogance. But it wasn’t a clean code. Not yet. The farmer’s face still lived in his memory: the man had been nothing but terrified. Innocent. And Spencer had still crushed the life out of him.

Dexter noticed the hesitation. He leaned closer, his voice pitched low, for Spencer alone. “You can’t keep doing that.”

Spencer’s brow knit. “Doing what?”

Dexter’s eyes tracked a couple on the opposite bank, the man shoving his partner’s arm too roughly. “Killing the wrong ones. The farmer? He didn’t fit what you told me in the basement. No power. No cruelty. Just a man. Innocent.”

Spencer’s jaw worked. He wanted to argue, but the memory of the knife, the man’s gasping breath, silenced him. “It was impulse. I couldn’t stop it.”

“That’s the point,” Dexter said, voice hard. “Impulse will eat you alive if you let it. You need a code. Otherwise, you’re no better than them.” He tilted his chin toward Hannibal and Will, who had paused just ahead, speaking in low tones, eyes glittering as they watched a wealthy tourist berating a gondolier. “They don’t care about innocence. They don’t care about guilt. They care about the performance.”

Spencer swallowed. “And you want me to be different.”

“I want you to be better,” Dexter corrected. “You have a choice. You can kill with purpose. With reason. That’s how you stay alive in this.” His hand brushed briefly against Spencer’s arm — not affection, but urgency. “I don’t want you turning into them.”

Spencer followed Dexter’s gaze again. Hannibal’s lips curved as he murmured something to Will, who laughed softly, eyes never leaving the man shouting at the gondolier. The predators in them were already alive, already choosing.

Dexter’s voice dropped further, almost a growl. “If I could, I’d make them follow Harry’s code too. But I can’t leash them. I can only hope you’ll leash yourself.”

Spencer didn’t answer right away. The water lapped against stone, muffling the city’s hum. His chest rose and fell, his pulse racing with both agreement and defiance. At last, his lips pressed into a thin line. “Maybe I don’t want a leash.”

Dexter’s eyes darkened, but he didn’t argue. He just watched Spencer with something between pride and dread.

Ahead of them, Hannibal lifted his chin — a small signal. Their prey had been chosen. That was all it took: they fanned out without speaking, each predator stepping into their own orbit.

Hannibal moved first. The wealthy tourist who had shouted at the gondolier now swaggered alone toward a side canal, muttering into his phone. Hannibal’s shadow stretched behind him, unhurried, patient. He would not rush; art was never rushed.

Will’s attention snagged on a young man staggering from a bar, drunk enough to lose the group he’d come with. His laughter echoed too loudly through the night, his unsteady steps leading him into alleys that swallowed sound. Will followed close, the darkness behind his eyes blooming with possibility.

Spencer lingered, fingers twitching at his side, until his gaze landed on a man in a suit pressing too close to a young woman by the docks. She pulled her arm free and hurried off, but he stayed, adjusting his tie, smirking at his reflection in a café window. Spencer’s lips tightened. Power. Arrogance. The kind of man who treated people as disposable. His pulse thrummed. This one would do.

Dexter should have chosen his own prey — instinct demanded it — but Venice was not Miami. There were no case files to pore over, no quiet hours to hunt through databases. Here, the city’s predators didn’t wear signs he could read in a glance. And so, without telling Hannibal or Will, Dexter shifted course. Tonight, he would help Spencer. Tonight, his hands would steady another’s kill.

For a heartbeat, the quartet was scattered — each hunting alone, four threads through the labyrinth of Venice.

Then Spencer faltered. His mark turned, eyes meeting his just a second too long, suspicion rising. Spencer’s hand brushed the knife hidden in his jacket, panic rising with exhilaration. Before he could move, Dexter’s presence was there, steadying, his voice low and sharp in the dark.

“Now,” Dexter murmured, barely audible. “Don’t hesitate. He deserves it.”

Spencer’s breath caught. The man had turned, suspicion narrowing his eyes. Spencer’s hand hovered near his pocket — not the knife, not here in the open, but a syringe Dexter had given him earlier, bought from a dealer in an alleyway. His pulse pounded in his ears as he stepped forward, voice steady in a way that surprised even him.

“Scusi,” he said, the accent stiff but passable. The man paused, just long enough for Spencer to close the distance and press the needle in under his jacket sleeve. The plunger depressed. His smirk faltered into confusion, then slackened into nothing. Dexter caught the weight of the body before it slumped too loudly against the stone.

“Good,” Dexter whispered, pride edged with something almost tender. “Now we move him.”

Across the water, Will stalked his own prey. The drunk had stumbled into a deserted arcade, shadows swallowing his laughter. Will’s steps were measured, silent, almost reverent. The man turned, about to speak, but Will was already there, his hand clamping over his mouth, the blade sliding up under his ribs in one smooth, practiced motion. The man’s eyes widened, shock more than pain, before Will eased him down into silence. No struggle, no sound — just the dark taking him.

Hannibal’s quarry proved just as compliant. He followed the wealthy tourist down a narrow passage, murmuring a single word — “Signore” — as he brushed close. The man turned, irritated, but Hannibal’s hand was already at his arm, the needle slipping in with a surgeon’s precision. His fury dissolved into weakness, and Hannibal eased him into the crook of the wall as though they were old friends bidding goodnight.

One by one, the unconscious men were gathered, pulled into the deeper dark of the city — not the stage of the piazza, not yet. Venice had corners few tourists wandered, and the quartet knew how to find them. A disused boathouse by the canal, its doors rotted and its windows blind with dust, swallowed their victims whole.

Inside, the smell of mildew and stagnant water curled in the air. Shadows licked the walls as they laid the men down, side by side.

Hannibal’s gaze lingered on Spencer’s victim first, then slid toward Dexter. His brow arched, voice quiet but edged.

“You did not choose.”

Will straightened, eyes narrowing, the echo of blood still fresh in his throat. “You let him carry the weight for you. That was his kill, not yours.”

Dexter held their stares, jaw tight. “He needed it more than I did.”

“That is not the point,” Hannibal said, each syllable measured. “We hunt as individuals, not as shadows. To refuse your own quarry is to refuse the truth of what you are.”

Spencer stiffened beside him, but Dexter didn’t waver. His voice was low, almost a growl.

“My truth is mine to measure. Spencer needed to know it wasn’t a fluke, that the farmer wasn’t just chaos. He needed this one.”

For a moment, silence pressed in — the water lapping faintly against the boathouse wall, the city’s heartbeat distant beyond.

Then Will tilted his head, eyes catching the faint light. “Next time, Dexter, there won’t be excuses. You hunt. You kill. Or you admit you’re weaker than the rest of us.”

Dexter’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite defiance. “I’ve killed more than all of you combined. Don’t mistake choice for weakness.”

Hannibal’s eyes gleamed, a faint hum of amusement breaking through his disapproval. But the reprimand remained, hanging in the air, undeniable.

Dexter’s jaw was still set when Spencer shifted beside him, arms folded, his voice cutting through the tension like glass dragged across stone.

“Maybe you two should be grateful he isn’t sloppy,” Spencer said, tone dry. “Not every kill has to be a performance piece.”

Will’s eyes flicked toward him, sharp, but Spencer didn’t flinch. He added, almost idly, “At least someone here knows when to pass the ball.”

The sarcasm hung, thin but unmistakable, before Hannibal’s mouth curved in the faintest smirk. He let it die there, turning instead to the work at hand.

The air inside the boathouse was damp, sweet with mildew, the shadows deep enough to drown sound. Hannibal’s chosen prey knelt first — the banker dragged forward with the efficiency of a surgeon laying a body on a table. Hannibal’s blade flashed once, bright as glass in the gloom, then pressed into the man’s throat. No frenzy, no hesitation. Just a single, perfect cut, shallow at first, widening, widening, until the banker’s insult and arrogance bubbled into silence. Hannibal held the man upright as though presenting him to an unseen audience. His eyes shone in the half-light, delight not in the gore but in the symmetry, the way blood painted a new collar over expensive cloth.

Beside him, Will’s victim fought louder. The drunk tourist had stumbled, tried to laugh it off, but Will’s hand gripped the back of his neck and slammed him against a beam. The sound cracked through the damp air, final, crude. Will pressed his weight down, face close, teeth clenched as he drove the knife through the tourist’s sternum with a force born more of rage than elegance. The man sagged, twitching, Will carving the body open not as a surgeon but as an artist trying to tear meaning from chaos. He left him sprawled where he fell, the knife driven so deep the hilt kissed bone.

Then came Spencer’s prey — the man who had lingered too long over a girl who didn’t want him. Spencer’s hands shook at first. He glanced at Dexter, who only placed a steadying hand on his shoulder and whispered, “Do it.” No command, no code recited — just permission.

Spencer’s hands were not clumsy for long. The first slip of the blade—an instinctive, uncertain lunge—gave way to something harder and clearer. The man beneath him thrashed, eyes wild; his mouth bled through the gag, a wet, obscene sound that seemed to sharpen Spencer’s focus rather than alarm him. Spencer imagined, as he’d told Dexter in the basement, the small cruelties that fed his contempt: a man who reached, shoved, laughed at a woman’s discomfort; a man who treated young boys as toys to be pried and handled. A flash of a memory—some imagined version of JJ or Derek smaller, frightened—flattened him with purpose.

He worked like someone learning to speak in another tongue. The knife found the seam beneath the ribs and he pushed, hard, not thinking of calculus or diagrams but only of the warm give, the way life surrenders when you insist. The victim’s hands scrabbled at Spencer’s jacket, found purchase on forearm and throat. For a breath, the room was all scrape and thud and the smell of iron.

Then the hands went for Spencer’s face, frantic, claws raking the cheeks. Instinct took over in a way that surprised even Spencer—an animal, a child, a man who had kept his muzzle on for forty years and suddenly discovered his teeth. He clamped down, not on flesh but on the man’s hand when it drove toward his mouth; his teeth found muscle and bone and leather and tore. It was obscene and intimate both: the flood of copper warmed his mouth, slick and raw; the taste of it made something inside him steady, made his vision narrow to a single bright center.

The man’s screams turned wet and strangled as Spencer’s other hand closed on the throat. He felt the pulse through the thin flesh and tightened, fingers digging until the rhythm thinned and then stuttered. He did not hear the last thump as a distinct sound so much as a cessation of everything else—the city, the night, the tide of light. When the body slackened beneath his weight, Spencer stayed bent over him, breathing hard, the man’s blood still wet on his lips. He tasted it, and the guilt that should have come was diluted by a hungry, terrible clarity: the world had rearranged itself along a line he had drawn with his own hands.

Dexter’s hand found the back of Spencer’s neck then, not to steady a weapon but to steady the man. He smelled of iron and sweat and the damp boathouse; his pulse was like a small engine under the ribs. “Yours,” Dexter said again, softer this time, not as instruction but as confirmation. “You made it yours.”

Spencer laughed then—a short, disbelieving sound that could have been tears. He wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand and left a red smear there, like a careless signature. For a wild second, he thought of Lecter’s patient touch and Will’s easier violence together and understood the thing Dexter had said in a new light: this was not only killing. It was choosing yourself into being.

Hannibal watched with the same cold appreciation that had attended the rest of the night. He’d always loved the anatomy of a moment, the way motive and motion and consequence braided into a single image. Here, in the damp dark, it was a study in emergence. He moved to the nearest body with the care of a curator: a feather-light touch at the collar, a test of the stare. Will, dusting blood from his knuckles, stepped over to the tourist he had dispatched—still half-rowed on the beam where he’d fallen—and gave a single, succinct shake of his head as if confirming the composition’s balance.

“Now comes the arrangement,” Hannibal said again, and it was less instruction than the naming of a ritual.

They worked quietly, efficiently. Hannibal directed—gentle gestures, an index finger here, a tilt of the head there. Will, larger and rougher-handed, obeyed with the same kind of precision he used at a crime scene, the muscle memory of a man who’d been in violent places for a long time. Dexter moved between them like a steadying presence, observing, intervening only when requested.

Spencer, still raw and trembling, followed a few steps behind, watching his own work with a stunned, brutal relish.

Hannibal arranged his banker first: cuff-link aligned, tie cut and fanned out like a collar of blood; one hand carefully placed as if to hold an invisible ledger. He pinched the lip of the man’s coat so that the dark bloom of blood traced a high collar, a grotesque parody of a necktie. The banker’s expensive shoes were positioned to point inward, as if the man had been turned toward his own sin.

Will’s tableau was less composed but no less intentional. The drunk tourist was sprawled as if tripped by life itself, limbs splayed at awkward, human angles. Will positioned the body so the water that found and glossed the floor pooled against the tourist’s cheek—a mirror to the city, a stupid laugh drowned in stillness. There was violence in the placement, a refusal of the polished; Will wanted the shock of recognition more than the symmetry of a painting.

When it came to Spencer’s work, Hannibal and Dexter combined to frame it. They wanted the story to be legible. Spencer’s victim, the man who’d reached too long and laughed too loud at another’s discomfort, was propped with the same cold mercy Hannibal afforded all his pieces—hands bound like a supplicant, head tipped, mouth open, an expression caught between embarrassment and defiance. But here Hannibal added something small and theatrical: a scrap of cloth in the victim’s hand, a token of the moment he’d been held in power. A single, humiliating relic to explain why this body had been taken.

Spencer, breathing hard, examined what they had done. He saw himself—no, he saw the person he was when he’d bitten and strangled—reflected back with the deliberate excess Hannibal favored. It wasn’t art in the prettiest sense. It was a language. He felt it like a hand closing into place.

When the bodies lay in their tableau, Hannibal lit nothing and said nothing. He only stepped back and allowed the composition to be what it was: a sentence in their shared grammar. Will’s smile was thin and terrible. Dexter’s face was instructive in its neutrality, though the light in his eyes softened when he looked at Spencer. Spencer’s hands were stained; his mouth tasted of iron and something like victory.

“No one will ever look at this and miss the message,” Will murmured, low as the tide.

Hannibal inclined his head the smallest fraction. “We give them meaning,” he said. “They will try to read our motives and find only mirrors.”

They left as quietly as they had come, the boathouse swallowing their footprints. Outside, Venice pulsed and breathed, indifferent until someone else found their work. For the moment the city slept, ignorant of the performance arranged in its darker corner. The quartet walked out into the night as four men bound by a shape they had carved with their own hands—equal parts fellowship and covenant, and a new, dangerous intimacy that no law could untie.

The others slept, or pretended to. Venice’s night hum seeped through the shuttered windows, carrying water and distant voices. Dexter lay on his back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling beams. He knew the shape of this quiet: it was the waiting room where Harry always came to find him.

And, sure enough, the scrape of shoes on old wood. Harry leaned against the far wall, hands in his pockets, wearing the same weary half-smile he always wore when he came to scold and guide at once.

“I’m glad you didn’t kill anyone tonight,” Harry said without preamble. His voice carried the same measured cadence it always had. “Because let’s be honest, Dex—an impulsive kill, one picked in a handful of minutes, rarely respects the Code.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. He remembered Hannibal’s quiet precision, Will’s savage grace, Spencer’s raw hunger. And himself—watching, choosing not to step forward. “You think I hesitated because I was afraid?”

Harry shook his head. “Not fear. Discipline. You know the difference. Will picked his drunk because it was convenient. There was no proof he deserved it. Hannibal’s banker? Maybe. Rude, cruel, pompous—probably fit his rules. But we don’t know. Not enough for the Code.”

Dexter turned onto his side, as if that could angle him away from Harry’s words. But they landed anyway, sharp and exact. He had felt it, too—the hollowness of their choices, the slippage between ritual and impulse.

Harry stepped closer, his voice dropping, quiet but firm. “I know you still want Hannibal and Will on your table. Don’t deny it. That hasn’t gone away. You saw them tonight—artistry, spectacle, arrogance. And you know what it means, deep down. They don’t care about lines, Dexter. They never did.”

Dexter exhaled through his nose, slow. A flicker of memory: the neat plastic, the clean slides, the order of it all. The way Hannibal had smiled, as if carnage was a symphony.

Harry’s gaze softened, though his voice did not. “But I’ll tell you this—I liked Spencer’s choice. A rapist. An abuser. That was the Code, Dexter. Clear and ugly. The way he executed it—” Harry grimaced. “A bit on the nose, a little wild, but the intent? Right. He saw the sickness. He chose correctly.”

Dexter closed his eyes. He could still taste blood in the air, hear Spencer’s ragged laugh, see the smear of red across his mouth.

“He’s new,” Dexter said at last. His voice was low, almost a whisper. “New to this hunger. But he’s learning.”

Harry gave a small, almost reluctant nod. “Maybe. Just remember, Dex—the Code was built to keep you alive. Don’t forget it now, not when you’re surrounded by men who don’t give a damn about it.”

Dexter opened his eyes again, and the space was empty. Only the beams above, only the water beyond the walls. But Harry’s words stayed, a counterweight in the dark, heavier than the night itself.

His body was cooling already, the air thick with the metallic ghost of blood. Spencer’s chest heaved, every muscle singing with the aftershock of exertion. His lips were slick, jaw aching where his teeth had torn. For one hollow second, the silence was absolute.

Then—

Cat Adams leaned against the far wall.

Her arms were folded, eyes glittering, smile sharp enough to cut. She looked exactly as she had in prison, hair neat, lipstick perfect, like she had been waiting for him all this time.

“Well, well,” she drawled, her voice low, teasing, and unmerciful. “You finally stopped playing dress-up.” She tilted her head, watching him like a cat with a bird pinned beneath its paw. “Do you taste it, Spencer? The truth? You’re not pretending anymore.”

Spencer swallowed hard, but the blood still coated his tongue. His body wanted to flinch, to deny her—but he didn’t. Not this time.

Cat’s smile widened, knowing, dangerous. “I told you once—you and me, we’re the same. You bit me with your words in prison. Now look at you. You bit for real. You belong here.”

Spencer’s breath hitched, but he met her gaze. He didn’t argue. He didn’t say no. The silence between them was answer enough.

Cat pushed off the wall, stepping closer until she could have touched him. She didn’t—she didn’t need to. Her grin was bright, wicked. “Welcome home.”

And then, as sudden as she had come, she was gone—swallowed by shadow, leaving the air colder in her wake.

Spencer’s knees trembled. He pressed his hands against the damp floor, trying to steady himself. The blood on his mouth had dried sticky, a stain he could not wipe away.

And then—

Maeve knelt in front of him.

Not sharp, not cruel—soft, luminous, eyes heavy with sorrow. Her dress was pale, her hair loose around her face, as if she had just stepped out of memory.

“Spencer,” she said, her voice like a hand brushing his cheek. “I’m sorry it had to be this way.”

His throat burned. “You shouldn’t see me like this.”

“I’ve always seen you,” Maeve whispered. “Even when you couldn’t see yourself.” Her hands, light as air, seemed to settle over his bloody ones. “You don’t need to be sorry. Not to me. Not anymore.”

Tears threatened, but he blinked them back, jaw tightening. “I killed him.”

Maeve nodded, sadness in every line of her face—but no condemnation. “Yes. And you’ll kill again. And I’ll still know you. The whole of you. You don’t have to hide from me anymore.”

For a heartbeat, Spencer couldn’t breathe. The violence in his chest, the hunger in his blood—she was telling him it didn’t make him unworthy of love. That she still saw him. That she still loved him.

Her smile was fragile, almost breaking. “I forgive you, Spencer.”

The words cracked something inside him. He bowed his head, breath ragged, hands curling into fists against the stone. When he looked up again—Maeve was gone.

But the forgiveness lingered, like a blessing.

The damp warehouse stank of rot, of blood, of salt air and oil. Floodlights from the forensic team cut through the shadows, bleaching the horror into clinical detail.

Three bodies lay in tableau.

The banker was crucified on a rusted iron frame, arms spread in parody of devotion, his suit shredded to ribbons. The drunk tourist had been gutted and left sprawled like a grotesque offering, entrails fanned with deliberate precision across the damp floor. And the man Reid had chosen—his throat bruised from strangulation, his hand mangled by teeth—was posed kneeling, head forced down, as if bowing in shame before the others.

Hannibal’s brushstrokes were all over it. But the forensics told the story none of them wanted to read.

Garcia’s voice cracked as she read the report over comms, still fighting tears. “The DNA matches. Saliva, skin. The bite marks on victim three—clean alignment with Spencer’s dental records. And traces of Dexter Morgan’s DNA where the staging was done. Blood under his fingernails.”

The silence that followed was not grief. It was a weight of fury, disbelief pressed into rage.

JJ’s face twisted, her jaw tight as if holding back a scream. “He bit him. He tore into that man’s hand with his teeth.” Her voice shook, not from sadness but disgust. “Spencer. Our Spencer.”

Morgan turned away, fists slamming into a rusted support beam so hard the clang echoed. “I don’t give a damn if it was Hannibal’s idea. He chose to do it. He enjoyed it. You can see it in the scene.” His voice broke into a snarl. “He crossed the line. He’s not the victim anymore.”

Rossi’s face was stone, but his voice was low with bitterness. “We raised him. Trained him. Put our faith in him. And now we’re standing in front of proof he’s no different from the monsters we hunt.”

Hotch’s eyes swept the room, sharp and merciless. “We don’t get to soften this because it’s Reid. Anger, grief—it doesn’t matter. He killed. And now he’s part of their circle. We treat him as one of them.”

Emily’s arms were crossed so tightly her knuckles whitened. “Hannibal was always going to drag someone under. Will followed. Dexter was inevitable. But Spencer?” She exhaled sharply, almost a laugh of disbelief. “That’s betrayal. He knew what we stand for. He knew what we fight for. And he threw it away.”

Tara looked back at the bodies, at the obscene artistry of their arrangement. Her voice was quiet, cutting. “We have to face it. Spencer Reid isn’t waiting for us to save him. He’s waiting for us to catch him.”

Luke swore under his breath, shaking his head. “And when we do—don’t expect him to come quietly. Not anymore.”

The team stood there, bathed in the sterile light, surrounded by what was left of innocents twisted into art. None of them spoke of love. None of them spoke of hope.

Only the hunt.

And at its center, not just Lecter, not just Graham, not just Morgan—

but Spencer Reid.

The boathouse was not clean. That was the first thing Rossi noted, eyes narrowing as his flashlight swept across the slick floorboards.

“Not Dexter’s hand,” he said quietly. “He scrubs. He erases. He makes sure nothing points back.” His beam shifted left. “But look—Hannibal and Will don’t mind leaving the echoes.”

They followed the trail. In one corner, a smear of blood against warped planks marked where the banker had been brought down. The splatter was upward, deliberate—Rossi could see the angle of the blade as if it had been painted there. “Lecter,” Emily muttered. “Precise. Surgical. Almost smug.”

Across from it, by the collapsed doorframe, the stains were ragged, wild. A bottle shattered, glass ground into the wood. Pools too broad, splashes too high. Morgan crouched, jaw tight. “That’s Will. He wanted it messy. Wanted someone to feel it.”

Then, deeper in the shadows, they found the last corner. The floor was torn with scratches, gouges from boots. The wall bore the print of a palm dragged down in blood, streaking as it slipped. And near it, droplets where teeth had broken skin. Tara’s voice was low. “Reid’s. It has to be. He fought the man up close. No blade work like Hannibal’s, no scattering like Will’s. Just… hands. And teeth.”

Morgan’s flashlight cut over the wall, tracing the bloody handprint dragged downward, the deep scratches where boots had slid. “This… this wasn’t surgical. Wasn’t clean.” His jaw flexed. “This is rage.”

Emily crouched by the dark patches on the floorboards, her gloves hovering over the splatters. “There are stab marks—multiple, frantic. But that’s not what ended it. Look at the pooling here, the shape of the arcs. He strangled him. Held him down until he stopped moving.”

“Not just strangled.” Tara leaned closer, her voice quiet, clinical. “There’s evidence of biting. Teeth tearing through skin. See the spray? It’s not defensive from the victim—this came from someone forcing his mouth down.”

JJ flinched, arms tightening around herself. “Biting. That’s… that’s personal. It’s not just killing, it’s consuming space. Taking power.”

Rossi exhaled slowly, his face unreadable. “Hands and teeth. The most primitive weapons a man has. When someone abandons steel for skin and bone, it’s because the barrier is gone. No distance. No hesitation. It means Reid didn’t just want him dead—he wanted to feel it. Wanted to own it.”

Hotch’s gaze was hard, fixed on the handprint streaking the wall. “Reid chose intimacy. Strangling forces you to listen to every last breath. Biting—” He stopped, his silence heavier than words.

Morgan shook his head, his voice low, almost pleading. “That’s not the Reid we know. That’s not… no. That’s an animal. A cornered animal.”

“No,” Rossi countered sharply. “Not cornered. Decisive. He wanted it this way. The stabbing, anyone could do that. But the strangling? The bite? That was deliberate. He crossed to the other side and he didn’t flinch.”

Garcia turned away, tears in her eyes. “So we’re not just hunting him. We’re hunting what he’s become.”

Silence hung. JJ swallowed, her voice breaking when she spoke. “They didn’t let Dexter clean it. They wanted the story told.”

JJ’s eyes hardened. “Which means Dexter didn’t kill—but he let it happen. He stood there and watched. And when it came to Reid…” She shook her head. “He didn’t stop him.”

Hotch’s voice cut, flat and final. “This isn’t Dexter’s scene. He would never leave it like this. He would have fought them to keep it clean. Which means if it’s dirty—he chose not to fight them. Or he couldn’t.”

The lagoon licked against the stone, the water carrying the faint stink of salt and diesel. Spencer sat with his knees drawn up, long arms looped loosely around them, eyes cutting into the dark horizon. Dexter was beside him, leaning forward on his elbows, a shadow that was all coiled muscle and restraint. For a while, they let the quiet rule.

Then Spencer broke it. “In the piazza,” he murmured, almost too low to hear, “they said they wanted a meal.”

Dexter glanced at him. Spencer’s tone was flat, but his eyes sharpened like a scalpel.

“They didn’t eat,” Spencer went on. “Not the banker, not the tourist. They staged the bodies, yes, but Hannibal said—” Spencer closed his eyes, the words surfacing whole, eidetic. ‘We’ll have our meal soon.’” His gaze snapped back to Dexter. “They meant it.”

Dexter’s jaw flexed. He didn’t immediately answer. He stared at the water, knuckles pale against his knees.

“They’re not done,” Spencer pressed. “They’ll kill again. And this time, they’ll eat.”

“Cannibalism.” Dexter’s voice was flat, dangerous. “That isn’t feeding. That’s rot. That’s self-indulgence dressed as ritual.” His lip curled. “It’s worse than the kill itself.”

Spencer frowned. “Why? It’s just… another step.”

“No.” Dexter turned to him now, eyes sharp, words deliberate. “Killing can have rules. A line. It can be directed. Cannibalism is chaos. Consumption. That’s not control—it’s appetite.”

Spencer’s mouth twisted. “And strangling a man with your bare hands isn’t appetite?”

Dexter didn’t flinch, though Spencer could see the faint spark in his eyes. “It can be. But it doesn’t have to be. You killed him because he deserved it. Because he fit the crime.”

“And because I wanted to.” Spencer’s voice rose, edged with heat. “Don’t strip it down to your Code. You don’t get to rewrite what I felt.”

Dexter studied him, silent, letting the air stretch tight between them. Finally, he said quietly, “So what did you feel?”

Spencer’s throat worked. His fingers dug into his knees. “Power,” he said. “Release. I saw him—the way he put his hands on her, the way he smirked like no one could touch him. I saw JJ, I saw Derek when he was a kid, and I wanted him gone.” His breath caught, sharp. “And when I made it happen, it was like cutting through static. I saw myself clearly for the first time.”

Dexter tilted his head, eyes narrowing, not in judgment but in calculation. “And was that clarity… enough?”

Spencer gave a short, sharp laugh. “Enough? That’s your problem. You think it’s about filling a quota. Feeding some passenger so he stays quiet.” His gaze cut into Dexter’s like glass. “I don’t want quiet. I want truth. And maybe that truth doesn’t fit inside your neat little Code.”

Dexter’s lips curved, not quite a smile. “Truth without rules becomes hunger without end.”

“And rules without truth?” Spencer shot back. “That’s just another mask.”

The silence that followed wasn’t calm—it was tight, a wire stretched to snapping. Both men sat rigid, waiting to see if the other would break.

Then Dexter leaned back, eyes still locked on Spencer. “If Lecter and Graham keep killing without rules, without lines, they’ll end up on my table.”

Spencer didn’t flinch this time. “And if your Code ever gets in the way of what I need…” His eyes darkened, sharp, unblinking. “Maybe you’ll end up on mine.”

For a long moment, they just stared, the threat hanging between them like smoke.

Spencer was the first to shift. He leaned back against the damp wall, his eyes hooded, his voice almost too quiet to hear. “You know what I expected after it was done? Nightmares. Guilt. Screaming when I closed my eyes.” His head tipped against the stone. “Instead, I saw her. Maeve. Clearer than any dream I’ve ever had.”

Dexter’s gaze sharpened, the hard lines of suspicion easing for the first time. “Maeve,” he repeated, tasting the name.

Spencer nodded. “She didn’t accuse me. Didn’t recoil. She looked at me like she always did—gentle, patient, like I was more than just… this.” His throat worked. “And she told me she accepted it. All of it. Even the part I thought was unlovable.” He exhaled a laugh that broke halfway, bitter and disbelieving. “Maeve, the purest thing in my life, says she accepts me. And the people I thought were my family—my team—can’t. Won’t. They only see what I did. Not why. Not what it meant.”

The confession lingered, raw and trembling in the air.

Dexter didn’t answer at first. His jaw flexed, his eyes distant, like he was seeing something far older than either of them. Finally, he said, “Rita came to me.”

Spencer blinked, eyes narrowing slightly, as if unsure if he’d heard right.

“In that church.” Dexter’s voice was low, almost reverent. “I thought it was just another ghost—Harry or Brian, the same chorus of judgment I’ve heard all my life. But it wasn’t. It was Rita. Not angry. Not broken. She was… radiant. Like the Madonna herself.” His mouth twisted, not quite a smile, not quite pain. “And she blessed me. Told me to keep moving forward. That I wasn’t damned, not if I carried her with me.”

Spencer’s lips parted, a flicker of surprise chasing across his face.

Dexter went on, words heavier now, slower. “Harry’s voice is still there. Always. The code, the rules, the endless reminders of what I should and shouldn’t be. But Rita—she gave me permission. Forgiveness I didn’t deserve. She accepted me. Even after everything.”

He finally turned, meeting Spencer’s eyes full-on. There was no mask in his expression, no practiced restraint. Just the quiet gravity of a truth offered. “And I accept you.”

The words hit hard. Spencer froze, his breath shuddering out. The instinct was to argue, to laugh it off, to deny—but none of it came. Instead, he pressed a hand over his face, trying and failing to steady himself. When he finally lowered it, his eyes glistened with something that wasn’t weakness so much as unbearable weight.

“Acceptance,” he whispered, almost to himself. “The most impossible thing in the world. Maeve gave it. Rita gave it. And here we are—two killers, hiding in a city that isn’t ours, still desperate for something so small.”

Dexter’s mouth pulled taut, but there was no disagreement. “It’s small,” he said. “And it’s everything.”

Silence followed, heavy but not hostile. Just the ebb and flow of the water outside, the muted echoes of a city too alive to care.

Spencer leaned back, closing his eyes. His voice, when it came again, was softer, stripped bare. “Maybe this is all we get. Ghosts who love us. Each other. And the hunger.”

Dexter didn’t answer right away. His hand twitched once, as if he might reach out, but didn’t. Instead, his eyes stayed fixed on Spencer, steady and unwavering.

“Maybe,” he said.

And for once, neither of them needed more.

The city outside whispered with the shifting tide, the far-off laughter of tourists who would never know how close they had brushed with death. In the darkened room above the abandoned shops, Hannibal and Will had claimed their own silence — a silence not of mourning, but of triumph.

Hannibal still smelled faintly of blood, rich iron clinging to his cuffs where he had not yet bothered to clean. Will hadn’t asked him to. He liked it there. Proof of what they had done, proof of what they were.

“You’re glowing,” Will murmured, leaning back against the cracked plaster wall, chest still heaving.

Hannibal laughed — low, throaty, indulgent. “And you are alight.” His hand drifted up, fingers brushing Will’s throat where a bead of sweat slid down. He didn’t press. He didn’t need to. The weight of the gesture was enough.

There was no mask left between them. No courtroom civility, no polite civics, no prison glass. Only the raw animal satisfaction of two predators who had fed their hunger and found one another waiting on the other side.

Will tilted closer, his lips brushing Hannibal’s ear, his words sharp as they were tender. “Do you ever think,” he whispered, “that this is the only time we’re honest? Not in words. Not in plans. But here. After.”

Hannibal’s eyes softened, though the smile curving his lips was sharp as a blade. “It is when the world falls away. There is no need for masks when one is drenched in truth.” His mouth brushed Will’s temple, almost reverent, almost worshipful. “You are my truth.”

Will’s breath hitched, and for a heartbeat, he closed his eyes, letting the confession settle into him like wine spreading warmth through the blood. When he opened them again, they were burning blue, lit from within. “Then say it.”

Hannibal did not hesitate. His hand caught Will’s jaw, holding him steady, and his voice came rich and steady, a vow whispered into the night. “You are mine. As I am yours.”

The kiss that followed wasn’t frantic, not the desperate clash of mouths they’d once shared. It was slow, deliberate, a claiming sealed not with fire but with certainty. Their foreheads pressed together afterward, breaths mingling, the silence pulsing with everything they did not need to speak.

Below, the canal lapped quietly at the pilings. Venice cradled its tourists in their beds, the gondoliers curled in dreams. And in that shuttered room, Hannibal and Will lay twined together, high on blood and one another, the city none the wiser.

The light that seeped through the broken shutters was pale, thin as parchment. None of them looked rested, though only Hannibal betrayed pain with the stiffness of his movements.

Spencer dragged his hands down his face, not to rub sleep away but to hide from the eyes already on him. He could feel them—Will’s sharp, measuring gaze, Hannibal’s patient curiosity, and Dexter’s steady, relentless stare.

It was Dexter who broke the silence.

“You’ve got blood under your nails.”

Spencer glanced down. He had scrubbed at them until the skin stung, but the line of red was still there, deep and stubborn. He curled his fingers into fists. “So what?”

Dexter’s voice was quiet, not mocking. “So it means something. First blood always does. It decides who you are.”

Spencer’s mouth twisted. “You sound like you want me to regret it.”

“I want to know if you do.”

Spencer looked away, toward the shutters where light fractured against the wood. “I should,” he said after a long pause. His voice was too steady, too stripped of hesitation. “But I don’t. I felt… whole.”

Something flickered across Dexter’s face. Not satisfaction. Not horror. Something heavier. “That’s dangerous.”

Spencer’s head snapped back toward him. “Dangerous? You of all people—”

“I had time,” Dexter cut in. His tone sharpened, for the first time close to anger. “Years to build something that kept me alive. What you did last night wasn’t survival. It was instinct. You liked it because it was easy. Easy kills get you caught.”

Spencer bristled, voice sharp. “And you’d rather I wait? Starve? Pretend it isn’t in me until it rots me from the inside?”

Hannibal’s lips curved faintly, approving the fire in Spencer’s voice. Will, beside him, only tilted his head, watching as though the argument itself was a specimen under glass.

Dexter didn’t back down. He leaned forward, eyes fixed on Spencer. “If you follow me, you learn discipline. If you follow them, you learn indulgence. That’s your choice.”

Spencer’s laugh was bitter, cracked at the edges. “Choice? You think I have one left? My family will never look at me the same. They’ll never see me as anything but a monster.”

Dexter blinked, caught off guard.

Spencer met his eyes, unflinching now. “So maybe the only people who get to decide what I am are right here. Not them. Not anyone else.”

The room went still.

For a long moment, Dexter didn’t move, didn’t speak. Then, slowly, he said, “I’m the one who will still be standing when they’re gone. And if you don’t want to end up on someone’s plate, Spencer, you need to decide where you stand.”

Spencer’s lips curled into something between a smile and a snarl. “Maybe I already have.”

The silence that followed wasn’t peace. It was a blade pressed between them, waiting to cut.

Spencer broke it first. He drew in a breath, released it through clenched teeth, then pushed himself to his feet. His voice came clipped, the words almost too precise.

“And if… and if you excuse me, I would like to go eat something for breakfast.”

His eyes flicked deliberately toward Hannibal and Will—steady, sharp, pointed.

“Food. Not people.”

Then he turned, striding toward the cracked doorway that led into one of the palazzo’s ruined corridors, the sunlight striping the dust in pale gold.

Dexter rose a moment later, silent as a shadow, following him without a word. Hannibal’s gaze lingered after them, a faint tilt of his head betraying something between amusement and the stirrings of that old hunger. Will only laid a hand on his shoulder, grounding him in place.

Out in the corridor, the air smelled of plaster and the salt trace of the lagoon. Spencer leaned against the wall, pressing his palms into the flaking paint as though anchoring himself to something real. Dexter stopped a few feet away, hands loose at his sides, simply watching.

“You didn’t have to say it like that,” Dexter said at last, voice low but even. “They know what you meant.”

Spencer didn’t look at him right away. His throat worked once before he muttered, “Good. Then I don’t have to say it twice.”

For a moment, neither spoke. Dust motes hung between them like suspended time, the sound of the water faint below the stone.

The paper bag crackled between them, greasy and warm with the smell of sugar, butter, and coffee. They’d ducked into a narrow alley just off the Riva degli Schiavoni, pressed between two damp walls, out of sight of the passing morning crowds. Spencer had carried the bag, careful even with his still-tender shoulder, but Dexter had torn it from his hands the moment they stopped.

He was ravenous. The first croissant vanished in four bites. The second hardly lasted longer. By the time he was halfway through the third, the paper at his feet was already littered with flakes of pastry, torn napkins, and a half-drained cup of coffee.

Spencer leaned back against the wall, his own brioche untouched in one hand. He tilted his head, watching Dexter chew, his sharp gaze narrowing with every bite. There was something almost predatory in the way he observed — not the food, but Dexter himself.

“You restrained yourself last night,” Spencer said finally, his tone low but needling. “Held back, let me take the kill. So now it comes out like this—” his free hand gestured lazily to the mess at Dexter’s boots, “—pastries instead of blood. At least four before the sun’s up. What’s next? You drink the coffee like it’s plasma?”

Dexter’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t stop chewing. He licked sugar from his thumb deliberately before answering. “Better sugar than blood in broad daylight.”

Spencer smirked, biting into his brioche at last, slowly, almost mockingly. “So that’s your code now? Croissants by morning, corpses by night?” He leaned closer, his voice sharper now. “You looked so controlled when you let me do it, so calm. And now I see the truth. You’re starving. And pathetic.”

For a heartbeat Dexter said nothing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then leaned in too, close enough that Spencer caught the faint smell of coffee on his breath. His voice dropped low, not angry, not mocking — just flat, certain.

“You don’t get it yet. You’re not replacing anything. You’re transforming.” He pointed with two fingers to Spencer’s mouth, where a faint streak of jam stained the corner of his lip. “You’ve already crossed over. You’re a vampire now. And vampires don’t go back to pretending they’re human. They only move forward.”

The word landed heavy in the quiet.

Spencer’s smirk faltered, but he didn’t look away. He wiped his mouth with the edge of his sleeve, eyes narrowing. “A vampire who only kills with permission? That’s not much of a monster. That’s a leashed animal. Maybe that’s you, Dexter. Maybe I’m something else.”

Dexter’s mouth twitched, halfway to a smile, halfway to a snarl. “Careful. The leash keeps you alive long enough to learn what you are. Tear it off too soon, and you won’t last. The Code isn’t weakness — it’s survival. And you’re not strong enough yet to survive without it.”

Spencer barked out a laugh, bitter and sharp. “Stop repeating yourself! Not strong enough? You saw me last night. You saw what I did with my hands. With my teeth.” His gaze hardened, daring Dexter to contradict him. “That wasn’t weakness. That was power.”

Dexter didn’t flinch. He folded the empty bag, slow, deliberate, his eyes never leaving Spencer’s face. “It was power. Raw, ugly, unshaped power. But power without rules burns itself out. You’ll learn that. Or you’ll die with your mouth full of blood and nothing left but the taste of ash.”

Spencer exhaled through his nose, the faintest hint of a grin returning. He took another bite of his brioche, chewing as if to prove a point. When he swallowed, he said, quieter now: “Then teach me. If your Code keeps the fire alive longer… show me. Otherwise, don’t stand in my way.”

For a long moment, they stared at each other, the air between them thick with provocation and challenge. Neither backed down.

At last Dexter’s voice softened, barely more than a murmur. “A vampire with a code is still a vampire. But maybe it’s the only way to last.”

Spencer said nothing. He just wiped his fingers on a napkin, the faintest smear of jam and sugar mixing with the memory of blood.

“I gotta take a walk,” Dexter told Spencer, wiping his hands on the paper bag that had once held their breakfast. His tone was level, almost casual, but his eyes didn’t quite meet Spencer’s. “Normal walk. I’m not stalking anyone. Just… need to think.”

Spencer didn’t answer immediately. He just studied him, the faint suspicion in his gaze softened by a kind of understanding. Finally, he gave a small nod. “Don’t take too long.”

Dexter offered the ghost of a smile, then turned into the maze of Venice’s calli.

The city swelled around him — shutters clattering open, vendors setting out tables, church bells pealing somewhere far. He walked without aim, letting the noise blur into the quiet he carried inside.

Then a voice cut through, steady and familiar.

“Dexter.”

He froze. Not because the sound startled him, but because of the weight in the name. He turned, slowly.

David Rossi stood at the far end of the alley, hands loose at his sides. No weapon drawn. No rush of backup. Just him, squared in the morning light, his gaze steady and unflinching.

For a long moment, neither spoke. Tourists passed, a gondola slid by on the canal beside them, but here, in the narrow cut of the street, it was only the two of them.

“You’re not surprised,” Rossi said finally.

Dexter tilted his head, the barest concession to irony. “You’re good at your job.”

“And you’re still out here,” Rossi countered. His voice was even, but there was a weight beneath it — disappointment more than fury. “With Reid.”

Dexter’s expression didn’t shift, but something tautened in his jaw. “Spencer doesn’t need saving.”

“That’s not your call.”

“It’s not yours either,” Dexter returned, quiet but firm.

Rossi stepped closer, his shoes tapping lightly against the stone. Still no hand near his holster. Just his voice, his presence. “You really think you can keep him safe? Walking beside Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham?”

Dexter’s smile was thin, humorless. “Hannibal and Will are the danger. Not Spencer.”

“You’re wrong,” Rossi said. His tone carried no heat, just the gravity of a man who’d buried too many truths. “Spencer crossed his line. He killed two innocent men.”

For the first time, Dexter’s eyes flickered. Not denial. Not guilt. Calculation. “Spencer’s line isn’t yours. Or mine. Or anyone else’s. He’ll find his own.”

“And you?” Rossi pressed. “What’s your line, Dexter?”

A pause. Then Dexter’s mouth curved again, darker, steadier. “My line is keeping him alive.”

Rossi gave a humorless laugh, short and sharp. “That’s rich. The Bay Harbor Butcher playing guardian angel. You carve up hundreds of bodies, and now you’re Reid’s shield? You don’t see the hypocrisy?”

Dexter’s eyes flickered, but his expression stayed measured. “I never pretended to be a saint.”

“No,” Rossi said, voice low, deliberate. He stepped closer, until there were barely three strides between them. “But you pretended to be one of us. Pretended to be his colleague. His friend. You played normal long enough that he let you in.” Rossi’s jaw tightened. “Now you’re using that to keep him in hell with you.”

Dexter’s shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly. He didn’t blink. “I didn’t drag Spencer anywhere. He chose.”

“Chose?” Rossi snapped, the mask of calm slipping for just a breath. “He’s drowning. And you—” He jabbed a finger toward Dexter’s chest. “You’re handing him an anchor instead of pulling him out.”

Dexter’s voice dropped, softer but edged. “Anchors keep people steady. Without me, Hannibal and Will will break him. You know it.”

Rossi’s smile was bitter, mocking. “And what? You’ll be his savior? The Butcher turned bodyguard? That’s the story you’re selling yourself now?”

The silence stretched, broken only by the faint wash of water against stone. Dexter’s jaw worked once, tight, but his eyes stayed on Rossi’s, unflinching.

“You don’t get it,” Dexter said finally. “Spencer needs someone who understands. Someone who won’t recoil. That’s not you. That’s not your team. That’s me.”

Rossi studied him, breathing slow, steady, but his hands curled faintly at his sides. “You’re wrong about him. He was ours long before he was yours. And if you think you can keep him, Dexter…” Rossi leaned in, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. “…we’ll take him back.”

For the first time, something cracked in Dexter’s stillness. Not a smile, not a flinch — just the taut awareness of a predator recognizing another hunter in the room.

Neither moved. Neither yielded. The alley seemed to shrink around them, the weight of old stone pressing close, until a ripple of footsteps at the far end of the street broke the moment.

Dexter turned his head, just slightly, scanning the sound. When his gaze returned, Rossi was still there, watching, unreadable.

Dexter took one step back, then another. Controlled, deliberate. But his pulse thrummed hot beneath the mask. He hadn’t expected Rossi. Hadn’t expected this.

“Tell the others whatever you want,” Dexter said quietly, retreating into shadow. “But know this — Spencer’s alive because of me.”

Rossi’s head tilted, eyes narrowing. For a moment, he almost looked like he hadn’t heard correctly. Then, with a low rasp of disbelief, he asked, “You changed your morality… for him?”

The question hung between them like a blade.

Dexter’s jaw flexed once, the faintest tightening, before he spoke. “You think I ever had morality to begin with?” His voice was quiet, measured, almost clinical. “No. What I had was a code. My father’s code. Rules to keep me from being caught, from burning the whole world down. That’s not morality. That’s survival.”

Rossi didn’t move, didn’t blink.

Dexter took a step closer, the words spilling out slow, deliberate. “But Spencer… he makes me want to do more than survive. With him, I don’t need the lies. The mask. He sees what I am, and he doesn’t flinch.

He—” Dexter’s voice cut sharp for a second, as though admitting too much. He steadied it. “He deserves better than Hannibal’s theater and Will’s obsession. He deserves someone who can hold the darkness without turning it into a show.”

Rossi’s mouth curled into a bitter half-smile. “And that someone is you?”

Dexter didn’t falter. “Yes.”

The word was simple, flat, without flourish. But the way it landed, it was heavier than any plea.

Rossi let out a long breath through his nose, almost a scoff. “Jesus. The Butcher finds his conscience in the form of Spencer Reid. Who the hell would’ve bet on that?”

Dexter’s gaze sharpened, but he didn’t rise to the jab. Instead, he said, “You can’t protect him. Not from what’s inside him. You can drag him back to Quantico, lock him in a cell, call him a victim until you’re blue in the face. It won’t change what he is now. But I can keep him alive. I can keep him… whole.”

Rossi shook his head slowly, the disbelief shading toward something darker. “Or maybe you’ll just drag him down with you. And when you do, Dexter, don’t fool yourself—he’ll be gone, and it’ll be your hands around his throat, whether you mean it or not.”

Dexter’s face didn’t flicker. Not once. But under the still mask, tension coiled like wire ready to snap.

“Believe what you want,” he said finally, voice low, flat. “But don’t get in my way.”

Rossi didn’t move. “One more thing,” he said, almost conversational. “You keep saying ‘keep him alive’ like it’s a job. It isn’t. It’s a tell.” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve got a crush on him.”

A flicker—barely there—tightened Dexter’s mouth. “No.”

Rossi’s smile went thin. “That wasn’t a no. That was a reflex.”

“It’s not what you think,” Dexter replied, quieter now, the edges of control pulled taut. “I’m the only one who understands what he’s carrying.”

“Right,” Rossi said, nodding as if Dexter had just confirmed a hypothesis. “You understand him. You watch him. You walk him to breakfast. You change your patterns for him.” He tipped his head. “You’re halfway to poetry and you don’t even hear yourself.”

Dexter’s jaw worked once. “This isn’t romantic.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Rossi said dryly. “Until the day you make a choice you wouldn’t have made for anyone else.”

Silence pressed in. Footsteps echoed at the end of the alley; a gull screamed over the water. Dexter didn’t blink.

Rossi’s voice softened just a fraction, more dangerous for it. “That’s what scares me, Dexter. Not the Butcher I know. The man who just admitted he’ll bend for Spencer Reid.”

A beat. “You’re projecting,” Dexter said, but it lacked heat.

“And you’re staying,” Rossi countered, glancing at the cobbles between them. “If it weren’t true, you’d have walked away two minutes ago.”

That landed. Dexter shifted, the movement small, precise—like a blade returning to its sheath. “Tell yourself whatever helps you sleep,” he said, and this time he did turn, shouldering past a cluster of tourists without breaking stride.

Rossi watched him go, the faintest, satisfied crease at the corner of his mouth—provocation delivered, reaction observed. Then, under his breath, to no one but the morning air: “Got it.” He finally reached for his phone, eyes still on the far end of the alley where Dexter had vanished. “We’ve got contact,” he murmured. “And something better.” A beat. “Leverage.”

Rossi pushed through the press of tourists, weaving around rolling suitcases and cameras held high. His phone was at his ear, his voice low but quick, alive with the kind of sharp urgency the team hadn’t heard from him in a while.

“I made contact,” Rossi said, not bothering with preamble. “Face-to-face. Dexter Morgan. Broad daylight.”

On the other end, voices snapped to life. Hotch: “You what?” Emily, under her breath: “Christ.”

“I let him walk,” Rossi cut in before the storm could rise. “Listen to me. He said it himself—Reid is alive because of me. His words. More than once.” Rossi dodged a pair of tourists taking photos, muttering an apology without slowing. “He’s framing himself as Reid’s shield. Guardian. Whatever you want to call it.”

“You’re certain?” Tara’s voice, sharp, skeptical.

“He didn’t flinch,” Rossi pressed, almost exhilarated by the memory. “Didn’t deny it. When I pushed, he doubled down. Said nobody else understands Reid, only him. He’s changed his own rules around Reid. That’s not me reading between lines—that’s him handing it to me.”

For a moment, the line was quiet. Then JJ: “That’s not a partnership, that’s—” She broke off, swallowing hard.

“A dependency,” Rossi finished, his tone biting. “The Bay Harbor Butcher, the most rigid code you could imagine, and he’s bent it—for Reid. That’s our crack.”

Morgan’s voice came next, furious, heated: “So what, he’s decided he gets to own Reid now?”

“Call it what you want,” Rossi shot back, ducking into a side street to avoid a patrol. His voice stayed taut, driven. “But it means Morgan’s not untouchable anymore. He’s human when it comes to Reid. He’s weak.”

“Or dangerous,” Tara warned. “An obsession like that? It makes him volatile.”

“Both,” Rossi allowed, and there was an edge of satisfaction under his breath. “But it also makes him catchable. Because if Reid moves, he moves. If Reid falls, he falls.”

Hotch’s tone came flat, decisive: “Good. Get back to us. We move on this together.”

Rossi snapped the phone shut and shoved it into his pocket. His pulse was still hammering, not with fear but with a kind of dark exhilaration. For the first time in days, he felt like they weren’t just chasing shadows—they had a thread.

And all of it, he thought grimly, hung on Spencer Reid.

The crowd thinned as Dexter turned down a quieter lane, the sound of water lapping against stone carrying louder than the voices behind him. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders loose enough to look casual, but inside every muscle was tight.

Rossi’s words replayed in his head, sharp as a blade dragged over skin.

“Reid is alive because of me.”

He had said it. More than once. He had meant it. And Rossi hadn’t just heard it—he’d spun it, fed it back like bait.

“You’ve changed your morality for him? You bent the rules?”

And Dexter had as good as nodded. Because it was true.

Guardian. Dependency. Weak. The old man’s voice looped, too calm, too precise, picking him apart with every phrase. Rossi hadn’t needed a gun to make him sweat—he’d gone for something far worse. Truth.

God. Where’s Brian when I need him? The thought cut bitter and fast. Brian would’ve known what to say, how to twist it back, how to laugh in Rossi’s face until the man couldn’t tell if he’d won or lost. But no ghosts came this time. No brother, no father, no Rita. Only silence.

He exhaled slow, forcing himself to steady. The important thing: Rossi had seen him. The team knew he was moving, breathing, thinking. Which meant—he glanced up at the clouded slice of sky—Will and Hannibal would be forced to shelve their appetites. No theater tonight. No meal tomorrow. Not with the noose tightening.

That was a small victory, if you could call it that. At least it bought them time.

But what lodged deeper, what needled him in a place even darker than his code, was Rossi’s grin when he said it. The way he twisted the knife.

You bent the rules for him.

Dexter’s jaw flexed as he walked faster, weaving back toward the palazzo where the others waited. His thoughts circled like vultures.

He’d have to tell them. Spencer first, maybe—Spencer would need to hear it. Hannibal and Will, too, though their reaction would be colder, more calculating. The FBI wasn’t just close now. They were on them.

And Rossi’s voice, the damned provocation of it, wouldn’t stop echoing.

The Bay Harbor Butcher turns guardian…

And over it all, Rossi’s voice kept pressing.

“You’ve got a crush on him.”

The way the old profiler had said it—mocking, sharp, deliberate. A provocation meant to cut deeper than any threat could. Dexter had brushed it off in the moment, or tried to. But now, alone with nothing but water and stone, it replayed again and again, a whisper crawling under his skin.

Crush.

He almost laughed, but the sound snagged in his throat. A crush was for teenagers, for awkward glances and sweaty palms. Not for him. Not for someone who carved meaning out of blood. Not for someone who was supposed to have nothing left but the code.

And yet… Rossi hadn’t been wrong, not completely.

Spencer’s face rose in his mind unbidden—too pale, too sharp, eyes that burned like they saw everything and forgave nothing. The way his hands had closed around that man’s throat, steady and unrelenting. The blood on his lips when he bit down. Not weakness. Not innocence. Not someone to protect, though Dexter had said it—no, someone who was already on the same path. Someone who didn’t just understand the darkness but invited it.

Maybe Rossi had put the wrong word on it, but the tremor he’d pointed at—that was real.

Dexter shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, walking faster. He wasn’t used to this kind of noise in his own head.

Crush.

The palazzo loomed up ahead, its windows like blind eyes staring down at him. He slowed his steps, heartbeat measured, forcing his face back into calm. Inside, Spencer would be waiting. Inside, Hannibal and Will would already have returned from wherever they’d slipped away to.

And Dexter still hadn’t decided what to do with the truth Rossi had pressed into his hands.

He stopped at the threshold, exhaled once, and shut the thought down—just enough to step through.

“I ran into someone,” Dexter said, voice flat. “Rossi. Alone. Broad daylight.”

That drew Will’s attention immediately. His posture sharpened, shoulders straightening in a way that betrayed the tension beneath his controlled face. Hannibal tilted his head, as if to say, go on.

Dexter gave them the facts: the brush in the narrow street, Rossi’s careful tone, the cat-and-mouse rhythm of the exchange. He told them what Rossi wanted them to believe, how far the Bureau had come, how close the hunt pressed now.

But he kept the rest—the needle jab that still buzzed in his veins, the word Rossi had used that he hadn’t shaken off.

Spencer frowned. “Did he try to take you?”

Dexter shook his head. “No. No gun, no move. He wanted to measure me. See if I’d slip.”

Hannibal’s mouth curved, sharp and knowing. “And did you?”

“No,” Dexter answered, clipped.

Will’s gaze lingered. Too long, too steady. He saw it—the space between what Dexter had said and what he hadn’t. Will had lived in those silences himself; he could smell them on someone else.

But Dexter gave him nothing.

“Point is,” Dexter pressed, forcing control back into his tone, “they’re on us. Rossi’s words made that clear. They won’t wait. They’ll close in.”

Will’s eyes narrowed, still searching, still weighing. For a moment, Dexter thought he’d call him out, press the missing truth into the light. But instead, Will only said:

“Then we keep moving. No more wasted days.”

Spencer nodded, as if that ended it. Hannibal’s smile lingered, but his eyes flickered briefly toward Will, a silent exchange passing between them.

Dexter stayed standing, hands tight in his pockets. The lie by omission sat between his ribs like a blade, but he refused to pull it free.

Later, when Spencer drifted toward the window to look down at the canal and Hannibal busied himself with rearranging some salvaged supplies, Will caught Dexter’s arm as he passed. A subtle tug, enough to pull him a step aside, into the darker edge of the room.

“You’re holding something back,” Will said quietly. His voice wasn’t sharp, but low, steady, like a knife laid flat against the skin.

Dexter didn’t blink. “I told you the important part. Rossi knows we’re here. He knows I’m still with you. That’s all that matters.”

“That’s not all,” Will pressed. His gaze narrowed, searching the way he always did — as if he could crawl inside another man’s head and pick apart the shadows until something raw bled out.

Dexter breathed out slowly, forced himself to keep his face still. “He wanted to get under my skin. That’s what Rossi does. He needles, provokes. He said… I’ve changed my morality. For Spencer.”

Will studied him, unreadable for a long moment. “And did you?”

Dexter’s mouth curved faintly, but there was no humor in it. “Depends on how you define morality. My code hasn’t changed. I just… applied it differently.”

The silence stretched. Will tilted his head slightly, the way Hannibal sometimes did. “And that’s all?”

Dexter met his eyes, let the pause hang, then said flatly, “That’s all you need to know.”

For a heartbeat, Will looked like he might push — that he might peel Dexter open whether he wanted it or not. But then his expression shifted, cooled. “Half-truths don’t hold long, Dex. Remember that.”

Dexter inclined his head, unbothered on the surface though his chest was tight. “Neither do whole ones.”

Will left him there, stepping back into the light with Hannibal, while Dexter lingered in the shadows. The words Rossi had thrown at him still clung like burrs under his skin, unspoken, burning.

Spencer waited until Hannibal and Will were deep in one of their hushed, winding conversations near the far side of the palazzo room. The moment felt carved out of the noise — a pocket of privacy. He stepped closer to Dexter, lowering his voice.

“You saw Rossi today,” Spencer said. It wasn’t a question. His eyes were sharp, restless. “You haven’t told me everything. What did he say about me?”

Dexter’s throat tightened. He’d rehearsed how to keep this sealed away, but standing in front of Spencer — eyes wide, too perceptive for comfort — the words pressed at the back of his teeth.

“He… he asked why you’re still alive,” Dexter answered carefully, voice flat. “Why I’d protect you. He doesn’t understand that no one else could.”

Spencer frowned, searching his face. “That’s not all.”

Dexter let the silence stretch, long enough that Spencer tilted his head, almost impatient. Finally, he said, “He wanted to rattle me. Tried to paint what we are as weakness. Tried to say I’ve… compromised.”

Spencer’s lips twitched — not quite a smile, not quite anger. “Compromised. By me?”

Dexter’s eyes flicked over him, steady, unflinching. “Not compromised. Chosen. That’s what he didn’t understand.”

The air between them grew heavier. Spencer folded his arms, but his gaze softened just slightly. “So that’s all Rossi said? That I’ve changed you?”

Dexter nodded once. “That’s all that matters.”

Spencer didn’t look convinced. He studied him another long moment, then muttered, “He always did know how to twist the knife.”

Dexter’s mouth curved faintly — not denial, not admission — and he turned his head just enough to glance toward Hannibal and Will. “Doesn’t matter. We’re still here. That’s what Rossi can’t stand.”

Spencer’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t buying it. Not yet.

“Dexter,” he said, tone sharpening, “you’re leaving something out. I can hear it. What did Rossi say about me?”

Dexter exhaled through his nose, slow, like he could breathe the question away. “Spencer—”

“No.” Spencer’s voice cut in, firm, harder than usual. He stepped closer, close enough that Dexter could see the tension in his jaw, the flicker of suspicion behind his pupils. “You don’t get to edit the truth for me. I want every word.”

Dexter stared at him. For a moment, the mask held. Then it cracked. His shoulders sank a fraction. “He said…” Dexter hesitated, as though the phrase itself was poison. “He said I had a crush on you.”

Spencer blinked, stunned. The air between them turned brittle.

“A crush?” His laugh was sharp, humorless. “Like we’re schoolboys passing notes in class?”

Dexter’s mouth tightened. “He wanted to get under my skin. That was his angle.”

Spencer tilted his head, gaze unflinching, too sharp. “And was he wrong?”

The question hung like a blade. Dexter didn’t answer right away. His face gave nothing, but the silence was louder than words.

Spencer’s lips curved — thin, sardonic, almost cruel. “That’s what I thought.”

Dexter’s jaw flexed. His voice was low, steady, but carried weight. “Don’t mistake Rossi’s provocation for truth. Whatever this is… it isn’t weakness. It isn’t something he can name with a schoolyard word.”

Spencer studied him a beat longer, then looked away — but the faintest flush lingered along his cheekbones, betraying what his mouth didn’t say.

Dexter paced the far corner of the abandoned palazzo, fists flexing, jaw tight enough to ache.

“Fuck. Fuck,” he hissed under his breath, words snapping like whips. “I’m losing it. I should never have said that. Christ, I’m—” He dragged a hand down his face, the heat of shame burning under his skin. “I basically handed him Rossi’s little provocation like it was truth. Like a fucking kid with a crush. And he—he looked at me like I was pathetic.”

A ripple of air, and Debra was there, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, voice softer than usual.

“Dex…” she started.

“Don’t,” he cut her off, sharp, almost panicked. He paced faster, shoes scuffing the cracked marble. “Don’t fucking do this right now. I don’t need consolation. I don’t need—” His voice broke, thin with fury at himself. “I don’t need you telling me I’m not stupid when I am. He saw it. He saw me.”

“Dexter,” she tried again, gentler, like she wanted to catch him before he spun apart.

But he shook his head violently, hands gripping his hair. “No. Don’t. Just shut up. Please, Deb. Just shut the fuck up.”

Her ghost fell quiet, gaze lingering, sad and frustrated all at once.

Dexter pressed his forehead to the cold wall, whispering it again, a broken mantra:

“Fuck. Fuck. I’m so goddamn stupid.”

Debra lingered a beat in the silence, then huffed, shifting her weight like she was still flesh and blood. “Christ, listen to yourself. You sound like some teenager who just got shot down before prom.”

“Don’t,” Dexter snapped, not lifting his head.

But she didn’t stop. “Yeah, you’re embarrassed, boo-fucking-hoo. So what? You care about someone. Big scary Bay Harbor Butcher caught feelings, alert the goddamn media. You think Spencer Reid hasn’t seen worse than a clumsy confession?” She pushed off the wall, stepping closer, voice dropping into that jagged tenderness only she could manage. “Stop wallowing, Dex. You want him to see you as more than a monster? Then show him. Don’t run from it. Don’t bury it. Go after it.”

Finally, she smirked, tilting her head, words sharp as glass but glowing with warmth.

“Hell, go get him, tiger.”

Dexter shut his eyes, shoulders rigid, pulse hammering. He wanted to shove the words away, to smother them under shame, but they cut through anyway — reckless, impossible, undeniable.

They went to the bathroom together, the cracked tiles slick with damp, the mirror half-fogged from pipes that shouldn’t have worked but did. Spencer sat on the edge of the sink while Dexter unwrapped the stained gauze, methodical as ever.

His hands moved with the same steady precision they always had — gauze unwrapped, tape peeled, wound cleaned. He could have done it blind. But after the first minute of work, when the ritual of it dulled, the thoughts came in, uninvited.

The ache in his chest was something he hadn’t felt in years, like pressure building where nothing should be. He wanted to tell Spencer…what, exactly? That the kid was brilliant, too brilliant, and brave in a way Dexter never had been. That Spencer was better than anything Dexter deserved, better than the life he’d stumbled into — the lies, the blood, the mask. That he, Dexter Morgan, was twisted, crooked, built wrong from the start. But maybe not so wrong that he couldn’t force the pieces together, make something almost human, for him.

He wanted to tell Spencer that without meaning to, he’d begun leaning on him. That he looked for him in every silence. That he needed him closer than he’d ever admit aloud.

But the words never came. His mouth stayed shut, his hands kept moving. And Spencer, mercifully, didn’t notice the storm under Dexter’s skin.

Or so Dexter thought.

“You’re quiet,” Spencer said after a moment, his voice low, not accusing — just sharp enough to cut through. His eyes flicked to Dexter’s face, then back to the half-healed wound, like he was deciding whether to press harder.

Dexter forced a shrug. “Concentrating.”

“You don’t have to.” Spencer’s mouth curved into the faintest smirk — the kind that made Dexter feel both unsteady and seen. “You’ve changed bandages before. Hundreds of times, probably. You could do this in your sleep.”

Dexter taped the fresh gauze down, a little too firmly. “Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it right.”

“Mm.” Spencer tilted his head, studying him in that profiler way that always set Dexter’s teeth on edge. 

“You’re hiding something,” Spencer said, voice quieter now, almost clinical in its precision. “I can tell. Your shoulders give you away.”

Dexter’s hands froze where they lingered on the edge of the fresh gauze. He forced them still, forced the neutral mask onto his face. “You’re imagining things.”

Spencer’s eyes narrowed, a flicker of something darker passing through them. “Is this about before?” His tone sharpened, cutting. “About what Rossi said?”

Dexter met his gaze, silent.

Spencer pressed anyway, the words rough, impatient: “The… school crush thing.”

The words seemed to echo off the bathroom tile.

Dexter let out a breath through his nose, jaw tightening. “He was trying to provoke me. That’s all.”

Spencer studied him, waiting. “And did he succeed?”

For a moment, Dexter almost smirked — brittle, humorless. “You tell me. You’re the profiler.”

Spencer’s mouth curved, but it wasn’t amusement. “Profiling doesn’t mean mind-reading. But it does mean I know when someone’s dodging.” He shifted his weight, wincing faintly at his shoulder. “You dodge better than most. Still not enough.”

Dexter held his gaze, quiet. He should have cut the moment off, ended it with a quip or a change of subject. Instead, the words slipped out, low: “And if he was right?”

Silence pressed close, broken only by the drip of an old pipe.

Spencer’s throat worked, but his voice came out steady. “Then you’d be even worse at hiding it than I thought.” A beat. “And me pretending not to notice would make me just as bad.”

They stood there, staring, not confessing, not denying.

Finally, Dexter’s lips curved — not a smile, but a weary admission. “So what do we do with that?”

Spencer gave a half-shrug with his good shoulder. “We don’t. Not now. Not here.”

Spencer’s mouth curved into a thin, sarcastic line. “You’ve got a crush on me, and you’re absolutely terrible at it. No charm, no subtlety. Just brooding in corners and staring like you’re auditioning for a slasher film.”

Dexter didn’t blink, didn’t even pretend to deny it. His tone came out bone-dry. “Better than delivering a three-hour lecture on statistics as foreplay.”

Spencer huffed, half amusement, half annoyance. “At least I wouldn’t make someone wonder if I was about to kiss them or kill them.”

Dexter’s head tilted, eyes narrowing just slightly. His reply was quiet, measured, but it landed with force. “So that’s what you wonder.”

Spencer froze for half a heartbeat, caught in his own trap. Then his mouth twisted into a crooked smirk. “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m just good at profiling. And you’re… hard not to read.”

“Hard not to stare back,” Dexter returned, dry as dust.

Spencer’s laugh was low, a little dangerous. “Careful. If you keep talking like that, people might think you have feelings.”

Dexter let the silence stretch, his gaze never leaving Spencer’s face. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a faint, taunting edge. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Isn’t guessing half the fun for you?”

Spencer leaned back against the cracked tile, feigning nonchalance, but his pulse betrayed him in the quick rise of his chest. “You’re enjoying this,” he accused, though his own grin betrayed him too.

Dexter’s lips curved, almost imperceptibly. “So are you.”

Spencer’s brows arched, quick and sharp. “More you than me.”

Dexter tilted his head, the barest flicker of amusement sparking in his eyes. “You sound awfully sure about that.”

Spencer let out a short laugh, dry as kindling. “Please. You’ve been staring at me for days like you’re waiting for me to make the first move.”

Dexter’s expression didn’t crack, but something in the air between them did — taut, alive, undeniable. “And if I were?” he asked, voice low, deliberate.

Spencer’s smirk sharpened, predatory now. “Then I’d say the great Bay Harbor Butcher wants to kiss me. And I’d say it loud enough that you couldn’t take it back.”

For the first time, Dexter looked away, just for a fraction of a second, and the victory lit Spencer’s face.

“You won’t admit it,” Spencer pressed, softer now, almost taunting in its intimacy. “But you like me wondering.”

Dexter’s gaze returned, steady and unflinching. “Maybe I like that you wonder at all.”

Spencer’s breath caught, not enough to break his mask but enough for Dexter to notice. He rolled his shoulders, as if shaking it off, and shot back with practiced sarcasm. “Careful. You’re dangerously close to romantic.”

Dexter’s answer was razor-thin, almost a whisper, but it cut clean through the room:

“Careful. You’re dangerously close to wanting me to be.”

The silence hung between them, humming with everything neither dared put into words.

Then Spencer’s mouth curved, sharp as a blade. “Don’t worry, Dexter. If I ever did want you to kiss me… you’d know. You wouldn’t have to wonder.”

He turned on his heel before Dexter could answer, the door creaking open and shutting behind him, leaving only the damp echo of his footsteps in the hall.

Dexter stood frozen, the ache in his chest almost unbearable. Shocked at the words that had slipped from his own mouth. Shocked at the ease with which Spencer had met them — matched them — and then cut him down with a single line.

Shocked, most of all, at how much he had enjoyed every second of it. Then he locked himself in the bathroom, the door a shield.

Spencer slipped back into the grand, crumbling room where Hannibal and Will sat across from one another, low voices threading in conspiratorial ease. Dust shifted lazily in the morning light that angled through a fractured window, painting both men in fractured gold.

They both looked up when he entered. Hannibal’s gaze lingered a moment too long, measuring, weighing. Will only arched a brow, a ghost of curiosity moving across his face.

“You’re smiling,” Will said, tone careful, halfway between observation and accusation.

Spencer let the corner of his mouth tick upward, deliberate this time. “Am I?”

“You are,” Hannibal confirmed softly, like it pleased him. “You’ve returned with… something.”

Spencer crossed the room, dropped into a chair with a languid ease he didn’t usually bother to fake. His shoulder brushed dust from the wood, but he didn’t care. He glanced between them, letting the pause stretch until it was nearly insolent.

“Maybe I just enjoy having the upper hand for once,” he said finally.

Will leaned forward, forearms braced against his knees. “Over us?”

Spencer’s eyes narrowed, sharp, teasing. “Over everyone.”

For a heartbeat, silence. Then Hannibal’s lips curved, just faintly, in approval. Will’s head tilted, studying Spencer the way he might study a crime scene — noting the new lines in his posture, the sly control threaded through his tone.

“You’ve changed,” Will murmured.

Spencer shrugged, but the grin stayed. “Maybe I’ve just stopped pretending.”

Hannibal’s eyes didn’t leave Spencer. The faint smile never faltered, but it deepened into something more pointed, deliberate.

“Does this,” Hannibal asked softly, each word measured, “have to do with the Butcher in the bathroom?”

Will’s gaze flicked sideways, quick, sharp, but Spencer didn’t flinch. He leaned back in his chair instead, arms folding loosely over his chest, smugness practically radiating off him.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The silence itself was the answer — a weapon sharpened by the curve of his mouth.

For once, Hannibal tilted his head and said nothing more. Will didn’t press either.

The room filled with the sound of dust and distant water outside the palazzo walls, and Spencer sat in it like a king on a throne he’d stolen.

The door creaked, and Dexter stepped back into the room. His eyes flicked once toward Spencer — as if to check if something had shifted in the short time he’d been gone — but Spencer’s expression gave nothing away.

Hannibal didn’t waste a breath.

“We move tonight,” he said, his tone calm but absolute. “Verona. A city rich in exits and distractions. We already know which train, which carriage, which hour. You and Spencer will follow.”

Will leaned forward, voice lower, stripped of ornament. “We’ve charted it. The alley we’ll cut through to the station. The door to force. The timetable. You don’t improvise, you don’t hesitate. You keep stride with us, nothing more.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. He didn’t argue, not yet. Spencer’s gaze flicked between the three of them, sharp and restless, but he said nothing either.

Hannibal’s eyes swept the room once, lingering on both Dexter and Spencer in turn. “You will obey,” he said simply, no threat in his voice — just certainty, the kind that brooked no contradiction.

Will gave a single, short nod, closing the space. “It’s already decided. Verona. Tonight.”

The plan wasn’t an invitation. It was an order.

Spencer exhaled through his nose, dry and sharp. “So generous of you — letting us tag along like obedient schoolchildren.”

Hannibal’s mouth curved, faint and unreadable. “You are rude, Spencer.”

The words hung just long enough, cool as the edge of a blade, carrying more weight than they should have. Not a promise, not even a threat — just a reminder of what Hannibal was, and how easily he could cut.

Will gave a single, short nod, closing the space. “It’s already decided. Verona. Tonight.”

And though Spencer’s jab lingered in the air, neither he nor Dexter pushed further. The plan was sound, airtight in its precision. They yielded — not because they wanted to, but because, for now, Hannibal and Will’s course was the only one that promised survival.

Night fell soft and heavy over Venice, the canals whispering their secrets to the stones. The quartet moved like shadows, four distinct figures stitched into one seamless current.

The alley Hannibal had chosen was narrow, a strip of damp brick that funneled them toward the station. Will went first, shoulders hunched in that deceptively unremarkable way of his, eyes scanning every dark pocket. Hannibal followed with a gait far steadier than his wound should have allowed, pale but controlled, his ring glinting whenever a lantern caught it. Spencer and Dexter trailed behind, silent as their ghosts.

At the service entrance, Will produced a tool — bent, brutal, but efficient — and jimmied the lock in seconds. The door yielded with a sigh, and the smell of diesel and iron swallowed them whole.

Inside, the station hummed faintly. Not the chaos of day, but the skeleton of it, rattling through steel and stone.

“Two minutes,” Hannibal murmured. “Carriage sixteen.”

They moved as if rehearsed. Down the corridor, across the shadows. Spencer glanced up once at the security camera overhead, felt its blind glass eye burning down on him — but Hannibal had timed it right. The sweep turned away just long enough.

Dexter’s grip brushed Spencer’s elbow, grounding him. “Now,” he whispered.

They crossed the last span in silence and slipped into the carriage: empty, save for crates stacked in uneven towers. Freight, not passengers. Perfect.

Will secured the door. Hannibal lowered himself onto a crate with surgical precision, pulling his coat tighter, hiding the lines of strain from his wound. Spencer’s breath caught, adrenaline hot in his chest — the station, the cameras, the risk of capture still echoing inside his bones.

But then the engine shuddered, the train groaned forward, and Venice began to recede, its labyrinth of canals sliding into memory.

They had made it.

For now.

The train clattered into rhythm, the sound of wheels gnawing at rails filling the silence of the freight car. It wasn’t a comfortable space — metal walls sweating with condensation, crates pressing them into corners, the faint reek of oil and dust thickening the air.

Spencer shifted, knees nearly touching Dexter’s, the brush of proximity too loud in the cramped dark. He pulled his jacket tighter around himself, though the heat pressed down heavy, suffocating. His skin still buzzed faintly with the memory of their exchange in the bathroom — sharp, teasing words he couldn’t take back, and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

Dexter sat unnervingly still beside him, but Spencer felt the weight of his awareness. Not eyes, but presence. A quiet gravity. It made the heat worse.

Across from them, Will leaned with his back against a crate, arms folded. He wasn’t watching them, not directly, but the silence of his scrutiny pressed like a mirror. Hannibal sat at his side, posture perfect despite the sway of the carriage, fingers resting lightly in his lap.

And on Hannibal’s finger, the ring gleamed each time the moon through some distant gap flickered across it. Will’s eyes strayed to it again and again, as if drawn by an orbit he couldn’t break. Each time, his throat tightened.

The discomfort rippled through all four of them, each for different reasons.

Spencer broke first. He pulled at his collar, muttering, “Feels like they sealed us inside an oven.”

Dexter’s dry voice followed, “Better than being out there in the open.” He didn’t look at him, not directly, but the words held the faintest edge — a reminder, or maybe reassurance.

Will’s gaze cut across to them then, sharp, knowing. Hannibal, amused, let the corner of his mouth tilt up just slightly. He said nothing, but the silence was almost cruel in how much it acknowledged.

Spencer sat straighter, jaw tightening, trying not to give Hannibal the satisfaction of seeing him squirm.

The train jolted over a switch, throwing them all slightly closer together. Metal rattled. The heat pressed harder.

And Will, pretending not to notice the small collision of knees across from him, fixed his eyes once more on that ring — gleaming, patient, waiting.

The train thundered on, and the silence finally cracked.

Spencer exhaled sharply, pushing a curl off his forehead. “We can’t just sit like this forever. Where exactly are we going, or is that another surprise?”

Will’s eyes shifted from the ring on Hannibal’s finger to Spencer’s face, steady as stone. “Verona.”

Spencer blinked. “Yeah, you told us. But why there?”

Hannibal answered, his tone smooth, deliberate. “Because no one expects wolves to walk into a city that pretends to be built on love. They’ll look for us in shadows, in ruins, in hiding. Not where every alley is dressed for the stage.”

Dexter’s brow tightened, but his voice stayed even. “And when we get there? We can’t exactly check into a hotel.”

“We don’t need to,” Will cut in. “Verona is old. Worn. It has more forgotten corners than remembered ones. We’ll find space to breathe. And to feed.”

Spencer’s mouth thinned at that word. He felt Dexter’s stillness beside him sharpen, the subtle shift that meant restraint.

“Do we get a choice in this?” Spencer asked, sharper than he intended.

Hannibal turned his gaze fully on him, polite as a blade. “You do. You can choose to follow the plan, or to risk improvisation in a city crawling with hunters. But I assure you, Spencer, our way keeps you alive.”

Spencer didn’t flinch. He wanted to — but didn’t.

Dexter broke in, voice low, flat. “Then we’ll do it your way. For now.”

For a moment the train’s rattling seemed louder than breath.

Hannibal inclined his head, satisfied. “Good. Then it’s settled.”

The four of them lapsed into silence again, but this time it was heavier, weighted by the inevitability of Verona.

Spencer leaned back against the crate, eyes on the metal roof, biting down the irony he refused to voice. The city of love.

Beside him, Dexter shifted, and though he didn’t say a word, Spencer knew he was thinking the same thing.

They sat in the conference room, dawn seeping weakly through Venetian blinds, the map of the lagoon still pinned up. Coffee was cold, ignored. The board hadn’t changed — Will and Hannibal still stared back in clipped surveillance photos — but the tone around the table had.

Emily opened with the blunt truth. “Yesterday, we were still talking about Spencer as if we could bring him back. That’s over. He’s part of them. The only difference is that we now know how — and who — he’s tethered to.”

Rossi’s jaw worked. “Dexter. He’s glued himself to Reid. Protective isn’t the word, it’s obsession. Call it what it is — a crush, maybe more. He made it plain in the alley, and it wasn’t theater.”

JJ’s expression flickered between grief and anger. “So now we’re not chasing one couple. We’re chasing two. And the second couple? One half of it is Spencer.”

Derek let out a low, sharp laugh. “Hell of a thing to write on a case file. Reid — co-conspirator, romantic interest of the Bay Harbor Butcher. If it weren’t our people, I wouldn’t believe it.”

Hotch didn’t flinch. “Believe it. And adjust. If Dexter is protective of him, that’s leverage. It means Reid is the weakness in Dexter’s armor. The question is whether Reid is equally protective in return. If he is, they’ll reinforce each other. If he isn’t, Dexter is exposed.”

Tara folded her arms, thinking it through. “Spencer’s first kill tells us something important. It wasn’t Hannibal’s style. It wasn’t Will’s style. It was messy, emotional, unplanned. Dexter’s still trying to bend him toward a code, but if he fails, then what? Dexter’s protection turns into babysitting a liability. That could split them from the other two.”

Garcia muttered, fingers twitching over her keyboard. “So what we’re really talking about is using their… feelings? Turning crush into choke chain?”

Rossi’s voice was rough. “Exactly. We put Dexter in situations where protecting Reid costs him. We make him choose between the code and the kid. And maybe we make Spencer see it — force him to wonder whether Dexter’s obsession is about him, or about control.”

JJ leaned forward, her tone sharp. “And what then? What’s the endgame? We’re not talking rescue anymore. We’re talking cage. Spencer doesn’t come home. He doesn’t go back to his godsons. He goes behind bars.”

Derek didn’t argue. “Better a cage than a grave. He crossed the line. DNA proves it. That farmer wasn’t a monster, he wasn’t a butcher, he wasn’t even a bastard. Reid strangled him with his own hands. No way around it.”

Emily exhaled, steady but grim. “Then we treat him like one of them. Hannibal is the architect. Will is the accomplice. Dexter is the operator. Spencer is the convert. And converts are unpredictable.”

Hotch tapped the table once. “So we plan accordingly. Step one, identify the tether. Dexter’s crush, Dexter’s protection. Step two, exploit it. Targeted misinformation. Controlled pressure. Step three, containment. Not rescue. Not reunion. Containment.”

Garcia finally looked up. “I can seed chatter through systems they’ll check. False trails that split them. And I can set up triggers to see how Dexter reacts when Reid is the bait.”

Tara nodded slowly. “If Dexter bites, we confirm his protectiveness is exploitable. If he doesn’t, then we know it’s one-sided. Either way, we learn.”

JJ’s voice was soft but firm. “And if we get him alone, Spencer doesn’t get a hand outstretched. He gets a cage.”

The silence afterward was heavy — not grief anymore, but decision.

Rossi broke it with a grim little smile. “Then that’s the hunt. Two couples. Two fault lines. And one kid who used to be ours, who we now have to put behind bars.”

The map of Venice glowed pale under the fluorescents, red circles scrawled around the piazzas, train hubs, and hotel clusters the team had already swept.

“They’re still here,” Emily said flatly. “We haven’t seen movement out. Until we do, Venice is the hunt ground.”

JJ leaned forward, jaw tight. “So we use it. Narrow streets, bottlenecks. If we can’t outgun them, we box them.”

Luke tapped a finger against the Rialto bridge on the map. “Spencer’s the one they’ll risk for. He’s the weak joint. If we pressure him, the others show themselves.”

“Pressure him how?” Tara asked.

“Psychological chokehold,” Rossi answered, voice low but steady. “Dexter’s already protective of him. Push Spencer, and Dexter will move. Hard. We can trap that.”

Hotch gave the faintest nod. “And if we corner Reid, we don’t talk about rescue. We talk about cages. Make him feel it.”

The silence that followed was heavy, unblinking.

Emily finally broke it. “All right. Divide Venice into quadrants. We tighten the net. If they’re here, we’ll make them feel hunted.”

No one argued.

Chapter Text

They crossed the Po plain at dusk, the train spitting them out into a place that smelled faintly of stone and lemon trees, of old love and the thin salt of the Adige. Verona folded around them like an old book: narrow streets, a bell tower cutting the sky, a piazza where lovers clustered and gondoliers—no, boatmen—moved like chessmen on the river. It felt, at once, small and theatrical, the perfect theatre for people who loved performance.

Dexter stepped off first because he always stepped into what he could measure. The heat of the platform stayed on his skin; he watched the others the way he watched a scene before the curtain rose—cataloguing exits, noting the light, counting the people who could be in a witness line at any moment. Spencer followed close enough to see the same things but with an inward shuffle, as if the city were a book he’d read before and now had to reread aloud. Will and Hannibal walked together a little behind, shoulders touching in that private rhythm they’d perfected: a tandem that could be camouflage or a proclamation, depending on who looked.

They did not go to the big, glossy hotels. Hannibal’s taste was precise enough to dislike ostentation; he preferred something less obvious, a room above a small osteria with ivy at the windows, a place with old linen and a view across tiled roofs. They took two rooms that opened onto the same narrow balcony, the curtains thin enough to let the streetlight in, the kind of place that felt like belonging only because someone had left it apart from strangers.

Inside, after they’d shed the grime of the road, they moved like people who had rehearsed tenderness. Will sat on the edge of his bed while Hannibal unwrapped a small loaf of bread as though it were a gift. The ring — the silver signet with the stag half-hidden in Hannibal’s fingers — flashed once as he turned it. Will watched it the way a hawk watches movement in the grass. There was something private in that look, as if the ring were a map and he had the route memorised.

Spencer stood at the window and watched two women thread past below, arm in arm. The hunger under his ribs had not left; it thinned into a new, sharper appetite the way a fever sometimes cools and then flares again. He turned away from the small crowd and traced the arch of an ancient bridge with his eyes. 

They planned with a simplicity that made the work feel inevitable. Hannibal spoke first, quietly: Verona had the Arena, old plazas, a sculptural taste; it was a city steeped in staged devotion—perfect ground, he said, for something that would say more than a headline could. Will’s voice came after, low and decisive: they would not be clumsy. They would choose a place where the bodies could be read as an argument, where the stage itself would supply half the line. Spencer listened, angles of hunger shadowing his face. Dexter listened, thinking about how to make a kill look precise and avoid stains that would lead the team to them.

They sat around the narrow osteria table with the city muttering beyond the shuttered windows, a small map folded higher toward Hannibal’s palm like a prop. The scrap of paper had become their score: place, timing, wind, exits. But now the argument shifted from geography to temperament.

Dexter’s voice was quiet but precise. “We do this my way,” he said. “Controlled. Clear edges. No improvisation. If you want to make a statement, do it with craft, not chaos.”

Will’s mouth tilted as if amused. “You call what you do craft.”

Dexter kept his eyes flat. “I follow rules. The code works—practicality, mercy, reason. It keeps us from becoming what we despise.”

Hannibal hummed, the sound more indulgent than mocking. “Rules are architecture, Dexter. Delightful, sometimes necessary. But architecture does not preclude invention. One can build a temple and still order a surprise inside.”

Spencer’s hands were folded in his lap. “I don’t want spectacle for spectacle’s sake,” he said, voice steadier than he felt. “I don’t want that clumsy theatre again—not like Venice.”

“That boathouse was messy,” Dexter allowed. “It lacked… constraints. It left things for the world to read without instruction. If we’re going to involve Reid—if we’re going to teach him how to be what he is—then we need a place that keeps the shape of the act intact. A room where edges are known and held.”

Hannibal’s fingers toyed with the signet ring at his throat as if weighing it like a coin. “You want a stage with a curtain,” he said, “and you want me to keep the candles off it.”

“You know what I want.” Dexter did not smile. “Not candles. Limits. A space divided. One side for what Spencer is and will be—his plain, honest violence. The other for what I am and must maintain—discipline, the Code. We do not blur those lines.”

Will leaned back against the chair, the private ease between him and Hannibal a visible seam. “And we are to stand by and watch, then? Be props in the audience?”

“You may watch,” Dexter said. “You may not interfere. If you want to eat the aesthetics of it, do so afterwards. Let the act itself be kept to a narrower moral frame. Teach him steadiness.”

Spencer’s face flinched at the word teach in a way that was almost, painfully, a child’s reaction to being handed a lesson. “I don’t need to be taught how to feel,” he snapped, then softened as if embarrassed by the heat of his own words. “I need to understand how to keep from breaking when I feel it.”

“That is what Dexter offers,” Will said, voice low and even. “A form. A vice to bind the edge.” He looked at Hannibal with something like petition and triumph braided together. “We will not disobey… entirely. We will take our pleasure, but not at the cost of what we are building.”

Hannibal watched the two men, reading the tension in their bodies as if it were a line of music. “Fine,” he said at last. “A room with two halves. One for the rawness, one for the discipline. We do not dirty the form. We will provide the theatre; you will provide the mechanism.”

Dexter’s mouth thinned. “And after?”

Hannibal’s smile was the fraction of a petal opening. “Then we cleanse. We put things away. We make it look clean to the eyes that will come later. But we do not scrub out the meaning. We allow the audience—your audience, Dexter—to read what they must.”

Spencer looked as if the word audience scraped him. “I don’t want an audience,” he said quietly. “Not that kind.”

“You’ll have one,” Will said simply. “Because once we move in public, our work speaks.”

They argued in low chords until the plan took a form: a room rented under a name that belonged to no one they knew, a place off the tourist paths where the walls were thick and where the echoes could be contained. Dexter insisted on measurements and angles of door swing; Spencer insisted on privacy and darkness and the chance to be the only thing in the world for a moment. Will and Hannibal negotiated the stage dressing: classical, restrained, the kind of tableau that made the eye linger and the mind supply the rest.

When they broke, the decision felt like a contract folded into the palm. For the next day they would separate themselves for the event—spend hours apart in preparation, return only when the work was done. They had rehearsed the logistics to a point where the musicality of the evening could exist without improvisation: watchpoints, routes, a place to rejoin and a small room in the hotel where they would sit afterward, damp and composed, and exchange the thin words that meant everything to them.

Night came and they dispersed into the city to find the elements of their roles: Spencer walked with a strange elevation, his hunger sharpened into a kind of expectancy; Dexter moved with an almost mathematical calm that belied the ache beneath his ribs; Will and Hannibal drifted together through the streets as though giving themselves to the city and taking from it in equal measures.

At dawn they met before the door of the anonymous room, two keys pressed into the palm of permission. There was no fanfare. Dexter’s voice was small and steady. “We keep the lines,” he said. “We do not let what is private become a performance for the wrong eyes.”

Spencer nodded. His jaw worked for a second then relaxed. “I won’t make a mess,” he said—an attempt at humor, or at least at something that resembled control.

Hannibal’s hand brushed Dexter’s on the keys with a touch that could have been conciliatory or possessive. “You have our confidence,” he murmured. “And our appetite, for afterward.”

They stepped inside together.

The room held the hush of a place prepared for ceremony: neutral drapes, a table that could be moved aside, a lamp that could be dimmed. Dexter’s chosen side had a modest bench, a small basin, cloths folded with exactness. Spencer’s side was darker by design; Will and Hannibal arranged it with tactile thrift—rougher textures where the body would work, a space where the human animal could be seen plainly.

They went about their separate rites without illusion. Dexter checked the small, impersonal things that mattered to him—no theatrics, only necessary order. Spencer flexed his hands, felt the tone of his own muscles. Will came and stood behind him for a beat, close enough to be a warmth at the back of the neck. He and Hannibal exchanged a look — a small, courteous confirmation — and together they stepped out of the improvised room, folding the door softly behind them to leave the others to their ritual.

So the work — the actual taking — fell to Dexter and Spencer. That was what had been decided. The quartet, in its brief and fragile symmetry, had settled into roles: Will and Hannibal the curators, the two younger men the actual instruments of violence. Dexter felt the weight of that division more than he liked; yet there was a practical poetry to it. If the feast was to have meaning, the taking must be done to a code. He would choose with surgical patience. Spencer would choose with the hot, immediate justice of appetite. Both victims would have to be culpable in ways that could be explained, if only to themselves.

Dexter began in his old way — observation as devotion. He moved through Verona with the quiet, exacting curiosity he had used for years: eyes at the angle that hid nothing, a footfall that learned the city’s breathing. He watched a man in a suit who spoke easily on his phone outside a bank, watched the small cruelty of his gestures when the homeless man brushed too close. He followed a line to a restaurant, catalogued the details of the man’s life in small, forensic strokes, and waited until the man revealed the private underside: a name in a charity board, an old archaeological preservation fund that masked offshore accounts. The sort of predator with ledgered kindness, the sort Dexter’s code could recognize and justify. He made notes in his head. He checked routines. He gave the man time to show the pattern he needed.

Spencer’s hunt looked less like plotting and more like predation. Where Dexter catalogued, Spencer read faces like open books. He walked into the neighborhoods where the other man — an ex-coach, known in small circles for the way he’d taken advantage of boys who trusted him — frequented cafes and barber shops; Spencer watched the way he cornered people into conversation, how a hand lingered when nobody watched. The things that had pulled together in Spencer’s mind since the farm — the sense of a wrong that could be set right by force — sharpened into a focused appetite. He wanted to make restitution with his hands, and he wanted the man’s fear to be private, to be contained, not broadcast.

They spoke little while they hunted. When they did, the dialogue was economy. Dexter taught Spencer the discipline of time: watch the route, learn the empty windows, record the neighbors who would notice. Spencer taught Dexter the immediacy of opportunity: sometimes the man you need walks alone into a courtyard and gives you the moment without a plan. 

Meanwhile, Will and Hannibal prepared without leaving a trace.

Hannibal bought wines with an elegant, casual hand and prepared the bread and bitter greens that would sit beside the real meal; he folded napkins and chose plates, prefiguring taste with the same care he put into his sentences.

When Dexter called in the first confirmation — the predator of the ledgered kindness had left his study at midnight and staggered down an alley with a bottle and an unguarded step — they moved. 

They worked with the efficiency of people who had rehearsed not the act but the consequences: Spencer with his raw method, Dexter with his measured protocol. 

Spencer, with a flash, promised that the man he would take would not be chosen for spectacle but for the satisfaction that righted a private wrong.

 The room smelled of damp stone and iron. Dexter had made it ready: tarps tacked across the floor, plastic draped from hooks hammered into the beams, knives lined in order. The hum of fluorescent light made everything sharper, uglier. Two victims were bound at opposite ends, wrists cut red from rope, their breaths shallow with panic.

Dexter stood between them, calm. Spencer, beside him, was anything but calm. His hands flexed as if they ached to close around a throat. His lips curled in a smile too sharp, too young, too starved.

Dexter pointed to the man lashed against the wall on Spencer’s side. “He’s yours.”

Spencer didn’t need to be told twice.  

He lunged at the man tied to the wall, a blur of long limbs and sharpened hunger. His hands locked around the man’s throat, knuckles blanching white as he squeezed. The man gagged and flailed, shoving his fingers desperately into Spencer’s mouth to pry him off.

Spencer bit down.

The sound was wet, obscene—a tearing crunch as flesh gave way. He didn’t spit it out this time. He chewed. The taste was salt, iron, meat, hot and primal against his tongue. The man shrieked, high and broken, as Spencer worried the torn knuckle like an animal with a strip of gristle. Blood poured down Spencer’s chin, pattering against his shirt and splattering the tarp beneath them.

He swallowed.

The victim howled, trying to wrench free, but Spencer only laughed—a short, jagged sound that didn’t belong in his throat. He stabbed, wild and unpracticed, into the ribs, once, twice, over and over until the knife handle slipped slick in his fist. The wounds weren’t clean—they were ragged gouges, splitting meat and skin.

The man sagged, choking on his own blood, but Spencer wasn’t done. He pressed his mouth to the man’s hand again, dragging teeth across raw skin, ripping more flesh loose in a mouthful of gore. His lips and teeth shone red, his eyes wide with feverish light. He looked less like a man than a starving thing that had been waiting its whole life for this moment.

The victim’s last resistance faltered. Spencer’s hands clamped on his throat again, strangling, holding, savoring every thrash and spasm until the final twitch stilled beneath him.

For a moment he stayed there, breathing hard, mouth smeared with blood, chin dripping. A single shred of meat clung between his teeth before he tongued it back and swallowed.

When Spencer finally stepped away, his chest heaving, he looked nothing like the FBI’s boy genius. He looked like something risen from myth, hunger made flesh.

Dexter watched in silence, almost reverent. Then he turned to his own side.

Here, the ritual began. Plastic tight against the wall. Tools in perfect order. The blade sliding across the cheek, not too deep, just enough to open the line of truth. He spoke softly to the man, almost tenderly. “This is justice. This is balance.”

The scalpel moved, clean and sharp. No frenzy, no wasted motion. He plunged his knife deep into the man’s chest, controlled, catching the spray in plastic he’d positioned beforehand. The man jerked, eyes wide with shock, blood flowing in a perfect arc before slowing to a steady pour.

Dexter’s breathing didn’t change. His eyes were calm, steady, almost clinical. Every drop that fell landed where he wanted it. The man’s pulse weakened, slowed, stopped. Dexter’s hand never shook.

He set the scalpel down, removed gloves with precision, dropped them into the plastic-lined bin. When he turned, Spencer was watching him, chest still heaving, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and flecks of blood.

“You see the difference,” Dexter said quietly. Not a boast. A lesson.

Spencer swiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing it across his cheek. He grinned—dark, unashamed, hungry.

And Dexter thought: Yes. He’s mine.

Spencer stood over the collapsed body, blood slick across his chin, breath ragged and hot in the stillness.

Dexter stared at him.

He looked like a fallen angel — almost unearthly in the sharpness of his face, beautiful and terrible at once. There was a decadence in the blood on his mouth, a louche quality that made him seem less like a man and more like some vision conjured from scripture: a sadist, a cannibal, Lucifer painted in flesh. An unforgettable, unnerving vision.

And his lips… his lips were wine — scarlet madness, dark intoxication. Dexter felt the thought like a wound in his chest: I want them. Want their bite. Gentle, strangled agony.

He blinked hard, forcing air into his lungs, dragging himself back to the ritual that steadied him. But the image lingered, burned into him, harder to shake than the smell of blood.

Spencer’s gaze cut to him, sharp as a blade. He saw it—saw all of it—in the flicker of Dexter’s eyes, the split-second of unguarded hunger. Slowly, deliberately, Spencer wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing crimson further, and then he stepped close.

Close enough that Dexter could feel the heat of him, close enough that the blood’s metallic scent mingled with the salt of his skin. Spencer tilted his head, lips hovering just above Dexter’s, breath ghosting the corner of his mouth.

“You’re staring,” Spencer murmured, voice low, biting. “What is it you want, Dexter?”

For one unbearable second, the world narrowed to the fraction of space between their mouths — temptation thrumming in the air like a wire drawn tight.

“What’s the matter, Dexter? Afraid I’ll bite you too? Or…” He let the pause linger, cruel, “…is that what you want?”

Spencer tilted his head, waiting for Dexter to deny it, to fight back, to say anything. But Dexter only stared, silent and tense, his breath a fraction faster. That silence gave Spencer everything he needed.

Spencer’s hand moved with languid certainty, his fingers still slick and red. He lifted one, studying the way the blood clung in dark rivulets before he dragged it slowly across his own lips, painting them with the metallic sheen. His gaze never left Dexter’s.

Then, with almost ceremonial precision, Spencer pressed the pad of his finger against Dexter’s lower lip. The smear was warm, sticky, obscene in its intimacy. Blood clung to the curve of Dexter’s mouth like an invitation and a brand at once.

Dexter’s breath caught — sharp, shallow — his restraint unraveling. Every nerve screamed to close the distance, to taste, to claim, to surrender. He leaned forward, hunger twisting into something deeper.

Spencer’s voice cut through, low and mocking, though there was laughter coiled inside it:

“Don’t mistake the taste for permission, Dexter. I’m not yours to bite.”

Only then did he lean back, the space between them sudden and brutal. The denial was playful in tone but absolute in weight, leaving Dexter stranded, trembling on the edge of something he could neither name nor control, blood hot on his lips but no relief in sight.

Dexter worked in silence, every muscle tight, his anger funneled into precision. Plastic folded back into itself, blades rinsed, every drop scrubbed from concrete until the room gleamed with antiseptic order. All except his mouth. His lips still wore the smear Spencer had left there, a dark reminder he refused to erase.

He left the bodies sprawled in grotesque symmetry — trophies for Hannibal and Will to dress, to season, to make into their obscene feast. Dexter didn’t care. His work was done. His code was intact. And yet his pulse thudded with something reckless and raw that had nothing to do with the kill.

He found Spencer in the far corridor of the abandoned building, where the light fell in fractured bands through broken windows. Spencer hadn’t bothered with soap, or water, or even a rag. Blood lacquered his hands, stained his shirt, streaked his mouth like some decadent animal too drunk on violence to wash. His eyes glittered in the half-dark, pupils wide, body loose with the aftershock of his high.

Dexter didn’t think — he acted. Spencer hit the wall with a sharp crack, plaster dust raining like pale confetti. Dexter’s hand wrapped around his wrists, pinning them high, blood slicking their skin together. He leaned in, his lips a whisper from Spencer’s, every breath shared, every nerve screaming.

“You think you can play me?” Dexter’s voice was jagged, breaking against the silence of the corridor.

Spencer’s mouth curved into a blood-stained smirk. His voice was low, taunting, every syllable a knife drawn slow.

“I’m the only one who can play you.”

That tore the last thread of Dexter’s restraint. He crashed his mouth against Spencer’s, no finesse, no hesitation — just raw, consuming need. The taste was copper and salt, violence and hunger, Spencer’s blood-slick lips giving back everything Dexter demanded.

And Spencer kissed him back. Not softly, not tenderly, but with a hunger that matched his own. His teeth scraped Dexter’s lip, hard enough to sting, hard enough to make him want more. His tongue pressed, daring, controlling even as he yielded. Every movement said: you wanted this, now drown in it.

Dexter pressed harder, his body pinning Spencer’s completely, feeling the tremor of restrained laughter in the man’s chest. Spencer tilted his head, deepening the kiss, swallowing Dexter’s breath as though it were blood, as though he were feeding still.

Their mouths broke apart just enough for words, both of them breathing hard, foreheads almost touching. Dexter’s voice was rough, guttural:

“You don’t know what you’ve started.”

Spencer’s answer came with a soft chuckle, lips brushing his.

“Oh, I do. That’s why it’s fun.”

Then he dragged Dexter back into the kiss, and this time it was all teeth, both of them fighting for control, neither giving an inch, both drunk on the violence between them.

When they finally tore apart, their lips were swollen, smeared crimson, both of them breathing like they’d sprinted miles. Dexter’s grip loosened but didn’t release, as though if he let go Spencer might vanish, or worse — laugh at him again.

And Spencer, still pinned, still smirking, whispered one last dagger between them:

“See? Even now… you’re mine.”

The sound came first — the deliberate tread of shoes on the stairwell, the rhythm unmistakable. Will and Hannibal, ascending together, steady as a pair of hunters returning from the field.

It broke the kiss like a blade to glass. Dexter wrenched back, both men panting, mouths smeared in blood, eyes still locked with the ferocity of what had almost gone further. Spencer’s wrists slipped from Dexter’s grip, but he didn’t lower them right away. He lingered there, pinned against plaster, daring Dexter to reach again.

When the door creaked open, the tableau froze: Spencer against plaster, Dexter inches away, both of them raw and streaked in gore. Hannibal’s gaze swept over the room first, clinical and amused in equal measure. Will’s followed, heavier, assessing. Neither spoke. They didn’t have to. What hung between Dexter and Spencer was as vivid as the blood on their lips.

Hannibal stepped past them with quiet grace, reclaiming what he came for. Together with Will, he gathered the prepared bodies, the cuts and careful arrangements ready for their own ritual. The air filled with the copper tang of death as the two men bore their prize down the stairs, their steps echoing back like a dark procession.

Dexter and Spencer didn’t follow. They collapsed onto the stained couch, side by side, both of them still slick with crimson, their clothes stiff with drying blood.

And then it started — the silence stretching, but not hollow. It was heavy with pulse, with heat. Spencer’s thigh brushed Dexter’s, deliberate enough to be noticed, careless enough to be denied. Dexter’s hand flexed on his own knee, itching to reach but pinned by restraint. Their breaths were uneven, their chests rising like men still in the act of something forbidden.

They didn’t touch. They didn’t speak. But every inch of them hummed with want, raw and maddening. The air between their mouths still held the ghost of the kiss, and the ache of not finishing it made their blood feel hotter than the stains on their skin.

Below, the clatter of metal against wood began: Hannibal and Will had turned the ruined kitchen into something uncanny and beautiful. Flames hissed as meat met pan, the perfume of spices rising to veil the horror of what was being cooked. A table had been laid — salvaged linen, a broken candelabrum polished to gleam, shards of glass set like crystal. It was grotesque and elegant, a feast born from ruin.

Dexter and Spencer sat above it all, listening. The scrape of knives, the murmur of Will’s voice, Hannibal’s low replies — it was the cadence of domesticity, as if the world had not narrowed to this city, this building, this blood.

On the couch, their hands rested close but not touching, red on red. Spencer shifted just enough for their shoulders to press, then stilled again, a calculated tease. Dexter’s jaw tightened, his self-control fraying like the gauze on Spencer’s half-healed shoulder.

Neither turned to look at the other. Neither broke the silence. They just sat, aroused and restless, watching the flicker of candlelight from below climb the walls like a reminder: there were hungers no one could ignore.

The silence couldn’t hold forever.

Spencer broke it first, voice low, sardonic, aimed like a blade between Dexter’s ribs.

“Careful,” he whispered, lips stained dark. “If you keep staring at me like that, you’ll convince me you don’t just want to watch me bite.”

Dexter’s jaw clenched. He turned his eyes forward, toward the faint glow of candlelight seeping through the stairwell. “I don’t just want to watch.” The words slipped out harsher than he meant, heavier, like a confession torn raw.

Spencer let out a soft, wicked laugh, leaning closer, his breath warm at Dexter’s ear.

“I knew it,” he murmured, savoring the syllables like blood in his mouth. “You want me feral. You want me with my teeth in you.” His shoulder brushed Dexter’s deliberately now, not an accident, the line of his body humming with provocation.

Dexter turned then, sharply, close enough to feel Spencer’s pulse ticking at his throat. “Don’t tempt me, Reid. You wouldn’t win.”

Spencer smiled slowly — and then, without warning, raised his bloodied hand and set it lightly against Dexter’s throat. Just a press, not enough to choke, but enough to remind Dexter of what those fingers could do when they tightened. His thumb traced the line of Dexter’s pulse, savoring the way it jumped.

“Wouldn’t I?” Spencer whispered, eyes glittering. His voice curled like smoke. “I’m the only one who can play you. You admitted it yourself.”

Dexter’s breath faltered. His self-control was a thread pulled taut, stretched to snapping. He wanted to crush Spencer against the wall, to claim the mouth still red with another man’s blood, to taste the sharp edge of his cruelty. Every part of him ached to lunge — and yet he stayed frozen, trembling with restraint.

Spencer leaned back just a fraction, smug, satisfied. His hand slid from Dexter’s throat but left the ghost of pressure behind, enough to keep Dexter burning.

Spencer let himself sprawl, legs stretched out, shoulders slack, but his eyes were locked on Dexter. The lazy posture was a lie; every nerve in him hummed. He tilted his head, almost yawning, then smirked.

“You know,” he murmured, just loud enough for Dexter, “I like how hard it is for you. To sit here. To not touch me.”

Dexter’s hands curled into fists against his knees. He wanted to deny it, but his pulse betrayed him, hammering under his skin.

“You’re playing with fire, Reid.”

Spencer leaned closer, his voice dropping, sultry and sharp all at once.

“Am I? Or are you?” His mouth hovered an inch from Dexter’s ear, a parody of intimacy. “Because you looked like you were ready to beg when I had my hand on your throat.”

Dexter exhaled, rough, controlled, his teeth gritted against the sound. “I don’t beg.”

“Oh?” Spencer’s smile widened, wicked. His fingers ghosted near Dexter’s wrist, not touching, just hovering close enough to make him ache. “You looked close enough. Mouth open, breathing fast. Do you know how good you looked? Like prey.”

Dexter snapped his head toward him, eyes blazing. “Prey? You think I’m prey?”

Spencer didn’t flinch. He leaned in until his lips brushed the air between them, until Dexter could almost taste the copper tang still clinging to him. His voice was velvet and venom.

“I think you’d let me bite you.”

Dexter’s restraint frayed — he moved, just barely, just enough to close that sliver of space. His lips hovered over Spencer’s, so close that the warmth passed between them, so close that one tilt would end it.

Spencer’s eyes glinted with cruel delight. “Not yet,” he whispered, smug. “You’ll break first. And when you do—” he let the sentence hang, razor-sharp.

Dexter’s chest rose with ragged restraint, his body screaming to close the gap, but he froze, trembling on the edge.

Dexter finally leaned back an inch, his jaw tight, breath still ragged from holding himself in check. He tried for composure, but the heat in his eyes betrayed him.

“God,” he muttered, low and sharp, “I didn’t know you’d become like this when you’re horny.”

Spencer laughed under his breath, low and dangerous, tilting his head with that same predatory angle. “That’s because you’re still imagining I’d let you have the upper hand.” His gaze dropped to Dexter’s throat, lingering there, hungry. “You think about sinking your teeth into me?” He leaned closer, so close Dexter could feel his breath. “I think about doing it to you.”

Dexter’s hands flexed against his thighs, white-knuckled, but his voice came out steady, edged with defiance. “You really think you could get away with that?”

Spencer’s mouth curved, sharp and merciless. “Not think. Know.”

Dexter leaned in closer, almost brushing lips, his eyes locked on Spencer’s. “Then you’d better be ready for me to bite back.”

Spencer’s gaze didn’t waver, the hunger in it as raw as the blood still drying on his skin. “That’s the point.”

Spencer’s hand closed around Dexter’s throat first, the way a pianist rests his fingers before a performance—measured pressure, not enough to choke, but enough to make Dexter feel it. His pulse jumped beneath Spencer’s palm.

Then Spencer slid his hand higher, thumb grazing along the line of Dexter’s jaw, almost tender if not for the crooked smile that pulled at his lips.

“You know what I kept staring at while you were cutting?” His voice was low, intimate, a rasp sharpened with cruelty. “Not the blood. Not the knife. Your hands.” His grip returned to Dexter’s throat, firmer now. “Big, steady hands. Hands that look like they were made to hold someone down.”

Dexter’s jaw locked. Heat crawled up the back of his neck, into his ears.

Spencer leaned closer, his lips hovering just beside Dexter’s ear, not quite touching. “And your mouth,” he whispered. His tone shifted from taunt to vulgar obscenity, slow and deliberate. “I keep wondering how it would feel—biting me. Or wrapped around me. Maybe both.”

Dexter’s breath hitched, his body straining against stillness.

“You’re blushing,” Spencer murmured, dark amusement in every syllable. “The Bay Harbor Butcher—undone because I like your hands and your mouth.”

Spencer’s thumb pressed into the hollow beneath Dexter’s jaw, forcing his head back just a fraction. He studied him with that fevered brilliance, the kind of gaze that could flay a man alive.

“Your throat, too,” he went on, voice rough velvet. “Long. Exposed. Makes me want to sink my teeth in, tear the skin until I taste the vein.”

Dexter’s pulse kicked hard under his palm.

“And your chest,” Spencer whispered, lips curling in a cruel half-smile. “Broad, hard. Built like it was designed for me to dig my nails in, leave marks no scalpel could clean away. I want to ruin it. Scratch you bloody, just so I can admire the mess.”

He slid his hand down, deliberately slow, fingers tracing the line of Dexter’s collarbone before ghosting lower, almost suggestive, not quite touching.

Then his palm shifted lower, hovering over Dexter’s stomach, fingers curling as though weighing whether to go further. His lips almost brushed Dexter’s ear when he whispered, “And your cock—don’t pretend I haven’t noticed. I’ve thought about wrapping my hand around it while you struggle to keep that blank mask in place. Wonder if you’d crack, if you’d beg, or if you’d just take it like one of your perfect little corpses.”

Dexter’s jaw clenched, his breathing louder than he wanted it to be.

Spencer chuckled low, a cruel, deranged sound, dragging his thumb slowly across Dexter’s lower lip, smearing the blood there like paint. “God, you look good with red on your mouth. Makes me want to shove my tongue in, bite down until you scream.”

He let the words hang, vicious and electric, before finally easing back—hand still lingering against Dexter’s throat, a mocking caress. “I’ll play you every way I want. And you’ll keep coming back for more.”

Dexter held his stare, unblinking, though the pulse at his temple gave him away. He let the silence drag until it almost broke, then said, voice low and edged:

“You talk like you invented hunger,” he muttered. “But I see the way you look at me. You’re not starving for blood, Reid. You’re starving for me.”

He leaned in just enough for Spencer to feel the brush of his breath along his cheek, his mouth dangerously close to his ear.

“You want specifics?” Dexter’s tone dropped, dry, obscene in its plainness. “I’ve seen your eyes crawl over my hands. Over my mouth. You don’t get to dress it up as power when all you want is to be fucked raw by the same hands that gut men open.”

The words came out harsher than he’d intended, but he didn’t pull them back. His jaw tightened under Spencer’s grip, the defiance sharp, daring.

Spencer’s smirk didn’t just widen — it sharpened. He let his fingers trace Dexter’s jaw, then his throat again, just enough pressure to remind him who held the reins.

“You’re right,” he whispered, viciously amused. “Your hands. Your mouth. Your cock. Every piece of you is wasted when you pretend you’re only a butcher. You were made for me to ruin.”

He didn’t give Dexter time to answer. His mouth crashed against Dexter’s in a kiss that wasn’t a kiss at all — rough, punishing, teeth scraping lips until they bled. Spencer bit down hard enough to draw iron, then pulled back only to press another brutal kiss into Dexter’s jaw, his throat, the edge of his ear. Each one was half possession, half mockery.

Dexter’s hands went to Spencer’s sides, then lower, gripping through fabric — not in control but desperate, needing more. Spencer ground against him once, slow and deliberate, catching the shudder he provoked.

“You like that?” Spencer hissed against his mouth, his breath hot, his teeth grazing Dexter’s lower lip. “Pathetic. You’re hard already. I could make you beg with nothing but my teeth.”

Dexter almost answered — almost — but Spencer cut it off with another savage kiss, one that ended in a bite to his shoulder through the shirt, sharp enough to bruise.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, Spencer drew back. His lips were red, swollen, wet with blood, his eyes lit with cruel delight.

He smoothed Dexter’s shirt collar as if tidying him, then whispered, soft and lethal:

“Don’t mistake this for mercy. I stop when I want to. And I want to watch you suffer.”

He stepped back, leaving Dexter pressed against the wall, aching, breath ragged, erection straining uselessly. Spencer didn’t look back as he walked out — he didn’t need to. He knew exactly what he’d left behind: Dexter, raw and frustrated, shaking with want.

Dexter staggered into the bathroom, shutting the door harder than he meant to. The cracked mirror showed him a version of himself he barely recognized: lips bruised and split from Spencer’s teeth, collar twisted, chest heaving like he’d just run a hunt.

He braced both hands on the sink, head bowed. Fuck. He’d told himself he could control this. He’d told himself it was just tension, just adrenaline, just a way Spencer played. But the ache between his legs burned like a wound that needed stitching, and every time he tried to breathe, he felt Spencer’s weight, Spencer’s hand at his throat, Spencer’s cruel mouth spitting those words: your hands, your mouth, your cock… made for me to ruin.

Dexter’s palm dragged down, past his waistband before he could talk himself out of it. He hissed through his teeth as the contact jolted him — no measured ritual, no precision, just raw need. His mind replayed it in jagged flashes: Spencer grinding against him through the cloth, Spencer’s lips hovering, not giving, then biting hard enough to taste blood. The mocking smile when he left Dexter shaking.

His hand moved faster. He thought of pushing Spencer back against the wall instead, thought of forcing his mouth to open, thought of what it would sound like when control finally broke on both sides. He thought of Spencer’s voice, sharp and taunting, daring him: Pathetic. You’re hard already.

The words undid him. He came with a strangled groan, forehead pressed to the mirror, trembling as the hot wave left him boneless and bitter.

For a long moment he stayed there, hand braced on the sink, disgust and hunger knotted tight in his gut. He wiped himself clean with the same ruthlessness he’d use on a crime scene, but no bleach could scrub the truth: Spencer Reid had gotten inside him deeper than any blade ever had.

And Dexter knew, with a cold certainty, that this wouldn’t be the last time.

By the time Spencer left his bathroom, skin scrubbed raw of blood, Dexter was already finished with his own. His face was freshly washed, his shirt changed, his expression neutralized into that flat calm he wore like armor. They didn’t look at each other when they crossed paths in the hallway; it was easier to act like the distance between them had always been there.

Back at the hotel, the osteria keeper barely looked up as they slipped through the narrow hall and climbed to their rooms. Hannibal and Will had taken the first; the second, smaller one, belonged to them.

Inside, it felt claustrophobic at once. Two beds separated by a narrow table, curtains too thin to block the streetlight, air that smelled faintly of wine and plaster. Dexter dropped into his bed first, back to Spencer, fists tight under the sheets. Spencer sat on his mattress a moment longer, head bent, the outline of his throat stark in the glow. He switched the lamp off, then lay down facing the ceiling.

It should have been silence. Instead it was a storm disguised as quiet: every breath too loud, every shift of fabric too sharp. Dexter tried not to think about Spencer’s hand at his throat. Spencer tried not to think about Dexter’s lips hovering an inch from his. 

“You son of a bitch,” Dexter muttered into the dark, too low to be mistaken for anything but confession.

Spencer’s laugh was soft, serrated. “You liked it.”

“Liked?” Dexter’s voice cracked bitter. “You fucking tortured me.”

“Good.” Spencer rolled onto his side, his profile cut pale against the faint streetlight. “I want you raw. I want you begging for it without ever getting it.”

Dexter exhaled a curse, half-growl, half-broken. “You’re already in my head, Reid. Crawling under my skin like a goddamn parasite.”

Spencer smirked, voice dropping low, velvet dragged over a knife. “Parasite? Funny. You look like the one starving.”

Dexter’s hands fisted the sheets, white-knuckled. “You enjoy this too much.”

“I enjoy owning you.” Spencer’s whisper curled, intimate and cruel. “And the best part? You let me.”

The silence that followed wasn’t peace. It was a knife left deliberately on the table.

Then Spencer twisted it. “Tell me,” he whispered, the edge of a grin in his voice, “what did you imagine when you touched yourself in that bathroom?”

Dexter went rigid.

“Was it my hand?” Spencer pushed, merciless. “My mouth? Did you think about the blood still on my lips? Or about me choking you the way you wanted?”

“Fuck you.” Dexter’s voice was torn, guttural.

Spencer’s grin widened, cruel in the dark. “You already did. In your head. Alone.”

Dexter sucked in a breath, broken glass in his lungs.

His body moved before his mind caught up. Sheets snarled around his legs as he lunged, grabbing Spencer with both hands and slamming him down into the thin mattress. The frame groaned against the violence, Spencer’s sharp gasp muffled by Dexter’s palm shoving his shoulder flat.

“You think you can play me?” Dexter’s voice was low, shaking with rage, with hunger. “Push me like that and walk away?”

Spencer only smiled — lips curved, breathless but not afraid. “I already did,” he whispered, taunting, teeth flashing in the dim.

Dexter’s grip tightened, pinning him harder, his arms iron bars. “You don’t get it. I’m not your toy.”

“Then stop acting like one.” Spencer tilted his head back against the pillow, baring his throat deliberately. “You came running the second I snapped my fingers.”

Dexter’s chest heaved, the weight of him pressing Spencer into the mattress. He could feel the length of Spencer’s body against his own, every sharp angle, every pulse thrumming fast but steady.

“You’re fucking insane,” Dexter hissed, but his mouth hovered dangerously close — too close — above Spencer’s, breath fanning over blood-dried lips.

Spencer’s eyes glittered, wide and dark. “And you like it. Don’t pretend you don’t. You want me like this—feral, cruel, in control.”

Dexter swallowed hard, muscles trembling with the effort not to close the distance. “Careful, Reid.”

Spencer smirked, daring him further, his voice velvet and venom all at once. “Or what? You’ll bite?”

The mattress creaked beneath them, the heat between their mouths electric, volatile. Dexter’s control was a thread ready to snap.

The thread snapped.

Dexter crashed down, his mouth slamming into Spencer’s with a violence that was almost a blow. Teeth clashed, lips split, the kiss raw and brutal. Spencer gave a sharp groan against him — not pain, not protest, but something guttural, dark, as if he’d been waiting for exactly this.

Dexter’s hands locked on Spencer’s wrists, pinning them above his head against the mattress. The younger man arched beneath him, twisting not to break free but to grind closer, his hips pushing up hard enough to make Dexter snarl into his mouth.

“Motherfucker,” Dexter growled between bites, dragging his lips down to Spencer’s jaw, to his throat, teeth scraping, not gentle.

Spencer laughed — hoarse, wild — and tilted his head back, exposing more. “That’s it. That’s the monster. I wanted to see you bleed control.”

Dexter bit harder, not breaking skin but close, close enough to make Spencer’s pulse jump against his teeth. He shoved his weight down, holding Spencer captive under him, every muscle taut with the effort of pouring everything into the kiss, the press, the grind of their bodies through too many clothes.

Spencer’s lips pulled back in a sharp grin even as he kissed him back, rough and hungry. “I knew you’d lose it for me,” he whispered into Dexter’s mouth, tasting blood.

Spencer bucked hard, twisting his wrists against Dexter’s grip, sudden feral strength in the move. For one heartbeat he broke free, flipping them — his weight slamming Dexter against the mattress, his hair falling into his eyes, his bloody mouth grinning down.

“I can break you,” Spencer hissed, pressing his forearm across Dexter’s chest. His hips ground down, merciless, testing.

But Dexter wasn’t Cat Adams, wasn’t some frail suspect in an interrogation room. He surged up with pure muscle, hands locking around Spencer’s waist, rolling them savagely until Spencer hit the mattress again, spine bowing under the force. Dexter pinned him down harder this time — wrists caught, body caged, strength undeniable.

“No,” Dexter snarled, breath hot against Spencer’s ear, their mouths grazing as he spoke. “You don’t get to break me.”

Spencer writhed beneath him, still grinning, still sharp, but every attempt to twist only ended with Dexter slamming him down harder, control absolute. The weight of him, the raw power, pressed Spencer into obedience he clearly didn’t want to give — and yet his laugh came ragged, breathless, hungry.

“You love it,” Dexter ground out, teeth scraping along Spencer’s jaw as his hips forced down into the younger man’s, grinding, punishing. “Don’t you? You fucking love being taken like this.”

Spencer gasped, lips brushing his, voice hoarse but still taunting. “You think you’re in control. But every time you touch me, Dexter—” his hips bucked up hard, reckless, “—it’s because I let you.”

Dexter’s answer was a growl into his mouth, the kiss brutal, devouring, his body crushing Spencer’s to the bed. He wasn’t letting go. Not this time.

Dexter’s weight crushed him, heat and muscle locking him in place, but Spencer wasn’t done. He twisted, shoulders straining, and then he struck — not with fists, not with leverage, but with teeth.

His mouth closed savagely on the curve of Dexter’s shoulder, biting hard enough to tear skin. Blood welled hot against his tongue. Dexter’s growl cracked into a sound half-pleasure, half-pain, shockingly close to a moan.

“Fuck—Spencer—” he gasped, jerking but not pulling away. The sting only drove him deeper into it, body shuddering against Spencer’s.

Spencer lifted his head, lips red, eyes wild. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” he taunted, voice a velvet whip. He dragged his tongue across the wound, slow, deliberate, making Dexter shiver. “You wanted me to really play you.”

Dexter’s hands fisted in the sheets, chest heaving, but he didn’t stop him. He let Spencer straddle his waist, let him push his wrists back down, let him lean in again, mouth hovering, cruel smile cutting across his bloody lips.

Spencer bit again, higher this time, just below Dexter’s throat. Dexter gasped loud, the sound breaking into a raw moan. Spencer ground into him with merciless precision, whispering filth between each bite.

“You take it so well. All that muscle, all that control,” he sneered, dragging his teeth across Dexter’s jaw. “But here you are, bleeding under me. Moaning for me.”

Dexter arched up helplessly, the taste of copper in the air, the burn of Spencer’s teeth in his skin, and he realized — he wasn’t resisting. He was letting himself be tortured, and loving every brutal second of it.

Dexter’s muscles strained, instinct screamed to throw Spencer off, but Spencer pinned him with nothing but leverage and sheer will. His grip on Dexter’s wrists tightened; his body pressed down harder, a sharp counterweight to all that brute strength.

Spencer’s teeth dragged across Dexter’s throat, pausing over the pulse hammering wild beneath. Then he bit — hard — until blood welled up. Dexter gasped, the sound breaking against clenched teeth.

Spencer lifted his head slowly, lips smeared red, and smeared it across Dexter’s mouth with two fingers. Not a kiss. A mark. A claim.

Dexter groaned low, guttural, back arching. His eyes shut tight, shame and hunger warring inside him.

Spencer leaned close, breath hot, words like iron: “You like it.”

Another bite — savage at his jawline, cruel enough to make Dexter jerk against him. His moan was raw, torn out before he could swallow it down.

Spencer pressed a palm over the bleeding mark, forcing the sting, pinning him down harder. His own smile twisted sharp, cruel, satisfied.

“Say it,” he whispered against his ear.

Dexter’s breath tore out ragged, but no words. He ground his teeth, jaw clamped, every muscle rigid as if sheer force could hold back the truth bleeding out of him with every sound.

Spencer bit again, higher this time, under the curve of Dexter’s cheekbone. Blood welled in a thin line; Dexter hissed, turned his face away, but Spencer followed, unrelenting.

Two fingers pressed cruelly into Dexter’s mouth, forcing it open, smearing more of his own blood across his tongue. Spencer leaned in close enough that their noses brushed, his voice almost gentle, which only made it more merciless.

“You won’t say it,” he murmured. “But you’re shaking for me.”

Dexter’s silence deepened, jaw working around the taste of copper, eyes burning with the effort not to give him what he wanted. But his body betrayed him — every breath, every tremor, every desperate arch against the hold Spencer had on him.

Spencer’s lips ghosted over his, so close it was torment, then drew back an inch, deliberately. A smile carved sharp across his face, cruel, victorious.

“Good,” he whispered, pressing his hand harder on Dexter’s throat, pinning him to the bed. “Stay quiet. I like you better that way.”

Spencer dragged his hand down Dexter’s chest, hard enough through the fabric to make the skin beneath sting. His teeth snapped at Dexter’s jawline again, not playful now but savage, tearing another thin welt of red.

Dexter bucked beneath him, muscles straining, but Spencer bore down, pinning him with his whole body, pressing the air from his lungs.

“Still nothing?” Spencer breathed, low, taunting. His tongue flicked against the blood he’d drawn, licking it from Dexter’s cheek before biting down again, this time hard enough to leave a ragged puncture.

Dexter groaned — half pain, half surrender — the sound breaking free despite his locked jaw. His hands fisted in the sheets, not to push Spencer away, but to anchor himself.

Spencer sat back just enough to be seen, blood smeared over his lips, on his fingers, across Dexter’s throat like a dark crown. His voice was sharp, merciless.

“Look at me. Look at what you want. Covered in you. You love it. Say it.”

Dexter turned his face, as if he could fight silence forever. Spencer bit into the side of his neck, deep this time, and didn’t let go until Dexter’s body jolted under him, a raw gasp breaking loose.

Dexter’s head fell back, eyes wide, lips bloodied, and finally — ragged, strangled — the words came out.

“Fuck— yes. I love it. You— covered in me. I love it.”

Spencer’s grin was feral, streaked red. He leaned in until their foreheads touched, his breath hot against Dexter’s mouth.

“I know,” he whispered, biting one last time, slower, deliberate. “And you’ll say it again.”

Dexter barely had time to breathe before Spencer’s hand cracked across his face, sharp and sudden. His eyes widened, fury flashing — and Spencer only smiled, teeth bright, cruel.

Fingers fisted in Dexter’s shirt, he yanked hard, the fabric tearing open with a jagged rip. Buttons scattered across the floor. Dexter’s chest, pale and already bloodied, lay exposed.

Spencer leaned down and bit — shoulder, collarbone, anywhere his mouth landed — until blood welled fresh. Dexter moaned, low, guttural, half in pain, half in need.

Spencer’s hand pressed into his throat, not choking, but heavy enough to pin him down. Dexter clawed at his back, ripping fabric, drawing welts. Spencer laughed against his skin, the sound low and wicked, then bit again, deeper this time, until Dexter gasped and arched under him.

Dexter’s shirt hung in shreds. Spencer dragged his nails down his chest, carving lines, then leaned close, lips brushing his ear.

“Say it.”

Dexter’s voice broke out hoarse, desperate.

“Fuck— yes. I love it. I love you bloodied.”

Spencer’s smile was slow, triumphant. He bit down on Dexter’s lower lip, hard enough to taste blood, then pulled back just enough to let it drip between them.

“Good boy.”

Dexter’s breath came ragged, his chest streaked with claw marks, his shirt nothing but tatters. Spencer straddled him, hands braced hard against his shoulders, pinning him to the ruined bed.

Dexter’s lips parted, trembling between a moan and confession.

“Spenc— I lo—”

Spencer’s hand clamped over his mouth, smearing blood across his cheek, his eyes glittering with feral warning.

“Don’t you dare say love.” His voice was sharp, dangerous, almost a growl.

Dexter groaned into Spencer’s palm, hips bucking despite himself.

Spencer leaned down, teeth scraping along his jaw, then biting hard enough at his throat to make Dexter cry out under his hand. He released his mouth only to tear at what remained of Dexter’s clothes, yanking fabric aside, exposing skin to teeth and nails.

Dexter seized his wrists, tried to roll him, but Spencer shoved back down, raw strength laced with madness. He ground his hips hard against Dexter’s, brutal, deliberate, a rhythm closer to violence than tenderness.

Dexter moaned again, biting down on his own lip until he tasted blood, eyes rolling shut. Spencer bit his shoulder, left a ragged mark, and hissed in his ear:

“You like this. You like being mine.”

Dexter’s answer came ragged, torn from his throat:

“Fuck— yes. More.”

Spencer’s grip on Dexter’s wrists tightened, iron-hard, pinning him flat. Dexter’s muscles bunched, tried to rise — but Spencer forced him down again, the movement harsh, absolute.

Their breath tangled. The ruined bed creaked under the strain.

Spencer leaned close, not biting this time but dragging his mouth down Dexter’s throat, marking with tongue and teeth just enough to sting. Dexter arched into it, half a groan, half a plea, and Spencer swallowed the sound with his body.

Dexter’s shirt hung in rags, his chest streaked with bruises and scratches where Spencer’s nails raked across. Spencer pressed his weight harder, grinding into him, the rhythm cruel and deliberate.

“Spencer—” Dexter gasped, the name torn from his throat.

That made Spencer’s lips curve against his skin, his own voice breaking free, lower, rawer than he expected:

“Dexter—”

The sound of their names echoed, guttural, desperate. No talk of love, no soft edges — only moans, ragged and broken, feeding each other’s hunger.

Dexter thrashed, tried to twist for leverage, but Spencer’s strength held. He shoved harder, their hips colliding in a bruising cadence, the bedframe rattling with every thrust of motion through their clothes.

Dexter’s head fell back, exposing his throat. Spencer’s hand closed there, not choking, but holding, commanding. And when Dexter moaned his name again — louder this time, cracked wide open — Spencer’s answering groan was just as fractured, his control and cruelty melting into the raw, filthy ecstasy of having him completely.

Spencer’s hand clamped at Dexter’s throat again, not squeezing, just enough to make the air between them burn hotter. Dexter bucked under him, teeth clenched, sweat slicking his temples, but Spencer forced him down harder, a merciless rhythm driving through both their bodies.

The friction was unbearable — hot skin, breathless curses spilling from both mouths. Dexter snarled Spencer’s name like it was a sin; Spencer hissed his back like it was a prayer.

Then Spencer shifted, pressed harder, deeper — and the sound that ripped out of Dexter was ragged, unguarded, an admission and a surrender all at once. Spencer bit down on his shoulder, a sharp, claiming mark, and thrust until the bedframe groaned against the wall.

It broke them open.

Dexter’s nails raked down Spencer’s back, leaving red crescents; Spencer’s lips grazed his jaw, the cruelest near-kiss, denied. Their moans collided — louder now, names shouted raw — until the tension snapped.

They came undone together, the violence of it brutal, the release ripping through them like shrapnel. Spencer stayed above, still in control, until Dexter stilled beneath him, shaking, throat bared, wrecked.

Only then did Spencer ease off, pulling back just enough to watch Dexter catch breath, sweat and blood gleaming under the dim light. Spencer’s smirk was faint, merciless, his voice nothing but a whisper against the storm of silence they’d made:

“Told you. I’m the only one who can play you.”

They didn’t part. Not after the climax, not after the sting of sweat and blood began to cool on their skin. They lay side by side in the darkened room, breaths jagged, hearts still hammering. It wasn’t silence exactly—more a low hum of exhaustion and something rawer, like static hanging over bare wires.

Dexter broke it first, voice wrecked and bitter, as if spitting out a truth he hadn’t meant to say:

“Fuck you. You son of a bitch.”

Spencer’s laugh came soft, curling in his throat like smoke. He shifted closer, his hand dragging slow patterns across Dexter’s chest—gentle, intimate, as if tenderness were the cruelest trick of all. His forehead brushed Dexter’s, the gesture almost unbearably sweet.

“Don’t tell me you hate it,” Spencer whispered, the words wrapping around the space like a dare.

Dexter clenched his jaw. He didn’t answer, couldn’t, because the truth hung heavy in his mouth.

Spencer tilted his head, voice sinking into something dangerously soft:

“You almost said it. Almost.” His fingers pressed, just once, against the hollow of Dexter’s throat—reminder and restraint at once. “I heard it trembling there.”

Dexter’s breath stuttered.

“Don’t you dare say love,” Spencer murmured. “Not to me. Not now.”

The reprimand was quiet but cut deeper than anything that had come before. For a moment it lingered like a knife between them. Then, almost cruelly, Spencer softened again. He shifted so his mouth brushed Dexter’s ear, his tone gentling without losing its edge.

“You’re mine in this moment. That’s enough.”

Dexter exhaled, the sound rough, half surrender and half disbelief. His arm tightened around Spencer despite himself, fingers pressing into skin as if anchoring him.

They didn’t sleep. The room smelled of sweat and copper, the faint rot of the abandoned building seeping back through the cracks. Outside, dawn threatened, though neither of them looked toward the window.

Spencer traced idle shapes across Dexter’s ribs with one fingertip, each line both soothing and taunting. “You’re not built for love,” he said, almost kindly. “Neither am I. But control—” his nail grazed a line just enough to sting—“that’s what we understand.”

Dexter swallowed hard, unable to argue, unable to agree. Every part of him ached with the contradiction: how much he hated the cage Spencer’s words built, and how much he wanted to stay inside it.

Spencer finally leaned down, mouth brushing Dexter’s temple—soft, unbearably human—and whispered, “You’ll thank me for not letting you ruin it with that word.”

And then he lay back against him, perfectly at ease, as if cruelty and comfort were the same thing, while Dexter stared into the dark, pulse still running too fast, trapped between fury, hunger, and the smallest, sharpest edge of longing.

For a long time, the silence stayed, thick as the sweat cooling on their skin. Spencer’s breathing slowed into something steady, deliberate, almost taunting in its calm. Dexter lay rigid, eyes fixed on the cracked ceiling, the words burning in his throat until he couldn’t hold them back.

“It wouldn’t have ruined it,” he said finally, voice low, almost steady.

Spencer stirred against him, just enough to show he was listening. His lips curled into the faintest ghost of a smile. “Wouldn’t it?” he murmured, eyes sharp even in the dim light.

Dexter turned his head, searching Spencer’s profile—the smugness, the calm, the faint trace of blood still dried at the corner of his mouth. “No,” Dexter said again, firmer this time. “It would’ve been…true.”

Spencer’s laugh was quiet, bitter around the edges. “Truth has a way of wrecking things. Breaking them wide open.” He shifted, propping himself up on one elbow so he could look down at Dexter. “Do you really want that? To break this before it even begins?”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. He wanted to say yes, no, something definitive—but the words tangled, stuck. Instead, he settled on the one thing he was sure of. “I know what I felt.”

Spencer’s eyes narrowed, calculating, the smile fading into something more fragile—though he hid it well. “And I know what I don’t want to feel,” he countered quietly. “Not again. Not ever.”

For a moment they just stared at each other, the air charged with the unspoken. No anger, no raised voices—just that quiet, stubborn clash of need and refusal.

Dexter reached up, brushing his knuckles once, lightly, against Spencer’s arm. “It wouldn’t have ruined it,” he repeated, softer now, like a promise he wasn’t sure Spencer wanted.

Spencer shook his head slowly, almost tenderly, though his words cut sharp. “Then it would’ve ruined you.”

Neither moved. The argument hung between them, quiet but suffocating, like smoke that never cleared.

Dexter’s eyes stayed locked on him, searching, even as silence pressed tight between them. Spencer held his ground, jaw tight, expression unreadable.

At last, Spencer’s shoulders eased—just a fraction. His hand slid higher on Dexter’s chest, fingers spreading over the steady thrum beneath bone. He didn’t push him away. He didn’t pull him closer. He just stayed, anchored there, as if testing the weight of restraint.

“You think saying it would ruin this,” Dexter murmured, voice quiet but edged. Spencer’s eyes lifted, sharp even in the softening. “You’re wrong. What ruins it is naming something before it’s ready to exist.”

Dexter’s breath hitched, a twitch in his throat betraying the protest he bit back.

Spencer tilted his head, almost tender, almost cruel. “I haven’t given you permission to call this anything. But…” His gaze faltered, just for a moment, then steadied again. “…you notice I haven’t left.”

The admission cut through Dexter like a blade, delicate and merciless all at once. His mouth opened, no words finding him.

Spencer let the silence linger, then leaned in close enough that their foreheads brushed, close enough for Dexter to feel the heat of his breath. “Don’t force it into a shape it isn’t ready for,” he whispered. “And maybe it won’t break.”

Dexter shut his eyes, swallowing the ache, clinging to the single truth Spencer had offered: he was still here.

Dexter’s throat worked once, twice, before he gave up on words altogether. He just stayed very still, waiting, as if movement might shatter the fragile allowance Spencer had given him.

Spencer’s hand softened on his chest, no longer pressing, only resting, palm warm over the beat that betrayed every flicker of Dexter’s control. Then, slowly, almost carefully, he lowered his head until his temple brushed against Dexter’s.

Dexter let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding, the sound low, unsteady. “You know,” he said, voice hushed, almost reverent, “I never thought there’d be someone I couldn’t take apart. Someone I wouldn’t want to.” His lips curled in the faintest smirk. “And now here you are, keeping me together instead.”

Spencer’s eyes flickered toward him, sharp at first, as if searching for the mockery behind the words. But he found only exhaustion and truth there, lined with something like awe. His mouth softened, though his tone did not. “You make it sound like I’m charity work. Don’t.”

Dexter shook his head, brushing his nose against Spencer’s hair, the gesture too tentative to be called bold. “Not charity. Never that. You’re… you’re the only thing that feels real when everything else is noise. That’s what terrifies me.”

Spencer let the words hang, then tilted his face closer, lips grazing Dexter’s jaw in a ghost of a touch. His voice was quieter still, but steady. “Good. Be terrified. You’ll behave better that way.”

A laugh escaped Dexter, broken but genuine, vibrating between them. He angled his head, catching Spencer’s gaze with a look that was both daring and raw. “You’re worse than Deb ever was at keeping me in line.”

“She wasn’t me,” Spencer replied, almost smug now, though softer than before. His fingers brushed Dexter’s ribs in something that looked dangerously close to affection. “And you should thank whatever god you don’t believe in for that.”

Dexter’s mouth curved again, but slower this time, like it hurt to admit the truth. “I think I do.”

For a long moment neither of them moved, pressed close in blood and warmth, monsters who had clawed their way into something gentle.

Spencer’s tone dropped again, not tender this time but edged with steel. “But don’t mistake this for softness. If you ruin it, I’ll break you.”

Dexter’s chest loosened under his hand, an exhale dragging free like something surrendered. “Then I’ll try not to ruin it.” He turned just enough that his nose grazed Spencer’s hair again, savoring the closeness.

“You will,” Spencer said, though there was no venom in it. Just certainty. “But not tonight.”

Dexter breathed in again, steadier this time, and when he whispered, “Thank you,” it sounded almost like relief.

So they stayed like that, side by side, blood dried on their skin, the city beyond unaware that in one small room two monsters had found something perilously close to peace.

The light in Verona came in pale and steady, slipping past thin curtains and across the room. The bones from last night sat in a bowl on the table between the beds, white and clean.

Hannibal was awake already, sitting straight, his wound bound neat and dry. There was color in his face again, a steadiness in his eyes.

Will pushed himself up on one elbow, hair a mess, gaze fixed on Hannibal. “You look better.”

“I am,” Hannibal answered simply. “Hunger weakens. The meal—” he paused, almost savoring the word, “restored me.”

Will’s hand reached across the small gap, brushing Hannibal’s wrist. “I thought you might not last much longer.”

Hannibal caught the touch, holding it. “I won’t leave you alone, Will. Not to hunger. Not to anything.”

The quiet hung heavy, the kind that said everything they wouldn’t put into words. Last night had been more than food. It had been survival. It had been coming back to themselves.

Finally Will let out a low laugh, half tired, half sharp. “So what now? Do we feed again? Or let Dexter and Spencer take their turn while we keep our heads down?”

“There will be other meals,” Hannibal said. His smile was faint, knowing. “But last night—last night was needed. What comes next must be chosen. Made.”

Will leaned closer until their foreheads almost touched. “Verona’s a city for love stories. But they all end the same way.”

“And we,” Hannibal murmured, “will make sure the ending is theirs, not ours.”

From their small balcony, Verona stretched in layers of stone and terracotta, the Adige flashing silver where the sun caught it.

Hannibal stood with a cup of bitter coffee in hand, posture straight even after the night. Will leaned against the railing beside him, letting the quiet roll over them before he finally broke it.

“Romeo and Juliet,” Will said, almost dry. “Two children dead in a crypt, remembered as if it were love.”

Hannibal’s mouth curved faintly. “An opera disguised as a tragedy. Love so reckless it devoured itself. Verona wears that story like a perfume.”

“And people still come here,” Will added. “They take pictures under Juliet’s balcony. Leave letters in the courtyard. Pretend they can rewrite the ending.”

“They cannot.” Hannibal’s tone was calm, certain. “But they want to believe devotion can be preserved by death. Lovers always want to believe that.”

Will glanced at him, the shadow of a smile crossing his face. “And you? Do you believe that?”

“I believe,” Hannibal said softly, “that true love is not destroyed by death. It consumes death. Transforms it into something lasting.” He turned the ring in his hand, the silver catching light. “The story of Verona is not theirs, Will. It can be ours. Not a balcony. Not a crypt. Something chosen.”

Will’s eyes lingered on the ring, then on Hannibal’s face. “You always want to stage things bigger than life.”

“And you,” Hannibal replied, voice a shade warmer, “pretend not to, even as you follow me into every theatre.”

Will’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “Every theatre? That’s generous. I’ve followed you into a handful. The rest… you dragged me.”

Hannibal let out a low, amused sound. “Semantics. You were present, that is what matters.”

“Present like Tristan, maybe,” Will countered. “Dragged along, poisoned with love, and too stubborn to admit it.”

“Ah,” Hannibal said, eyes brightening as if savoring the comparison. “Then I am Isolde? Beautiful, transcendent, carrying you into eternity?”

Will’s laugh slipped out sharp, surprising even himself. “That’s one way to frame it. Personally, I’d say you’re more Medea than Isolde.”

Hannibal’s brow arched in mock offense. “Medea? A woman scorned, who slaughtered her children to punish her husband?”

“You’ve never minded a little slaughter to make a point,” Will said dryly.

Hannibal’s lips curved. “Perhaps. But I prefer Dido. Abandoned, aflame, immortalized in song.”

“Always choosing the dramatic exit,” Will said, shaking his head. “If I had to choose for you, I’d say Orpheus. Always looking back, even when you know you shouldn’t.”

That earned him a rare, quiet laugh — not cruel, but full. “And who are you in that telling?” Hannibal asked.

Will smirked. “Not Eurydice. I don’t wait in shadows. Maybe Aeneas. Always moving forward, regretting, but still walking away.”

For a beat, they held each other’s gaze. Then Will huffed, shaking his head, the tension dissolving. “We’ll end up comparing ourselves to every doomed couple in history if we keep this up.”

“Then let us stop before Cleopatra and Antony,” Hannibal replied smoothly. “I have no intention of dying in a snake pit.”

Will chuckled again, brushing his shoulder against Hannibal’s. “You’d find a way to make it artful.”

There was a pause, warm and heavy, before Hannibal added — almost idly, but not without weight: “Perhaps it’s worth noting… all these lovers we’ve named, they were bound together, one way or another. Some formally, some not. All marked.”

Will’s eyes flickered toward the hand Hannibal rested on his knee, the faint gleam of silver there. He didn’t comment, only huffed a low laugh. “Marked. Yeah. That sounds about right.”

He looked at Hannibal then, and saw it—the faint movement of Hannibal’s hand brushing the ring, silver catching the dim light. Not absentminded, not careless. Deliberate.

Will’s gaze held fast, lingering on that gesture before rising to meet Hannibal’s eyes. He let the silence stretch, heavy as a touch.

Finally, his voice came low, steady: “You’re not subtle.”

Hannibal’s answering look was unflinching, a trace of satisfaction in his stillness. “No.”

The air between them stayed taut, neither of them reaching to break it.

Then Will spoke again, softer but clearer than before. “I know what it means. What you’re asking without asking.” His eyes flicked once more to the silver, then back to Hannibal’s face. “It’s heavy. All of it. But I want it. I want the weight. I want to carry it.”

Hannibal’s breath shifted, too quiet to be called a sigh. His hand closed over the ring as if it might tremble loose without his grip. For once, language seemed to fail him—his silence fuller than any sentence.

At last, he found just enough: “You already do.”

It was almost no voice at all, raw at the edges, nearly breaking. The faintest gleam of unshed tears gathered in his eyes, though none fell. He held Will’s gaze like it was anchor and absolution, and in that charged stillness, nothing more needed to be said.

But Will did more anyway. His hand lifted, slow, deliberate, until the back of his fingers brushed Hannibal’s knuckles, hovering near the place where the ring rested. Not taking, not demanding—just touching enough to show he’d seen, he’d chosen.

Hannibal’s throat worked, a tremor running through the stillness he carried like armor. He did not pull away.

Will’s mouth curved, the smallest smile, dangerous and tender both. “You’re not subtle,” he repeated, voice a shade rougher now.

This time Hannibal let the silence answer for him, but his hand turned beneath Will’s, palm meeting palm, ring pressing between their skin like a seal.

The word came then, uninvited but inevitable, falling from Will’s lips like it had been waiting all along. “Marriage.”

The single syllable hung between them, stark and weighty.

Hannibal’s eyes closed for a moment, his composure shivering at the edges. When he opened them again, he looked almost undone, though his voice was steady when it came: “Yes.”

Silence followed, so absolute it seemed to press against the walls. Will felt it in his chest, steady as a heartbeat. Hannibal’s gaze lingered on him, soft and unarmored, and for the first time Will wondered if the man had no language left at all.

Then Hannibal’s hand shifted, the ring turning once more between his fingers before he let it drop gently against his palm. His voice came low, careful, as though each word were being chosen from a place too tender to touch.

“But I will ask you properly.” A faint breath moved through him, almost reverent. “You deserve more than a whispered yes in a borrowed room. You deserve ritual, acknowledgment, the dignity of something the world has never been able to give us.”

Will didn’t look away. “And what do you deserve?”

The corner of Hannibal’s mouth curved, barely there. “The chance to give you that.”

Then Will felt the thought rise, sharp and certain.

When Adam bit the apple, it wasn’t about knowledge or rebellion. It was about trust. Eve offered, and he trusted her more than God. The first sin wasn’t hunger. It was love.

Will thought this, and in the quiet that followed, he let the weight of it settle. Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe everyone’s right, and we’re sinners. But if trusting him damns me, then damnation is the only place I’d ever want to be.

The conference room was heavy with silence, the kind of silence that comes when hours of scrolling through footage finally resolve into something solid. Tara stopped the video, fingers tense on the space bar.

“Back it up three seconds.”

The pixelated blur sharpened again: four figures slipping out of Verona Porta Nuova station, the evening light catching on a tall frame — Spencer’s unmistakable silhouette. A half-step behind, a man with Hannibal’s posture. Will’s profile. Dexter trailing. The camera caught only fragments, but fragments were enough.

“They’re in Verona,” Emily said, voice clipped. “The city of love.”

“Love,” Rossi muttered, almost spitting the word. “That’s what they’re calling it now?”

Luke leaned forward, rubbing his jaw. “Verona means crowds, tourists, and a lot of ground to cover. If they want spectacle, that’s where they’ll do it.”

JJ didn’t look up from her notes. “Or if they want cover, it’s perfect too. Masked balls, lovers’ lanes, the Arena at night. Cameras aren’t everywhere, not in the old quarters.”

The weight in the room shifted. They weren’t discussing if anymore. It was where.

“They split the work,” Tara said carefully. “Hannibal and Will orchestrate the theatre. Dexter… he controls the space. And Spencer—” she exhaled sharply. “Spencer enjoys the struggle. The bite. He isn’t tentatively testing himself anymore. He’s hunting.”

Emily nodded once. “So we use that. They can’t stay invisible forever. One of them will make a mistake.”

The street was narrow, shaded by the overhang of tiled roofs. The city woke slow around them, shutters lifting, shopkeepers setting out baskets of bread. Dexter moved like shadow through it, head down, pace steady, calculating every angle of escape.

He didn’t expect to see Derek Morgan step from the corner of a trattoria, sun behind him like some avenging shadow.

“Going somewhere?” Derek’s voice carried low, dangerous.

Dexter stopped. He measured the distance to the alley mouth, the number of people around them—too many eyes, too many witnesses. He had to stay still.

“You blend better in Miami,” Derek went on, moving closer with a predator’s patience. “Here? You stand out.”

Dexter let a smirk tug at the corner of his mouth, though his muscles stayed tight, coiled. “Interesting. No one else has noticed me.”

“Noticed,” Derek said, “isn’t the same as seen. And I see you.”

The words landed heavier than a fist.

Dexter adjusted the weight of his stance, forcing his tone back into cool. “Then what do you see?”

“I see a killer walking free because he hides behind other killers.” Derek’s eyes flicked deliberately downward, pausing on the bruises cresting Dexter’s throat. His mouth twitched in something halfway between disgust and satisfaction. “And I see marks that don’t belong to you.”

Silence stretched. A cart rattled by, the smell of citrus drifting from its crates.

Dexter didn’t answer, but his stillness was answer enough.

Derek pressed closer, voice edged with steel. “Those aren’t from a fight. Not the kind you’ve ever won. Someone put their mouth on you and you let them.”

Dexter’s jaw flexed. “Profiling’s always been your department.”

“And you make it too damn easy.” Derek’s smile was humorless. “Walking around with a throat like that, like you want to show us what he does to you. What he makes you.”

Dexter’s lips curved, dry and sharp. “You’re obsessed. You think you’ve figured me out.”

“No.” Derek’s voice cut through, steady and dark. “I know when a man’s compromised. You’re supposed to live by your little code, right? Harry’s voice in your head, neat plastic wrap, righteous purpose. But him? He’s in your blood now. He’s got his teeth in you, and he doesn’t let go.”

Dexter’s mask slipped—just a flicker, an almost imperceptible tic in his expression—but Derek saw it. He always saw it.

He stepped in, close enough that Dexter had to feel the heat of his presence, close enough that his words had nowhere to go but under Dexter’s skin.

“You keep saying you’re the one protecting him, keeping him alive. That’s your line, right? But it’s bullshit. He’s the one who’s got you leashed. He’s the one pulling.”

Dexter’s voice was low, rough. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Derek leaned back just slightly, long enough to let the air shift between them, long enough to make the next words sting like a blade.

“I had no idea Pretty Boy could have it in him.”

The words slid out sharp, deliberate, cruel.

Dexter’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. It was thinner, sharper, like the edge of a blade catching light.

“You think you’re clever,” Dexter said, voice low enough that Derek had to lean into it. “You think you’ve got me pinned because you saw a few marks on my skin. But that’s all you ever do, isn’t it? See the surface. You don’t understand the depths.”

Derek’s eyes hardened, but he didn’t speak.

Dexter went on, tone colder, words precise as scalpels. “You call me leashed. Tamed. But the truth is, I could end you before you finish your next breath. All that training, all that profiling—you’d still die with your eyes wide open, realizing too late you underestimated me.”

Derek’s jaw clenched. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move, but the street suddenly felt smaller, tighter.

“You think I’m compromised?” Dexter’s voice sharpened, every word like a needle. “No, Agent Morgan. I’m choosing. Choosing when to act, choosing who to kill, choosing to let you walk away right now.” His eyes glittered, flat and dangerous. “That’s not weakness. That’s control.”

Derek’s reply came slow, deliberate. “Control doesn’t leave bite marks on your throat.”

Dexter’s mask flickered again—rage, shame, something darker—but he forced it back, swallowing it whole.

“You can call them bite marks,” Dexter said finally, his voice silk over steel, “but you’ll never understand what they really are. And that’s why you’ll lose. Because you only see what frightens you. I see everything.”

For a moment, the two men stood locked in silence, Verona moving unconcerned around them, the weight of centuries of stone pressing down.

Derek’s stare didn’t falter. Neither did Dexter’s.

The game between them wasn’t over. It had barely begun.

Derek didn’t follow Dexter. He let the man slip back into the alleys, swallowed by shadow and brick. But when Derek turned the corner into the piazza where the BAU was waiting, the set of his shoulders told them enough before he even spoke.

Emily rose halfway from the bench, eyes narrowed. “Morgan?”

He exhaled, sharp, running a hand across his jaw. “It’s worse than we thought.”

JJ leaned forward. “You saw him?”

“Yeah.” Derek’s voice was tight, clipped, each word chosen. “And he wasn’t running. He wasn’t even scared. He was… cocky. Like he had the upper hand.”

Hotch’s expression sharpened, unreadable. “What did he say?”

Derek hesitated. Not because he didn’t know how to explain, but because saying it out loud made it real. Finally, he dropped into the chair beside them, his gaze heavy.

“He’s not just protecting Reid. He’s tied up in him.” His jaw worked as if the words themselves tasted foul. “And I don’t mean as partners in crime. I mean…” He looked at JJ, at Emily, at Rossi, who leaned in with sharp, old-world curiosity. “Physical. Emotional. They’re—” he broke off, shook his head, then spat the truth. “They’re sleeping together.”

The silence after was brutal.

JJ’s mouth parted, disbelief etched in her face. Emily swore under her breath. Rossi only sat back, eyes narrowed as if turning over every possible angle of manipulation. Hotch didn’t move, didn’t blink, but the muscle in his jaw ticked once.

“You’re certain?” Hotch finally asked.

Derek’s voice was rough. “I saw the marks. I pushed, and Dexter didn’t deny it. Reid’s not just with them. He’s… involved. Intimately. And Dexter? He’s twisted up enough about it that we can use it.”

JJ’s whisper was bitter. “Leverage.”

“Exactly.” Derek nodded, grim. “Reid’s not chained by Hannibal and Will anymore. He’s chained by Dexter. And Dexter’s chained right back. We push one, we pull the other. We make them bleed where it hurts.”

Emily leaned back, exhaling sharply. “So we don’t just have four killers. We have two couples. And that gives us pressure points.”

Rossi’s voice was low, deliberate, predatory. “It gives us the one thing we’ve been missing: a way to break them without bullets.”

Hotch finally spoke again, voice even but hard. “Then that’s our focus. No more illusions of saving Reid. We cage him. And if Dexter’s tethered to him…” He let the rest hang, the decision unsaid but unanimous.

The team sat in silence a moment longer, Verona’s bells tolling over them like judgment.

They had leverage now. And leverage meant hope.

But it also meant danger.

Dexter shut the door behind him harder than he meant to, the sound ricocheting off the narrow hotel walls. His pulse was still thrumming, anger and adrenaline tangled in his veins. Spencer was perched on the bed, long legs folded, thumbing absently at the corner of a book he hadn’t really been reading. His head snapped up at the sound, eyes narrowing.

“You ran,” Spencer said flatly. Not a question, an observation.

Dexter dragged a hand down his face, crossed the room in three long strides. “I saw him.” His voice was raw, unfiltered. “Morgan. He was there, right in front of me.”

Spencer straightened, book sliding forgotten to the sheets. “And?”

Dexter leaned in, low, urgent, the words spilling faster than he’d planned. “He knows, Spencer. About us. Not just the killings. About… us.”

For a beat, the room went still. Spencer’s eyes flickered, sharp calculation beneath the flicker of disbelief. “What exactly did he say?”

Dexter’s mouth pressed into a hard line. “Enough. He called you Pretty Boy. Said he didn’t think you had it in you.” His lip curled in remembered fury. “They’ll use it. The team. Leverage. That’s what they see now—weakness.”

Spencer gave a short, bitter laugh, though there was no humor in it. “A weakness?” He pushed off the bed, closing the space until they were inches apart. “They don’t understand. They’ll never understand. What I did to that man in the boathouse? What I did with you?” His voice dropped, rough as gravel. “That wasn’t weakness.”

Dexter’s breath caught, jaw tightening. “Maybe not. But to them, it’s a chain. And chains can be pulled. I’m telling you—Morgan will tell the others. They’ll cage you, Spencer. And if they can’t—”

“They’ll kill us both,” Spencer finished for him, calm but with that raw edge in his voice that made Dexter’s chest feel too tight.

Dexter swallowed hard, searching Spencer’s face, trying to gauge if he was afraid, or angry, or secretly thrilled at the danger. “I had to tell you. Before anyone else.”

Spencer tilted his head, eyes narrowing with a mix of suspicion and something softer that unsettled Dexter more than Morgan’s words had. “Not Hannibal. Not Will. Me first.”

Dexter didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Spencer smiled, slow and cutting. “Good.”

Dexter told them.

This time, when he laid it out—Morgan’s face in the street, the risk coiled tight in his words—Hannibal and Will didn’t say pack, move, flee. They only exchanged one of those glances sharp enough to be an entire conversation, and Hannibal’s mouth curved in the faintest trace of a smile.

“Let them chase,” Hannibal said, quiet but assured. “We’ll give them something to hold onto. Something so elaborate, so demanding, that they cannot lift their eyes from it.”

Will added, “They’ll be busy with bones. Busy enough to keep their hands full, their minds tangled.”

No argument, no rush of suitcases or talk of trains. Just calm certainty, the predator’s patience. Whatever they had in mind, Dexter understood it meant staging their leftovers in a way that would pin the team in place, locked to a scene while the quartet remained free.

When the talk was done, Spencer excused himself without ceremony. He slipped from their room, down the narrow hall, and back into the smaller one he shared with Dexter. The air there still held the residue of their last night—quiet, charged, unfinished. He closed the door behind him, leaning against it for a beat longer than necessary, before crossing toward the bed.

Spencer was waiting when Dexter came in. He didn’t speak right away—he let Dexter shut the door, let the weight of silence sit on his shoulders first. Then, without turning from where he sat on the bed, Spencer said,

“How did it feel? Knowing Morgan saw the marks I left on you.”

Dexter froze. For half a second, he thought Spencer had read it on his face, pulled it straight from his pulse. But no—Spencer simply knew him, knew how the BAU worked, knew how Morgan’s eyes would have locked onto every line of bruised skin and bitten flesh.

Spencer finally looked up, and there was nothing hesitant in his stare. His lips still carried the faintest shadow of red, like memory itself hadn’t washed away. “Did you flinch? Did you want to hide it? Or did it thrill you, knowing someone else could see what I did to you?”

Dexter’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t answer yet. The silence stretched, and Spencer leaned back on his hands, all provocation and patience. “Because I can tell you something, Dexter—I like that he saw. I like that they know I touched you. That I left something no code, no ritual, no scalpel precision could scrub off.”

Dexter let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You think I liked him seeing that? Morgan will drag it back to the others, put it under a microscope until it’s a weapon. That’s what they do. That’s what you used to do.”

Spencer tilted his head, studying him the way he might have studied a crime scene once. “Maybe. But you didn’t answer me.” His tone sharpened, the faint edge of mockery threading through it. “Part of you liked it, didn’t you? Being marked. Being claimed. And not by just anyone—but by me.”

Dexter’s shoulders stiffened. “You’re a goddamn sadist.”

Spencer’s mouth curved into something between a smile and a wound. “And you’re lying.”

The silence that followed wasn’t comfortable, but it burned, alive between them. Dexter tried to hold his ground, tried to let the disgust in his words stay intact, but Spencer leaned forward, elbows on his knees, voice dropping into something quieter, sharper.

“You could’ve covered it. Worn your shirt higher. Shifted your collar. But you didn’t. You let him see. You wanted someone to know.” His gaze narrowed, pinning Dexter in place. “That’s the part you can’t stand admitting—that you liked being exposed.”

Dexter snapped, voice low but fierce: “I wanted you, not them. Not anyone else. You think this is about Morgan? You think I wanted him to have a piece of this?” He shook his head, frustrated. “No, Spencer. It’s about you.”

For the first time, Spencer faltered—but only for a breath. Then he leaned back again, smug satisfaction sharpening his features. “Good. That’s what I wanted to hear.”

Dexter leaned back on the bed, exhaling hard. “You know what the worst part is? Morgan didn’t even look surprised. Like he expected me to walk around with bite marks.”

Spencer smirked, eyes glinting. “Maybe he just thinks you’re into weird foreplay.”

“That’s comforting,” Dexter deadpanned. “A federal agent assuming I spend my nights as someone’s chew toy.”

Spencer tilted his head, pretending to think. “Well, technically, you are.”

Dexter shot him a glare, but it only made Spencer grin wider.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Dexter snapped.

“Oh, I’m not flattering myself,” Spencer said sweetly. “I’m just stating the evidence. Teeth marks don’t lie.”

Dexter barked out a laugh despite himself, shaking his head. “God, you’re a menace.”

“And you like it,” Spencer countered, lips twitching.

Dexter’s smile faded into something more dangerous. “Careful, Pretty Boy. You keep talking like that and I might actually prove you wrong.”

Spencer laughed then, soft but sharp. “You can try. But we both know who’s holding the sharper teeth.”

He stretched out on his bed, still grinning. “You realize the BAU probably thinks I’m halfway to Dracula now.”

Dexter raised an eyebrow. “Dracula? Please. You’re way too smug to brood in a castle.”

Spencer propped himself up on an elbow. “Fine, then who? Don’t say Edward Cullen.”

Dexter almost choked. “Oh God, no. You’d set yourself on fire before sparkling.”

Spencer smirked. “Thank you. So, what then? Lestat?”

Dexter studied him for a beat, lips quirking. “More like Nosferatu with better hair.”

Spencer rolled his eyes, but he laughed, the sound bubbling out before he could stop it. “Nosferatu doesn’t flirt.”

“Neither do you,” Dexter shot back, deadpan.

Spencer’s smile sharpened. “Really? Then what do you call putting my teeth in your neck?”

Dexter’s laugh came low and dangerous. “Assault.”

“That’s one word for it,” Spencer said, eyes gleaming.

Dexter tilted his head, pretending to study him like a specimen. “What about… Damon Salvatore?”

Spencer blinked, then laughed in disbelief. “You think I’m a CW vampire?”

“You’ve got the same cocky smirk. And the same way of looking at people like you already know how they’ll bleed.”

Spencer leaned back against the headboard, smug. “Damon is the hot one.”

Dexter gave a mock-serious nod. “Exactly my point.”

Spencer huffed a laugh, but the satisfaction flickered in his eyes all the same. “Fine. Damon. But you’re not allowed to be Stefan.”

“I wasn’t volunteering,” Dexter said dryly. “Too much hair product. And way too much pining.”

Spencer tilted his head, voice sharp with amusement. “So who are you then?”

Dexter smirked. “The guy dumb enough to let the vampire bite him.”

Spencer’s lips curved slow, wicked. “Good. You’re no Elena.”

Dexter narrowed his eyes, caught between a laugh and a growl. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re not the girl crying in the middle of every scene, waiting for one of the brothers to save her.” Spencer’s tone was teasing, sharp as glass. “You bleed, but you don’t swoon.”

Dexter gave a short, incredulous laugh, shaking his head. “So now I’m measured against fictional damsels?”

Spencer tilted his head, eyes glinting with wicked amusement.

He leaned against the window frame, arms crossed, mouth quirking in that sharp, infuriating little smirk he knew how to weaponize. “You look ridiculous when you’re trying to be serious.”

Dexter glanced up from where he was tightening the cuff of his sleeve, expression flat as a blade. “Better than looking ridiculous all the time.”

Spencer barked a short laugh, low in his throat. “That’s your comeback? All this time sharpening scalpels, and that’s the best edge you’ve got?”

Dexter let out a breath that almost—almost—counted as a laugh. “I save the sharper edges for people who deserve them.”

Spencer tilted his head, feigning thoughtfulness. “So not me?”

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?” Dexter countered. His tone was deadpan, but the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth betrayed him.

Spencer stepped closer, eyes glittering with amusement. “Not for lack of trying on your part. You’ve slammed me against more walls than I can count. Pretty sure the building’s getting jealous.”

“Walls don’t roll their eyes this much,” Dexter muttered.

That made Spencer snort. He leaned forward, so close Dexter could feel the warmth of his breath. “You’re really bad at this.”

“At what?” Dexter asked.

“Pretending you don’t like it.” Spencer’s smile was sharp now, teasing. “You try so hard to look annoyed, but every time I push, you stay. Every single time.”

Dexter’s jaw worked, but no words came out. His silence was as good as an admission. Spencer saw it, of course—Spencer always saw too much.

“God,” Spencer said, shaking his head with mock pity. “You’re supposed to be the controlled one. The man with a code. And here you are, getting unraveled by someone with blood on his lips and sarcasm in his mouth.”

Dexter shot him a glare that was supposed to cut, but it only landed half-hearted. “You never stop talking, do you?”

“Only when I’ve won.” Spencer’s grin widened. “Which, if you hadn’t noticed, is right now.”

Dexter moved without planning to, stepping forward, crowding into Spencer’s space. The air between them tightened, the kind of taut silence that could snap either way—into violence, or something else entirely.

Spencer didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink. He just tilted his head the tiniest bit, a dare written in the angle of his mouth. “So what now, Butcher? Gonna slam me again? Or finally admit what all this is?”

Dexter’s hand twitched at his side. He hated being cornered with words—Spencer knew that, exploited it. But instead of snapping, Dexter found himself leaning in, their mouths hovering an inch apart.

Spencer laughed softly, not pulling back, not pushing forward. “You really are terrible at this. Most people just kiss.”

Dexter’s lips twitched, a grimace or a grin—it was hard to tell. “Most people don’t drive me insane first.”

Spencer’s eyes flicked down to his mouth, then back up. “Oh, you like it. Admit it. You’d miss me if I shut up.”

Dexter’s throat worked, the faintest hitch in his breath giving him away.

Spencer closed the distance. The kiss landed crooked, not rough but edged with laughter, their mouths sliding together like they’d tripped into it. Spencer chuckled against Dexter’s lips, the sound low and warm, and Dexter found himself almost laughing too—half in disbelief that it was happening, half because it felt so inevitable.

When they broke apart, Spencer whispered, still grinning, “See? Was that so hard?”

Dexter stared at him, a mix of frustration and something dangerously close to fondness pulling at his expression. “Harder than it should be.”

Spencer’s smile sharpened again, teasing. “Good. Means I’m doing it right.”

And then they kissed again, softer this time, still laughing between the press of their mouths as if daring each other to make it serious and neither of them quite ready to lose the joke.

JJ sat with her elbows on the table, fingers digging into her temples like she could press clarity into her skull. “I just—” Her voice snagged. “I just can’t reconcile it. Spencer and… Dexter. Not killing together, not even that. But—”

“Sleeping together,” Garcia filled in, blunt because sugarcoating made her more anxious. Her big glasses slid a little down her nose, catching the light. “Yeah, no, I can’t reconcile that either.”

Tara leaned back in her chair, arms folded tight. She’d been quiet for a while, but her eyes flicked between them sharp as ever. “We know Reid better than most people ever will. But maybe that’s the point. Nobody knows all of him. And now we’re staring at the part he never let us see.”

Emily, pacing the perimeter of the briefing room like she couldn’t sit still, gave a humorless laugh. “And it’s that part he chose to show to Dexter Morgan of all people. Not us. Not anyone he’s trusted for years. But the Bay Harbor Butcher.”

JJ shook her head, looking up at her with wide, tired eyes. “But why him? Why Dexter?”

Garcia fiddled with the edge of her keyboard, nervous fingers picking at nothing. “Maybe… maybe it’s not about Dexter. Maybe it’s just about not us.” She winced as she said it, hating the words. “You know? Like… like he couldn’t let himself go that way with people who saw him as—”

“As the kid brother,” Emily supplied, bitter. “As the genius. As the one we swore we’d protect.”

JJ’s voice was low, raw. “He’s godfather to my boys.”

“Exactly,” Garcia said quickly, nodding. “So how could he ever let you see… the side that bites chunks out of men in dark boathouses? He can’t. He needed someone who’s already… broken.”

Silence stretched, heavy as smoke.

Finally, Tara broke it. “Let’s not skip over the obvious: Dexter is a man.”

That landed like another body on the table. JJ blinked, staring at her. “You think that matters?”

“Of course it matters,” Tara said firmly. “Not because it should. But because you’re all sitting here shocked, and part of that shock is realizing Reid’s not straight. Did any of you ever think he might be?”

Emily stopped pacing. Her jaw worked. “No. Not once.”

JJ whispered, “Me neither.”

Garcia rubbed at her forehead. “Okay, guilty as charged. I mean, Spencer Reid with a… what, a boyfriend? My brain never painted that picture. Not in a million years.”

“Then maybe that’s on us,” Tara said. “We built a neat little box for him. And he broke out of it with someone who’d already smashed his own box to pieces.”

The room quieted again, the sound of helicopters still faint outside like a constant reminder of the hunt.

JJ finally said, “I’m not judging him for… who he wants. Man, woman, whoever. I don’t care about that.” Her voice trembled, but she steadied it. “What I care about is that it’s Dexter Morgan. A man who cuts people up. Who lived a double life for decades. That’s who Spencer chose to—” She swallowed hard. “—to trust. To sleep with.”

Emily put her hands on the back of a chair, leaning in. “You think it’s about trust? Because to me it looks like it’s about recognition. Reid saw himself in Dexter. Maybe that’s what we missed. He didn’t need someone safe. He needed someone who made him feel seen.”

Garcia’s eyes shone, wet at the edges. “And we didn’t see him.”

JJ’s hand closed over hers, squeezing, but she didn’t argue.

Tara’s voice was softer now. “The real question isn’t why Spencer had sex with Dexter. The real question is why it surprises us so much.”

Emily’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Because we wanted him to stay our Pretty Boy forever. And now he’s a man with blood on his lips and another killer in his bed. And we don’t get to roll that back.”

JJ let out a shaky breath. “So what do we do with that?”

Tara answered, steady, unflinching: “We use it. Whatever feelings Dexter stirs in him, whatever this… twisted intimacy is, it’s leverage. We don’t need to drag him out by love or loyalty anymore. We use his desire. His attachment. If Spencer Reid has chosen Dexter Morgan as his mirror, then that’s the reflection we crack.”

The words landed, hard and cold. But none of them argued. Not this time.

JJ slumped back in her chair, her arms crossed tight like she could keep herself from splintering. “He was supposed to come to me,” she whispered. “If he… if he needed something, someone, if he needed to—” She shook her head hard. “I’m his friend. His family. Why didn’t he come to me?”

Emily’s voice softened, but the edge never fully left. “Because you’d have tried to save him. And maybe he didn’t want saving. Maybe what Dexter gave him was permission.”

Garcia sucked in a breath, blinking fast. “Permission to what? To… bite people? To…” She flailed her hands helplessly. “To finally stop being our sweet Reid? To just—” Her voice broke, and she shoved her glasses up like that would stop the tears. “I don’t like that answer, Emily.”

“No one likes it,” Emily admitted. “But liking it doesn’t matter.”

Tara leaned forward, her gaze sweeping across them. “Look. What Spencer did… it wasn’t just about desire. It wasn’t only about sex. He picked the one person who could look at his darkness and not flinch. And that’s what hurts us the most. Because we thought we could do that for him.”

JJ let out a laugh, hollow and wet. “Guess we weren’t enough.”

Garcia grabbed her hand, shaking her head fiercely. “Don’t say that. Don’t you dare say that. We were enough. We still are. He’s just…” Her throat bobbed. “He’s just too far gone to see it.”

Emily’s mouth pressed into a line. “Or maybe he sees it all too clearly. And chose anyway.”

That silence cut sharper than any blade.

JJ finally broke it, her voice cracking despite her effort. “I just… I don’t want to think of him like this. Covered in blood. Biting people. Sleeping with a killer. I want to remember the Reid who quoted books at us, who carried my babies on his shoulders, who stayed up late helping Garcia with her cases. That’s the man I know.”

“And maybe,” Tara said quietly, “both men are him. The Reid you loved, and the Reid who’s standing beside Dexter now. They’re not separate. They never were. We just didn’t want to believe it.”

Garcia pressed her fists against her eyes. “I can’t stop picturing it. Him with… with him. It makes me sick. Not because it’s a man. But because it’s that man.”

Emily walked over, rested a hand on her shoulder. “You’re not alone in that.”

JJ stared down at the table, her fingers tracing invisible lines in the wood. “Then what do we do? Because I can’t fight him if I’m still… mourning him.”

Tara’s answer was almost a whisper. “Maybe that’s exactly what we have to learn. To fight while we mourn. To love him and hate him at the same time. To accept that our grief doesn’t excuse us from doing our job.”

For a moment, the room felt like a funeral. Not for Spencer Reid’s body, but for the version of him that had belonged to them.

They were gathered in the narrow hotel room the Bureau had commandeered, late morning light burning too bright through thin curtains. Coffee went cold on the table between them. The silence had settled too thick, too heavy, until JJ finally broke it.

“We keep circling the same problem,” she said, voice low but firm. “Spence is too far gone. Dexter’s tied to him now. We need something sharper than reason, sharper than another profile.”

Emily lifted her head slowly. “Sharper how?”

JJ hesitated, then reached into her bag. A folded photograph slid onto the table — her boys, Henry with his arm around Michael, grins so wide they lit the paper. “They don’t remember him this way. Not yet. He’s their godfather. He read them stories, made them laugh. If Spencer saw this—” she pressed a finger against the glossy paper, “—it might cut deeper than anything we can say.”

Garcia’s gasp came sharp and immediate. “You want to weaponize your children? JJ, that’s—” she broke off, shaking her head. “That’s cruel. That’s—”

“It’s survival,” Tara interrupted, steady and deliberate. “We’re not aiming at Spencer’s rational brain anymore. He’s crossed that line. We have to aim where it still hurts.”

Garcia’s eyes filled, but she didn’t speak again.

JJ’s hands trembled slightly as she folded the photo back up. “It’s not just him. Dexter has a son, too. Harrison. He’s the only thing I’ve ever seen get through that mask he wears. If we can get a picture into his hands—”

Emily leaned back in her chair, weighing, judging. “So the message becomes: this is who you’re betraying.”

“Exactly.” JJ’s tone sharpened. “Every kill, every step further down with Hannibal and Will—it’s a step away from the kids who love them. Make that undeniable, and maybe we get hesitation. Maybe we buy ourselves an opening.”

Garcia hugged herself, voice small but raw. “You’re talking about using children’s faces to haunt them. Like ghosts while they’re still alive.”

“That’s the point,” Tara said flatly. “Ghosts follow you everywhere. Hannibal Lecter has no ghosts. Dexter and Reid do. We use them.”

“Someone will say it plain,” Emily said finally, her voice rougher than she meant it to be. “Hannibal and Will had Abigail. And they gutted her.”

The word gutted landed hard, dragging silence in its wake. JJ’s hand froze on the edge of the table, knuckles whitening around the photo of her sons. Tara’s gaze flicked to the printout of Harrison, then away just as fast, like the image burned.

JJ whispered, “And what if that’s what happens now? What if Spencer and Dexter look at our kids the way Hannibal and Will looked at her?”

The room seemed to shrink, the weight of her words pulling the air out of it.

Emily shook her head, almost violently. “No. I won’t let it come to that. We cannot let them near the children.”

Tara’s voice was low, careful, but brimming with anger. “We don’t get second chances with this. If they’ve crossed that line—if they already see innocence as raw material—then we are one mistake away from our kids being next.”

JJ’s eyes welled, but she held their gazes. “That’s why we slip them the pictures. That’s why we remind them—these are ours. These are off-limits. If anything human is left in Spencer, in Dexter, he’ll protect them, not harm them.”

Emily’s hands pressed flat against the table, as though she could pin down the rising dread. “And if we’re wrong?”

No one answered. The silence itself was answer enough.

It was late when they moved, the three of them alone in the quiet of the safehouse. The rest of the team was out running another lead, but JJ had laid the photos on the table as if they were evidence—though these were far more dangerous than fingerprints or DNA.

Henry and Michael, grinning, wet from the lake. Harrison, mid-laugh, his eyes so like Dexter’s it was disarming.

JJ’s hand trembled as she picked up her sons’ picture. “He carried me through cases when I couldn’t see straight. He loved them.” She slid the photo into a slim plastic sleeve, then set it aside.

Tara folded Harrison’s picture carefully. “Dexter doesn’t get to forget this either. He doesn’t get to pretend Harrison doesn’t exist.”

Emily pulled Spencer’s worn satchel from the evidence pile. It had been returned after Tivoli—the same canvas bag he’d had for years, the one he stuffed with notebooks and spare clothes. She unzipped the front pouch and slid both photos in, side by side, just far enough that they wouldn’t fall out but near enough that he’d notice them quickly.

JJ hovered, then pressed the zipper halfway shut. “So he can’t miss it.”

Emily’s mouth was grim. “This isn’t for him to keep. It’s for him to choke on. A reminder. A warning. He opens that bag, he’ll see what he’s putting at risk.”

Tara’s tone sharpened. “And if there’s any part of him left that’s still Spencer Reid, he won’t be able to look away.”

They stood in silence a moment longer, staring at the satchel on the table. No speeches, no threats—just two glossy photographs, tucked away like landmines waiting for discovery.

The square buzzed with tourists, cameras clicking, the smell of coffee drifting from cafés. Spencer had almost convinced himself that he could disappear into the crowd—just another face, just another foreigner passing through.

Then he saw her.

JJ. Standing near a narrow side street, head tilted like she’d been waiting. Not the JJ of late nights in the office or quiet reassurances in the field. This was the profiler, the mother, the one who’d come for him.

He stopped dead. His throat tightened.

“Spence.” She didn’t smile, didn’t move closer. Just said it like she had a right to.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, voice flat, though he could feel his pulse hammering.

“I had to.” She pulled a small canvas satchel from her shoulder, held it out to him. “This is yours.”

His eyes narrowed. “What’s in it?”

“Things you left behind. Things you need to see.”

He didn’t take it. The weight of the bag in her hand looked heavier than it should have been. “If this is another trap—”

“It’s not.” Her voice cracked just slightly, the mother slipping through the profiler. “Please, Spence. Just… take it.”

For a long beat, he stared at her, calculating. She didn’t blink. Finally, with a sharp movement, he grabbed the strap.

Their hands brushed, familiar and foreign at once, and then she let go.

“You think you know me,” he said, low, venom edging the words. “You don’t.”

JJ’s jaw tightened. “Then prove me wrong.”

He turned before she could say more, cutting through the crowd with the satchel clutched to his chest. He didn’t look back.

It wasn’t until the hotel door shut behind him, the murmur of the city muffled, that he ripped the bag open. And there they were.

Henry’s gap-toothed grin. Michael’s careful scrawl on a crayon drawing. Harrison, laughing in midair.

The pictures burned like acid in his hands. For a moment he couldn’t breathe.

Then the fury surged.

He stormed down the hall, slammed into the room he shared with Dexter, and threw the photos hard against the bedspread.

“They think we’d hurt them,” he spat, voice breaking between rage and disbelief. “They think we don’t love them.”

Dexter barely looked up at first when Spencer burst in, photos scattering across the bed like shrapnel. He was used to storms; Spencer’s voice, ragged and furious, was just another kind of thunder.

“They think we’d hurt them. They think we don’t love them!” Spencer’s hands were shaking, veins standing out on his arms as he pointed to the pictures. “Henry. Michael. Harrison. Do you see this? They think we’d gut them like victims in a fucking kill room.”

Dexter’s gaze fell on Harrison’s face. His son, frozen mid-laugh. For a long moment, he said nothing. His expression was unreadable, clinical almost—like he was cataloguing evidence.

“Of course they think that,” he said finally, voice quiet, steady. “That’s what they’ve always thought of me. The monster waiting in the corner. The Bay Harbor Butcher who couldn’t be trusted with anyone’s child. Not even his own.”

Spencer spun on him, eyes burning. “And me? They raised me. They trained me. I spent years at their side—and they still think I’d…” His throat closed. He slammed a fist against the wall. “I’d never. Not them. Not any child.”

Dexter stood then, slow and deliberate, and crossed to the bed. He picked up Harrison’s photo with careful fingers. His calm faltered—the muscle in his jaw tightened, his throat working like the words were heavier than the air.

“They’ve taken the one thing left that mattered to me and turned it into a weapon,” he whispered. Then louder, bitter: “Harrison will grow up believing I’m a monster. Believing they were right.”

Spencer stepped closer, shaking with anger, but not at Dexter. At all of them. At JJ. At the team. “They want to cage us with guilt. They think that’s stronger than chains.”

Dexter’s eyes lifted to meet his, and for the first time the calm was gone. His face cracked, raw grief showing through. “It’s working.”

Silence fell, heavy and brutal.

Spencer bent down, hands still trembling, and gathered the photos one by one. He smoothed them against his chest, careful not to crease them further. His fury hadn’t dimmed, but something else burned beneath it—a refusal to let the faces be discarded, even as weapons.

“They don’t get to make me hate this,” he said, voice sharp as a knife. “They don’t get to turn the only innocent things left in my life into proof that I’m a monster.” He tucked the photos into the inside pocket of his jacket, patting them once like a vow. “These are mine now. I’ll keep them safe—safe from them.”

Dexter’s eyes tracked the movement, his jaw taut. Spencer’s words cut through the room, steadying him, though they still bled anger.

“They want to make me the monster,” Dexter said, voice rough, “and make you the disappointment.” He let out a jagged breath. “But I’ll be damned if I give them that satisfaction.”

Spencer’s hands shook only slightly when he dropped the photos on the rickety table between them. The boys’ smiles looked out of place against the cracked wood, bright paper in a dim, crumbling room. Dexter stood at his side, jaw clenched so tightly the muscle twitched.

“They left these for us,” Spencer said flatly. “They want us to feel like monsters. Like we’d ever hurt them.” His voice cracked on the last word, rage and wounded pride tangled together.

No one spoke. The silence in the room shifted, weighted, like stone pressing into their ribs. Dexter’s breathing was sharp, angry, while Spencer’s eyes stayed fixed on the photographs, as if daring them to accuse him again.

Finally, Hannibal leaned forward. His hand, deliberate and precise, slid across the table until his long fingers rested on one of the glossy pictures. He didn’t lift it yet—he simply touched it, smoothing the edge with the same care he might give to a bone he intended to carve.

His gaze never went to Spencer. It went to Will. And Will, already tense, locked onto Hannibal as if there were another conversation happening there, one the others could not hear.

Spencer frowned. “Why are you—what does this mean?”

Will exhaled slowly, jaw tight. He looked as though he’d rather not say anything, but the pressure of Hannibal’s silent stare demanded it. “It’s not about the boys. Not only.” His voice carried the wear of old grief. “They’re sending us a message.”

Spencer’s brow furrowed deeper. “What message?”

Will hesitated, his hand twitching slightly before he pulled it back into his lap. He bit down on the inside of his cheek. “Hannibal… gutted her.” The word was harsh, heavy, dragged across the air like a blade. “Abigail Hobbs. She was ours. She was my daughter.” His throat worked around the word, as though it still cut him to shape it.

Spencer blinked, stunned. His lips parted. “You—what?”

“She was a girl we took in,” Will said, the words spilling against his better judgment, “after her father tried to kill her. Hannibal brought her into our house. Into my life. And for a time, I thought—” He faltered, shaking his head once, bitter. “I thought I could have been a good father.”

He didn’t look at Hannibal when he said it. He stared at the table instead, his voice edged with the old resentment that still hadn’t dulled. “But Hannibal…”

“Gutted her,” Hannibal supplied, finally, as calm as if he were naming an ingredient. His tone carried no apology, no defense—only the weight of fact. “They remind us of Abigail because they want you—” he glanced now, sharply, at Spencer—“to believe you could be made into her killer too.”

Spencer flinched, the photos crinkling in his grasp. Dexter’s shoulders stiffened, hands curling into fists at his sides.

“You had a daughter?” Spencer’s voice was low, incredulous, wounded by proxy.

“A daughter we failed,” Will answered, softer, his eyes dark with memory. “And they know how much that failure lives in us. They want it to live in you.”

Dexter’s head shook sharply, almost violently. “That’s what this is. Psychological warfare. They don’t know us—they don’t get to.” He looked at Spencer, his voice harsh but meant for him. “They don’t get to make us into someone else’s ghosts.”

Hannibal finally set the photo down with clinical precision, but his eyes stayed fixed on Spencer’s. “You must understand, Dr. Reid. They mean to hurt you. That is all.”

Spencer didn’t answer. He only slipped the pictures back into his jacket pocket, holding them as if they might burn, or save him.

Dexter waited until the others’ voices thinned into the paper-scrape of utensils and the soft, distancing hum of their conversation. He stepped close enough that Spencer could see the white at the edge of his knuckles.

“Alone?” he asked, low.

Spencer nodded, pocketing the photos with a slow deliberation. The room narrowed to the space between them. He smelled faintly of blood on his hands—still—not scrubbed away, and something like a challenge flashed in his eyes.

Dexter leaned in until his mouth was almost at Reid’s ear. His voice was a hard, hot whisper, all the rasp of sleep-deprived hunger and a day’s worth of fury. “Now I really, really want them on my fucking table.”

The words landed like a thrown knife. Spencer’s face shifted—shock, then a wary, almost delighted calculation. For a long breath he didn’t answer. When he did it was softer, not quite conciliatory and not quite a dare. “Then let’s make sure they deserve it,” he said. “Not for us to be monsters for their show—because we’re not trophies in their theater.”

Dexter’s mouth hooked, a humorless half-smile that never reached his eyes. “No,” he agreed. “We choose the rules. We choose the line.”

Spencer blinked once, then met Dexter’s gaze until something in him settled. The moment was private and sharp and terrible and it tied them tighter than any of the violent words exchanged at the table. They walked back into the others’ talk as if nothing had been said, but both carried that whisper with them like an ember, red and hot against the ribs.

The call came in just after dawn. Locals had found a scene on the edge of Verona, an old granary that had long since fallen to ruin. The carabinieri had stumbled over it first, then called in, the words tumbling in a mix of shock and disgust. Two bodies, they’d said. Mostly bones. Arranged.

By the time the BAU arrived, the square was cordoned off, the granary’s stone throat yawning wide. Inside, the air was stale with iron and smoke, though there was no fire. Just bones. Bones and ritual.

Emily moved first, her face carved into stillness, but the tension in her jaw betrayed her. The tableau was exacting, deliberate—every angle chosen, every rib and femur arranged with the precision of someone staging an opera.

JJ’s breath hitched, but she held it steady, forcing herself not to flinch. The skulls had been cleaned, not perfectly, but enough that their empty sockets seemed to follow them.

Luke muttered something under his breath, a curse or a prayer, no one was sure. Tara catalogued the pattern in silence, lips moving as she traced the logic of the display.

Rossi was the one who said it aloud, his voice rough. “It’s not random. It’s art. Hannibal’s hand is all over this.”

Emily nodded, slow. “But not just his. Reid’s signature is here too. Look.” She pointed to the teeth marks scored deep into one of the radius bones, brutal, human. “That isn’t Hannibal. That’s raw. That’s… him.”

A hush fell.

JJ’s hand pressed hard against her mouth before she forced it down. “Spence,” she whispered, as though the name itself could undo what lay in front of them.

“Don’t,” Rossi snapped, though his tone carried more sorrow than anger. “This isn’t the Reid you knew. He left his teeth in someone’s bones.”

“Jesus Christ. He didn’t just kill. He fed. Like a fucking animal.”

JJ’s control cracked; she swore under her breath, shaking her head. “Goddammit, Spencer. You ripped someone apart with your mouth. Who the hell even does that?”

Luke’s eyes narrowed, fury flashing. “He enjoyed it. You don’t leave marks like that unless you’re savoring it. That bastard liked it.” His hand twitched near his holster as if instinct could replace reason. “You give me a clean shot at him, I’ll put him down myself.”

Tara’s jaw tightened. Her voice was cool but laced with revulsion. “He didn’t hesitate. That kind of violence isn’t a slip—it’s a choice. And it’s obscene.”

Emily stood rigid, fists clenched at her sides. Her voice cut through, flat and sharp as glass: “This isn’t weakness. This isn’t Hannibal forcing him. This is Spencer. He wanted this.”

JJ’s voice rose, raw and trembling with rage. “No, this isn’t the man who held my kids, who read them bedtime stories. That man’s dead. This—this thing wearing his face is a monster.”

Derek leaned forward, hands in ghe air, voice tight. “You want to know what I said to him? To Dexter?” His tone was all iron and bitterness. “I looked him dead in the face and told him, ‘Pretty Boy had it in him.’”

The room jolted at the words.

“Because it was obvious,” Derek pressed, his voice rising, raw. “The marks, the look in his eyes, the way Dexter didn’t deny it. Reid’s not just killing with him. He’s… with him. And Dexter’s wearing it like a badge. Like it proves something. Like they’ve made themselves into a pair.”

Emily’s brow furrowed hard. JJ’s face crumpled. Tara’s lips parted but no sound came.

Derek shoved back in his chair, disgust dripping from every word. “That should be sacred. What happens between people like that. And instead it’s—God—blood, and domination, and biting chunks out of someone’s body like it means love. Like it means trust.” He spat the last word.

JJ flinched, shaking her head. “No. No, that’s not Spencer.”

But Derek wasn’t letting go. “That’s exactly what it is now. He let himself get pulled down into Dexter’s filth. And the worst part? He’s not fighting it. He’s leaning into it. Enjoying it.” His fist landed hard against the table. “I’ve seen monsters use each other, but this? This is the first time I’ve seen one of our own turn intimacy into another weapon.”

The words hung, jagged and merciless.

Rossi’s voice, gravel-edged, cut through the silence: “And that makes them harder to separate. Harder to break. Because now it’s not just the kills binding them—it’s everything else too.”

No one contradicted him.

The night sat heavy over Verona, pressing heat into the stone walls of their room. Spence had scrubbed the last of the blood from under his nails, but the memory clung as stubbornly as the ache in his jaw. Across from him, Dexter was coiled in the chair by the window, eyes on the street below, but not really seeing.

It was Spence who broke the silence first, voice sharp with dry amusement. “So, Dex. You going to keep staring at nothing all night, or do I actually get your company?”

Dex turned his head at last, and the faintest smirk tugged at his mouth. “Company, huh? You don’t exactly make it easy.”

The name hung between them, intimate in a way neither had intended, more binding than blood.

Spence tilted his head, feigning innocence but letting the sarcasm drip. “Maybe I like watching you squirm.”

Dex huffed out a breath, low, dark. “You’re too good at it, Spence.”

The name hung between them, stripped of formality, too raw to take back.

Spence’s mouth curved, but his eyes stayed hard. “You wear it well, Dex. Like I own you already.”

Dex’s jaw tightened, a laugh caught somewhere between defiance and surrender. “Careful. You don’t know what it takes to own me.”

Spence leaned forward, elbows on his knees, voice dropping to a low, taunting murmur. “Don’t I?”

The silence stretched until it started to feel like a third presence in the room. Not absence — pressure. The kind that made skin itch and breath catch, the kind that reminded Dexter of stalking prey and Spencer of holding a chess piece over the board too long.

Spence broke it first, his voice sharp but almost lazy, like he didn’t need to raise it to cut deep. “You’re staring again, Dex. What’s it this time? My hands? My mouth?” He flexed his fingers deliberately, knuckles cracking, then dragged his thumb slow across his lower lip, smearing nothing — just the ghost of memory.

Dex’s throat worked, the sound low, restrained, but his eyes didn’t move. “You like putting on a show, don’t you?”

Spence leaned back in his chair, legs spreading wider, posture dripping insolence. “For you? Always.”

Dex’s laugh was dry, but it snagged in his chest. “You’ll push too far.”

“You’ll let me,” Spence countered, and there wasn’t a tremor in it — only certainty.

The room felt hotter than it should have, the air too close, every shift of fabric suddenly audible. The ghost of blood still clung to them both, metallic, stubborn. It hadn’t left the room, and neither had what they’d done.

Spence tilted his head, studying Dex the way he once studied case files, sharp and ruthless. “Tell me, when you touched yourself in that bathroom, who was it you saw? Me above you? Or you finally pinning me down the way you keep pretending you want to?”

Dex inhaled hard through his nose, fighting to keep steady. “You talk too much.”

Spence’s grin widened, wolfish. “And you break too easy.”

Then, deliberate as a predator, he rose from the chair. The air between them tightened as he crossed it — not fast, not slow, but with a precision that made every step feel intentional.

Dex didn’t retreat. He never did. He only lifted his chin slightly, forcing his body not to betray the surge of heat rising in his chest.

Spence stopped close enough that Dex could count his eyelashes. His voice dipped low, almost whisper-soft, but the mockery still ran through it like poison. “You think you’re the one hunting, but you’re not. You never were.”

Dex’s lips twitched, something between a smile and a snarl. “Funny. You bleed, I clean. You flail, I contain. Tell me again who’s in control, Spence.”

That earned him a quick move — Spence’s hand caught his jaw, tilting his head with the easy strength of someone who knew how to control a body. Their mouths brushed, not a kiss, more like a threat disguised as one.

Then Spencer pulled back, just out of reach, a wicked satisfaction in his eyes. “Punishment,” he murmured. “Because you wanted it too much.”

Dex’s chest heaved once, sharp. He snapped forward, slamming Spence lightly against the wall, lips crushing his, teeth clashing — not tender, not gentle. He was stronger, and he knew it.

But Spence bent, didn’t break. He laughed against Dex’s mouth, biting hard enough to taste copper. “That all you’ve got?” he goaded, pushing back with his body, shoving Dex’s shoulders until they crashed into the opposite wall.

For a beat they wrestled against plaster, lips still finding each other between the force of shoves and harsh laughter. Neither gave an inch willingly — every kiss felt like a war declaration, every retreat like a calculated strike.

Dex pressed his forearm across Spence’s chest, pinning him again, voice ragged against his mouth. “Say it. Say you’re mine.”

Spence’s eyes blazed, dark, feral. He leaned in until their lips almost touched again, breath hot. “No,” he hissed, then bit Dex’s lower lip until he flinched. “You’re mine.”

Dex’s breath stuttered, but he didn’t retreat. He shoved back into Spence’s mouth, kissing like a counterpunch, like he could choke the word down his throat.

Spence moaned against it — not surrender, but delight. His hands clawed into Dex’s shoulders, dragging him closer, their teeth knocking hard enough to sting. Then he wrenched his mouth away, laughing low, mean. “Pathetic,” he spat, but his nails dug in deeper, holding Dex there like he couldn’t bear to let him go.

Dex slammed him again, shoulder to chest, pinning him hard against the wall. His lips found Spence’s jaw, biting down, not playful — cruel, claiming. “Pathetic? You’re trembling.”

“I’m thrumming,” Spence shot back, gasping, head tipped to expose his throat in a defiant dare. “And you can’t stop drinking it in.”

Dex froze for a heartbeat, staring at the pulse under pale skin, the vein thrumming with adrenaline. His control frayed. He pressed his lips there, open, biting just shy of blood, breath harsh.

Spence shivered, but his grin returned — savage, smug. He twisted his fingers into Dex’s hair and yanked his head back, forcing eye contact. “Go on,” he taunted, voice low, rough. “Do it. Tear me open.”

Dex growled, a sound too raw to be human, and crashed his mouth back onto Spence’s. The kiss was ugly, punishing, a tangle of blood, teeth, spit — not love, not tenderness, only hunger and defiance.

When he finally wrenched back, his voice cracked through his ragged breath. “One day, Spence. One day, I’ll ruin you.”

Spence’s laugh was wild, broken at the edges, but triumphant. “You already are.”

Dex let out a laugh that wasn’t laughter at all — sharp, guttural. “You said it would ruin me,” he growled, voice scraping low, “when I almost said love.” His hand slid up Spence’s ribs, fingers pressing like he might crack them one by one. “But this—” he jerked his head forward, bruising another kiss against Spence’s mouth, biting his lower lip until copper rose between them, “—this is what ruins me.”

Spence gasped into it, lips bloody, and then pushed harder, reversing the slam, shoving Dex against the wall with a strength that startled even him. “And yet you let me,” Spence hissed, breath shaking but grin savage. His palm came back to Dex’s throat, pressing just enough to choke the next word out of him. “You want me to.”

Dex choked, then laughed, half-mad. “God, I do.” His voice broke on it, equal parts fury and need. “And I hate it.”

Spence leaned in until their mouths were almost joined again, teeth grazing teeth. “Hate it more,” he whispered, and then kissed him with a violence that felt like punishment — a brutal rhythm, biting, dragging Dex with him into the dark current.

Dex’s breath was ragged against Spence’s mouth, their foreheads slick, pressed together. He still clutched at Spence’s waist like he couldn’t let go, couldn’t stop.

Spence let the silence drag, savoring the tremor in Dex’s shoulders, the way his jaw worked like he was chewing on words he couldn’t spit out. Then, voice low, cruel as broken glass, Spence said:

“Say love again and I’ll gut you.” His thumb pressed harder under Dex’s chin, tilting his face up with humiliating ease. His eyes burned with a manic gleam. “Not quick, not clean — I’ll cut you open slow, let you watch me take everything out of you until there’s nothing left but the want.”

Dex’s laugh came cracked, wild — like someone who knew he was walking into a blade and couldn’t stop. “You’d still keep me breathing,” he rasped, eyes blazing up at him.

Spence leaned closer, lips grazing but not giving, his words a serrated whisper against Dex’s mouth: “Only long enough to hear you beg me not to stop.”

Spence’s threat still hung in the air, heavy and vicious, when Dex finally pushed back. His grip tightened at Spence’s wrist, his smile sharp but shaking, like he was gambling with dynamite.

“It’s okay,” Dex murmured, eyes boring into him. “You’re not worthy of love anyway.”

The words cracked something raw in Spence. His pupils widened, jaw clenched — a flicker of panic disguised as rage. Then he snapped.

He shoved Dex hard against the wall, the thud echoing in the narrow room. His hand closed around Dex’s throat again, tighter this time, thumb digging in until Dex’s breath stuttered. His voice was ice, trembling with the fury of a man who’d heard the one truth he couldn’t face.

“Don’t you ever say that to me.” His teeth bared as he hissed it, spittle flecking Dex’s cheek. “You don’t get to decide what I’m worth.”

Dex coughed out a laugh, defiant even with the bruising grip on his throat. “Looks like I already did.”

Spence’s response was brutal — a kiss more like a bite, smashing into Dex’s mouth, tasting of blood and fury, tearing a groan from him that blurred pain and want until they were indistinguishable. His nails raked down Dex’s chest through the fabric, punishing, claiming, daring him to say it again.

Spence didn’t let up. His grip on Dex’s throat stayed iron, his other hand clawing at his jaw, forcing him to keep eye contact. Every inch of his body leaned in, pressing Dex harder into the wall, pinning him there with raw fury.

“You think I’m not worthy?” Spence snarled, teeth flashing as he crashed his mouth against Dex’s again — not a kiss, not really. A brutal claiming. He bit Dex’s lower lip until he tasted copper, until Dex groaned and swallowed the pain like it was fuel.

Dex’s laugh was ragged, bloodied. “If this is how you prove your worth, Spence—” he choked on the pressure around his throat, but forced the words out, sharp as glass, “—then maybe you’re more pathetic than I thought.”

That made Spence snap harder. He yanked Dex’s head back by the hair and sank his teeth into the side of his neck, harder than before, breaking skin. Dex hissed, a groan twisting into something halfway between agony and dark pleasure.

Spence pulled back just far enough to spit Dex’s blood onto the floor between them, eyes wild. “Pathetic?” His voice was low, dangerous. “Pathetic is you—letting me tear you apart and still wanting more.”

Dex’s smirk returned, shaky but unbroken. “Maybe I do want more,” he rasped, licking blood from the corner of his mouth. “Doesn’t make you worthy, though. Just makes you cruel.”

Spence’s hand tightened again, knuckles whitening. He leaned in until his lips brushed Dex’s ear, voice a razor’s whisper: “Cruel gets remembered. Weak gets forgotten. Which one do you think you’ll be?”

Spence froze at the words — again. “You are not worthy of love.” Dex repeated. They landed sharper than any blade, sharper than his teeth had cut through flesh.

For a heartbeat, his grip slackened, like the ground had been ripped out from under him. Then the anger surged back in tidal force, messy and desperate. His hand crushed Dex’s throat again, shaking, his breath ragged.

“Say it fucking again!” Spence’s voice cracked, half a roar, half a plea. His eyes burned wet, tears cutting violent streaks through the blood smeared on his face. “Go on! You think I don’t know what I am? You think I haven’t heard it my whole fucking life?” He slammed Dex back into the wall, sobs ripping through the words even as his hips pressed forward, even as his body betrayed him with hunger.

Dex stared at him, throat raw under Spence’s grip, lips swollen and bloody — and still, still, he whispered it: “You’re not worthy of love.”

That broke him. Spencer’s tears spilled fully now, hot, furious, unstoppable. He bit down hard into Dex’s shoulder, almost animal, tasting blood and salt and his own tears. He shook against him, angry and aroused, unable to stop grinding against the very man who had gutted him with words.

“You son of a bitch,” Spence hissed, voice ruined by the sob. “You think you get to decide? You think you get to—” His words dissolved into a ragged scream as he shoved Dex’s head back against the plaster.

Dex’s laugh came through broken, breathless, but defiant. “Guess I hit the vein, Spence.” He coughed, eyes locked with him. “Maybe…maybe you hate me because I’m right.”

And Spence’s only answer was another sob, another violent kiss, crushing and wet with blood and salt, his tears running down into Dex’s mouth like a bitter communion.

“Enough!”

Dex’s voice cracked the air like a whip. He shoved Spence back with the flat of his palm against his chest — not violent, but immovable, the way a wall refuses to move when you slam into it. His breath came hard, chest rising and falling, blood dripping from the bite on his shoulder.

Spence tried to lunge forward again, face wet and furious, but Dexter’s hand stayed there, firm. “No. Not this time.” His tone was low, commanding, sharper than Spence had ever heard it. “You’re going to stop. Right here. Right now.”

Spence’s jaw trembled. His hands flexed like claws wanting to tear, but he stilled under that voice. His breath rattled, uneven, like a sob caught in his throat.

Dex leaned in, their faces almost touching, his words deliberate and merciless. “Tell me why.”

Spence’s eyes darted, wild, cornered. “Why what?”

“Why you believe it.” Dexter’s voice did not waver. “Why you believe you’re not worthy of love. I want to hear you say it. Out loud.”

Silence stretched between them, cruel and suffocating. Spencer’s lips trembled, pressed tight as if he could keep the words locked inside his chest forever.

Dexter pressed harder on his sternum, his tone colder. “You tear me apart with your teeth, you bleed me, you push me to the edge—but you don’t get to hide behind that rage. Not now. You tell me why, Spence. Or you don’t move another inch.”

Spence let out a jagged laugh that broke halfway into a sob. “Because it’s true.” His voice was raw, cracked open. “Because everyone I ever loved has either left me, died, or hated me. Because I destroy everything I touch. Because I scare the people who once swore they cared. Because when they look at me now, all they see is a monster.” His voice cracked again, sharper this time. “And you—you just said it out loud.”

For a long moment Dexter didn’t move. His hand was still flat on Spence’s chest, but the strength in it shifted — not a shove anymore, not a barrier, just weight. His eyes softened, though his jaw stayed set, fighting something inside him.

Spence’s face was streaked with tears, chest heaving, words spent like knives thrown at the dark. He looked shattered and furious at once, like a man who wanted to bite his own heart out rather than let it be touched.

Dexter’s voice came quieter this time, frayed at the edges. “You’re wrong.”

Spence shook his head hard, teeth clenched. “Don’t—”

Dexter cut him off. “You’re wrong. And I can prove it with one word.” His throat worked around the weight of it. His lips parted, but he didn’t let it fall. Not yet.

Spence blinked at him, dazed, still trembling. “Then say it.” His voice was cracked, pleading without meaning to be.

Dexter leaned in until their foreheads almost touched, breath hot between them. His hand slid up from Spence’s chest to his throat, not pressing, just holding him there, forcing eye contact.

“Beg me,” Dexter whispered, low and shaking. “Beg me to say it, Spence. If you want the word you’re so afraid of—if you want to hear it from me—you’re going to ask for it.”

Spence let out a ragged breath that was half a laugh, half a sob, disbelief cutting through the wreckage of his face. His lips trembled. “You son of a bitch…”

Dexter’s eyes burned. “Say it. Ask me.”

Spence’s throat worked beneath Dexter’s palm, but he didn’t yield. His eyes were glassy, furious, alive with that terrible hunger, but he still forced out a rasp: “No. I won’t beg for scraps.”

Dexter’s mouth curved in something that wasn’t a smile. He leaned closer until the words brushed directly against Spence’s lips.

“Then you won’t get them,” he murmured. “Not until you admit you want them. Not until you admit you want me saying them.”

Spence let out a sound — strangled, wet, halfway between a sob and a snarl. He shook his head, defiant even as tears streaked down his cheeks, even as his body trembled under Dexter’s grip.

Dexter held his ground, eyes steady, tone deliberate. “I’m not going to say it just to break you. You’ll hear it when you earn it. When you ask. Until then, you’ll choke on the silence, Spence. My silence.”

The air between them thickened, hot and unbearable, neither moving, neither blinking. Spence’s chest hitched as if the fight itself was ripping through him.

Dexter kept his hand steady on his throat, not cruel, not tender — commanding. “You wanted me to take control? This is me taking it. You don’t get the word unless I hear you ask for it.”

Spence’s tears burned his cheeks, his breaths sharp and ragged. He wanted to spit fury, to claw his way free, but Dexter’s hand stayed there — not crushing, just firm enough to remind him who held control now. The steadiness of it, the terrifying calm, unmade him more than violence ever could.

“Say it,” Dexter ordered, low, cutting through the silence. “Beg for it.”

Spence jerked under the grip, trembling with rage and arousal in equal measure. His lips curled, but the word still escaped, cracked and humiliated: “Please.”

Dexter’s eyes didn’t move. He wanted more. He leaned in until his forehead brushed Spence’s, until Spence could feel every deliberate exhale. “Again.”

Spence’s laugh came out choked, furious, bitter. “Fuck you.” His hands twitched against Dexter’s arms, claws with no strength behind them. His voice broke into something closer to a sob. “Fuck you, Dexter.”

Dexter’s hand pressed just a little tighter, not to hurt but to pin him to the moment, hold him inside it. “Beg again, I said.” Each word deliberate, dangerous, leaving no room for refusal.

Spence’s head fell back against the wall with a dull thud. His teeth ground together, his body quaking with the effort of resistance. The silence stretched, heavy, brutal. Then, with a sound closer to a whimper than a word, he yielded.

“Please.” The syllable was raw, stripped of irony. His eyes fluttered shut, tears slick at the corners. His voice broke again, softer, shakier: “Please, Dexter. Please.”

Only then did Dexter’s hand ease from his throat, his fingers brushing Spence’s jaw almost tenderly. His voice shifted, all the roughness gone, replaced with warmth so gentle it cut deeper than cruelty ever had.

“I love you, Spence.”

Spence’s head was still tipped back against the wall, chest rising too fast, his throat blotched where Dexter’s grip had pressed him down. His mouth twisted, trembling between rage and relief.

“Fuck you, Dex,” he spat, though his voice shook. “Why’d you make me beg so much?”

Dexter’s hand lingered, thumb dragging slowly along Spence’s jaw as if weighing the crack in his armor. His reply came low, deliberate. “Because it mattered. Because I wanted it torn out of you, not tossed away.” He leaned in closer, lips a breath from Spencer’s ear. “And now it’s your turn.”

Spence stiffened. “No.”

Dexter’s eyes didn’t waver. “Yes.”

“No, Dexter.” Spence’s laugh was raw, broken glass edged in defiance. “I won’t.”

Dexter’s palm pressed harder against his chest, steady, unrelenting. “You will. Because you want to. Because it’s eating you alive not to.”

Spence bared his teeth, desperate to make it a snarl but failing. “Fuck you.”

“Beg again, I said,” Dexter whispered, tone like steel.

The words slid under Spencer’s skin, lodged deep, burning. His whole body shook with the effort of holding them back. Seconds stretched, a silence sharp enough to cut through bone. His throat worked, his lips parted—then closed again.

Dexter’s gaze pinned him harder than any hand could. “Spence,” he murmured, quieter now, almost kind. “Say it.”

Spence’s chest shuddered. He tried to laugh, it broke halfway into something too close to a sob. He turned his face aside, but Dexter caught his chin, held him there, made him look.

Finally, the fight cracked. The words spilled raw, unwilling, torn from someplace he didn’t want to admit existed:

“I fucking love you, Dex.”

It came out hoarse, furious, and trembling with something too close to bliss.

The conference room smelled of burnt coffee and paper that had been rifled through too many times. Screens glowed dim in the half-dark, showing grainy stills of Reid and Morgan’s alley encounter with Dexter, crime scene photos from Venice and Verona, and the latest analysis of bite patterns on the bones they’d recovered.

Rossi leaned back in his chair, arms folded, studying the collage like it was one of his old cases resurrected. Morgan sat forward, elbows planted on the table, his jaw tight.

“They’re not just killing together,” Morgan said finally, breaking the silence. “They’re feeding off each other. Look at this—” he jabbed a finger at the photos of the strangled, bitten corpse in Venice. “That wasn’t Dexter’s work. That was Reid. And it wasn’t cautious or neat. It was… raw. He wanted the man to know he was dying under his hands. Wanted him to thrash. And Dexter let him. Hell, Dexter watched him.”

Rossi’s voice came low, deliberate: “Watched him, and then reinforced it. He staged the body with Reid’s violence still written on it. That’s partnership. That’s validation.” He gestured toward the overlapping DNA reports. “Reid marks. Dexter records. Reid rips. Dexter frames. It’s a dance. And each one gets exactly what he needs.”

Morgan exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “It’s worse than that. Look at the progression. Reid’s escalating—first the farmer, impulsive, sloppy. Then Venice, violent but almost purposeful. And then Verona… Jesus, Rossi, he’s not just killing now. He’s owning it. The bite marks weren’t just about silencing the victim—they were about marking territory. Marking Dexter. That’s not just murder, that’s…” He trailed off.

“Possession,” Rossi supplied. His tone carried no hesitation. “You saw Dexter’s neck yourself. He let Reid put those marks on him. Didn’t fight it. Maybe even wanted it. They’re blurring the line between victim and partner, lover and executioner. One marks, the other wears the mark.”

Morgan sat back, running a hand over his face. “That’s what gets me. I’ve seen dominant/submissive dynamics before, sadists and masochists, couples who feed each other’s sickness. But this? It’s not just sex. It’s strategy. Every fight between them, every shove, every bite—it’s a rehearsal. A test. They push until they find the edge, then they step over it together. Violence is how they say love.”

Rossi’s mouth curved grimly. “And that makes them more dangerous than Hannibal and Will. Because Will and Hannibal are ritualists—they want the stage, the performance, the opera. Reid and Dexter? They’re improvisers. One provokes, the other retaliates. And the result is chaos that only they can navigate. You try to wedge them apart, you only give them a new enemy to unite against.”

Morgan’s jaw tightened. “So what are you saying? That Pretty Boy and the Butcher are locked in some kind of twisted honeymoon phase? That they’ll just keep escalating until one of them breaks—or until they start dragging innocents into their games?”

Rossi’s eyes didn’t leave the photo of Reid’s bloodied mouth from the boathouse. “I’m saying they’ve already dragged innocents in. And they won’t stop. The violence between them isn’t a fracture—it’s the glue. Every cut, every bruise, every bite—it keeps them bound. You don’t separate them by force. You corner one, the other comes snapping. You threaten their bond, they’ll close ranks.”

For a long moment, silence stretched between them. The screen flickered with the image of Spencer Reid’s face frozen in ecstasy, smeared with blood not his own.

Morgan muttered, half to himself, half to Rossi: “I didn’t think Reid had it in him. But he does. And Dexter—he likes it. Likes letting him loose.”

Rossi gave a single, quiet nod. “Two killers who found in each other the exact shape of violence they were missing. It’s not just recognition, Derek. It’s reinforcement. It’s… evolution.”

Morgan leaned back, disgust written plain across his face. “Evolution that looks a hell of a lot like love.”

Morgan hadn’t stopped pacing. His hands were clenched, like he needed to hold onto something before his temper snapped. “You know what really messes with me, Rossi? The way they kill. It’s not the same, but it’s not opposite either. It’s like two halves of the same sick coin.”

Rossi leaned forward, elbows on the table, voice calm but cutting. “Dexter’s compulsion is control. His kills are clean, wrapped, surgical. He needs his environment to bend to him—plastic walls, neat lines, victims taped down like specimens. That’s how he manages the chaos inside. Every ritual is about keeping the monster caged, letting it out only under the rules of his Code.”

Morgan stopped pacing long enough to look at the photos again—the bite marks, the strangulation bruises, the blood spatter that had been half-smeared by Reid’s hands. “And Reid?”

“Reid doesn’t kill for control,” Rossi said, his eyes narrowing. “He kills for release. For the storm that’s been bottled inside him his whole life. All the empathy, all the suppressed anger, every injustice he catalogued but never acted on—it bursts out when he finally breaks. That’s why he bites, Derek. That’s why he strangles. He wants to feel the resistance, the terror, the life draining away under his hands. He wants to be overwhelmed, because that’s the only time he doesn’t feel powerless.”

Morgan swore under his breath. “So one needs total control, the other needs to lose it completely. And together—”

“Together,” Rossi interrupted, “they’re a closed circuit. Dexter builds the room, sets the rules, makes sure the Code stays intact. Reid blows the rules apart, feels the chaos, drinks the power. They each give the other what they can’t get alone. Reid gives Dexter the chaos he secretly craves but can’t allow himself. Dexter gives Reid the structure that keeps him from burning out too fast, too sloppy. It’s balance, Derek. Twisted balance, but balance.”

Morgan rubbed the back of his neck, shaking his head. “It makes sense. I hate that it makes sense. Reid’s whole life, people were telling him what he couldn’t control—his mother’s illness, his own brain, his body, his emotions. You pile that up long enough, eventually he finds power in the only place no one can take it from him: in taking someone else’s life.”

Rossi’s voice went quieter, heavy with the weight of it. “And Dexter—he was taught to manage his darkness with rules, with ritual. But the truth is, rules don’t satisfy. They just contain. When he sees Reid lose control, he sees something he can’t allow himself. And instead of stopping it, he… admires it. Maybe even envies it. And then he turns it into order afterward. Two killers teaching each other how to need differently, how to want differently.”

Morgan’s fists tightened. “You’re saying this isn’t just partnership. This is evolution again, isn’t it? Reid teaching Dexter to lose control, Dexter teaching Reid to build cages for his chaos. They’re not just dangerous together, Rossi. They’re… sharpening each other.”

Rossi met his eyes. “Exactly. Two predators pushing each other into being something worse than either one could have managed alone. One can’t stop needing control. The other can’t stop needing the violence. And every time one of them kills, they both get fed.”

The room went quiet again, the weight of the conclusion heavy between them. Morgan finally muttered, almost to himself: “God help us if they figure out how to be both at once.”

The needle cracked once before it steadied, a thin hiss of vinyl filling the room. Hannibal leaned back into the chair by the window, one leg folded, the light of the streetlamp catching faintly on his profile. He had bought the record that afternoon, tucked in with the care of a relic, and now it spun in slow revolutions, filling their narrow room with something lush and old, violins bending into one another like voices.

Will lay stretched along the bed, one arm crooked under his head, watching him. “You look like you’re about to write a review,” he muttered, the corner of his mouth lifting.

“I would be a generous critic,” Hannibal replied smoothly. “This performance deserves nothing less.”

“You think everything on vinyl deserves reverence,” Will said. “Even the scratches.”

“They are history pressed into sound,” Hannibal said, with that serene finality of his. Then, softer: “As are we.”

Will exhaled a laugh, sharp but warm. “That’s bleak. Even for you.”

“It is not bleak,” Hannibal corrected. “It is continuity. A single needle drawing every moment into one long, unbroken line.”

Will shook his head, but his gaze lingered. The music swelled, then softened again, and in the pause between movements, he said, “Twenty-five days.”

Hannibal looked over.

“That’s how long it’s been since Dexter and Spencer joined us. Twenty-five days,” Will said, voice quiet but precise. “Feels longer. Or shorter, depending on which part you count.”

A rare pause in Hannibal’s composure. “An arbitrary span, yet you name it.”

“It’s not arbitrary if it feels lived,” Will said. “They’re changing faster than they know.” His tone was neither pity nor judgment—just observation. Then, with the hint of a smile: “Faster than I thought you’d allow.”

Hannibal’s fingers tapped once on the arm of the chair, then stilled. “Music demands interpretation, Will. Some players flourish under structure. Others under improvisation. Both can be exquisite, provided the audience has the ear to hear it.”

“That sounds suspiciously like approval,” Will said.

“It sounds like recognition,” Hannibal corrected again, though his gaze softened.

The record turned, violins lifting into a frenzy. Will let his eyes close, listening, then opened them again to glance at Hannibal. “This one’s too dramatic.”

“Dramatic,” Hannibal repeated, almost offended.

“It’s posturing,” Will said, grinning faintly. “I like the restraint of the last one better.”

“Restraint,” Hannibal mused, lips curving in the smallest of smiles. “How telling.”

Will laughed outright this time, low and sudden. “You don’t let me have a single opinion unexamined, do you?”

“Why would I?” Hannibal asked. “Every note of you is worth listening to.”

The music climbed again, lush, aching, as if in argument with them. Will tipped his head back against the wall, smile fading into something smaller, heavier, but not unhappy. He watched Hannibal, watched the way he didn’t look away. The room was only music and the press of silence, and the ring at Hannibal’s hand catching dim light, deliberate as always.

The violins spun themselves into a near-fever, then dropped away, leaving only the low hum of strings beneath silence. Hannibal let it linger before he spoke, his voice calm, almost conversational.

“I know,” he said, “that Dexter wants us on his table.”

Will blinked once, not startled but listening. Hannibal continued, his gaze steady:

“He tries to mask it with restraint, with that performance of discipline he clings to so fiercely. But I’ve seen it in the way he looks at us, the way he sharpens when we speak of appetite. He wants to bind us in his plastic and carve us open, as if he could measure us into his rules.”

Will’s mouth curved in a faint, mirthless smile. “And Spencer?”

“Spencer,” Hannibal said, with a quiet relish in the syllables, “would not mind watching. Perhaps even joining, in his own vampiric fashion. He savors the intimacy of blood in ways Dexter never could admit to himself. Dexter calls it urge. Spencer calls it freedom. Both are illusions, but they live them with conviction.”

Will sat up a little, elbows on his knees, eyes shadowed. “So we’re playing house with men who dream about killing us.”

“Not dream,” Hannibal corrected gently. “Resolve. Dexter frames it as morality. Spencer frames it as necessity. Yet here they remain, twenty-five days by our side.”

Will huffed out a laugh that had no humor. “Sounds like a marriage.”

Hannibal’s lips curved, almost indulgent. “All marriages contain the seed of destruction, Will. Ours, theirs—it is the nature of intimacy to blur into violence.”

Will leaned back against the wall again, eyes narrowing with something like grim amusement. “So what do we do? Wait for Dexter to sharpen his knives? For Spencer to sink his teeth in?”

Hannibal tilted his head, considering him with that patient gravity that always made the room feel heavier. “We play the music louder. We let them dance to it. And when the moment comes, we decide whether to finish the performance—or change the key.”

The record clicked into silence, needle humming in its groove. Hannibal didn’t move to change it. He watched instead, patient, as Will rubbed a hand down his face and then let it drop, his eyes dark with something sharper than exhaustion.

“You’d eat them,” Will said flatly. No preamble, no art. Just the blunt edge of truth. “You’d fucking love it.”

Hannibal inclined his head, almost a bow, as if inviting Will to keep going.

Will laughed once, low and bitter. “Dexter with his neat lines, his goddamn garbage bags—he’d be a feast for you. Not just the flesh, but the ritual. You’d savor cutting through all that control. And Spencer—Christ, Spencer—he comes at his kills like he’s starving, like the world owes him its blood. You’d take one look at him covered in it and think he was already half yours.”

Still Hannibal didn’t interrupt, only the faintest narrowing of his eyes betraying the pleasure of hearing Will’s voice on these truths.

“You sit there, listening to your records, acting like you’re above them. But you want to taste them, don’t you? All that blood, all that hunger, right under your nose for twenty-five days.” Will leaned forward, vulgar now, unashamed. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Hannibal. You’d eat them. Every bite.”

The room hung heavy in the wake of his words.

Hannibal’s smile was slow, deliberate, a shadow moving over light. “I have never denied myself the beauty of appetite, Will. But only you get to tell me such things with such… language.”

Will let out a harsh breath, half laugh, half curse, running a hand through his hair. “Fuck you,” he said, but the corner of his mouth betrayed the smallest curl upward.

Hannibal leaned back, content, and finally rose to change the record.

But then Hannibal’s voice returned, rougher than usual, stripped of its polish. “You’re right, Will. I would eat them. Both of them. Their flesh, their control, their hunger—it tempts me. I think about it more often than you imagine.” He turned his head, eyes sharp in the dim light. “But you—only you—make me want something beyond appetite. If I devoured them, it would only be meat. With you, it is meaning.”

Will stared at him, something like heat and disgust and want all at once running under his skin. “You’re a bastard,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Hannibal agreed. No defense, no denial. Just the word, steady as breath.

For a moment they sat in the quiet, the record spinning up its next track. Then, abruptly, Will snorted. “I wish we had a fucking TV in this room.”

Hannibal’s brow arched, the faintest smile tugging at his lips. “A television?”

“Yeah. Trashy reality shows. Dating shows, maybe. Potato chips. I could watch people scream at each other about nothing, eat my way through a family-sized bag, and fucking die of cholesterol right there on the couch.”

Hannibal let out a short, almost incredulous laugh, the kind that slipped out despite all his control. “I would slap you,” he said, half laughing, reaching lazily toward Will’s hand as if to make good on the threat.

Will grinned, shaking his head. “No, I wouldn’t let you.” He caught Hannibal’s wrist and shoved it back, not hard, just enough to turn the gesture into play.

Hannibal’s eyes glinted, and he tried again—quicker this time, fingers darting out in a mock slap. Will dodged, snorting out a laugh, and caught Hannibal’s hand mid-air. For a moment he held it pinned between them, triumphant, until Hannibal twisted his wrist free with a smooth flick, going in for another half-hearted strike.

Will batted him away, grinning wider now, the lines of his face softening in a way that few ever saw. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Oh?” Hannibal arched a brow, feigning offense. He shifted closer, moving deliberately slow as if preparing a grand, operatic strike—only to suddenly dart at Will again.

This time Will was ready. He grabbed Hannibal’s fingers and pushed them back toward him, laughing outright. The sound was unguarded, boyish, surprising even to himself. Hannibal’s chuckle rose in response, low and warm, filling the room with something lighter than either of them had known in months.

What followed was less a struggle than a child’s game. Hannibal kept reaching, trying to catch Will’s hand in a playful slap, and Will kept blocking him, twisting their wrists together, pushing him back. At one point their fingers locked, palms pressing against each other as if testing strength, each of them leaning in, grinning, eyes locked with the kind of heat that wasn’t hunger or rage, but something simpler, rarer.

The laughter came in bursts—Will huffing out a “Christ, stop,” even as he shoved Hannibal back again, Hannibal smiling with a strange, almost tender delight at how Will let himself be unguarded in this moment.

It didn’t last only a second. It stretched, stretched into something ridiculous and joyful, until Will was laughing so hard he finally collapsed back onto the bed, one arm thrown over his eyes. Hannibal stood over him, dignified but smiling, adjusting the cuff of his sleeve as if the whole thing had been nothing more than a demonstration of composure—though the mirth still tugged at the corners of his mouth.

Will was still laughing, breathless, his arm shielding his eyes. “You’re ridiculous,” he muttered, half through a grin, voice muffled.

Hannibal watched him for a beat, his smile sharpening into something conspiratorial. Then, with the quiet precision of a hunter, he crouched, slipped a hand past Will’s guard, and tapped his cheek with the gentlest mock-slap.

Will’s arm fell away instantly, eyes wide in mock outrage, before another laugh burst out of him, helpless and bright. “You bastard,” he said, shoving Hannibal’s shoulder—but it had no heat, no resistance.

Hannibal only straightened, the trace of triumph unmistakable in his eyes. “Victory,” he said, softly, as if the word itself were a secret.

Will rolled his eyes, still smiling, shaking his head as he sat up. “Not victory,” he said. “Balance.”

The park had thinned; afternoon light slanted, gilding the backs of pigeons and the hair of a pair of girls who laughed as they wandered between plane trees. The bench felt private though it wasn’t; the world continued in its small, oblivious movements. Spencer looked down at the cupcake in his hand as if reading a page he’d written for another life. He split it with the precision of someone who’d once handled fragile evidence and pressed the smaller half into Dexter’s mouth as if committing him to a pact.

Dexter chewed, the sugar soft on his tongue. The gesture — intimate and absurd — made both of them smile in the same slow, small way, the kind of smile that arrives when the world briefly aligns with an interior hunger that is not only animal.

“Sweet,” Spencer said, voice close enough that Dexter felt it against his ear. “Not all of which is bad.”

They sat like that a long time, the quiet between them a thing they could shape. Finally, Dexter set the ruined paper box on his knee and wiped the frosting at his mouth with the pad of his thumb, a private, practical motion.

“We do this clean,” he said, and it was not only about the technicalities. “Not for the police. Not for spectacle. For us. You take one side, I take the other. We set the parameters. We keep it measured.”

Spencer watched him, eyes slow, amused, hungry. “Measured,” he echoed. “You mean controlled. You mean: your rules. I know the code. I know what it does to you.” He toyed with a loose thread on his sleeve. “But I am not you. I want the thing I want; I want the swallowing, the closeness, the animal clarity. If I’m honest, I want to feel it in my teeth.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. He understood the anatomy of Spencer’s want — the way it had erupted that night at the farm, and the brittle joy that followed. He also remembered the parts of the world he’d chosen to keep intact, the lines Harry had drawn in the dark and the reasons for them. He had spent his life arguing with blood and conscience and finding, oddly, a form of mercy in precision.

“We won’t let it become spectacle,” Dexter said. “No grand statements. No public theater. We don’t stage a message for the world. We take care of what’s necessary and keep the rest buried.”

Spencer’s mouth quirked. “You’re remarkably moral for a man who stains his hands on purpose.”

“I have a method,” Dexter said dryly. “It keeps me from becoming something else.”

“And what if you don’t want to be kept?” Spencer murmured. His fingers brushed Dexter’s sleeve almost by accident and the touch lengthened into a small permission. “What if you want to try my way for one night?”

Dexter looked at him then — really looked: at the quickness of his throat, the hunger in the set of his chin, the small scars like punctuation. There was desire there, fierce and immediate; there was also a careful, dangerous appetite that had to be acknowledged honestly.

“Not like you,” Dexter said. “Not without rules I can live with. We’ll be present for each other. One room, two halves. You take what you need. I will be there. If you step past what we agreed — if anyone does — I stop it. I don’t hesitate.”

Spencer’s laugh was sharp and delighted. “You sound like a priest.”

“You sound like an incantation,” Dexter shot back.

Spencer reached suddenly, without a word, and tipped a dusting of sugar so that it landed at the corner of Dexter’s mouth. The gesture was playful and intimate and somehow defiant. Dexter’s thumb touched it and brushed it away; his hand remained near Spencer’s, not fully still.

They sketched the contours of the agreement in guarded sentences. No crowds. No spectacle. No children nearby (they both said the last with the same quick, private flinch). Will and Hannibal would not be in the room when they began. They would trust Dexter and Spencer to do the work their way; they would come afterward to claim the fruits in whatever ritual they intended. That last clause was a lever of trust — and of manipulation — but both men accepted it. There was an economy to these arrangements, an intimacy that traded power for complicity.

“You’ll take the first half,” Dexter said. “You’ll do the close things — the hands, the pressure — because that’s yours. I’ll do what I do. I’ll make sure it ends cleanly.”

Spencer tipped his head as if considering the geometry of their lives. “And afterwards?”

“Afterwards,” Dexter said, and his voice was softer than the rest of the plan had been, “we come back to each other. We find the pieces that are still human.”

Spencer’s smile folded and sharpened. “You mean the tender parts.”

“Yeah,” Dexter admitted. “The tender parts.”

They rose then, the little boxes empty now, and walked across the grass. Spencer’s shoulder brushed Dexter’s in the way of two people who had, in strange times, decided to hold one another’s edges. The public world strode on around them; the bench behind remained a simple mark in a city that could not know the bargains made beneath its shade.

At the gate of the park they paused. Spencer turned, quick and serious. “One more thing,” he said. “When it is done, no theatrics between you and me. Not for the cameras. Not for anyone. Keep the softness for us. Keep the rest for the world.”

Dexter’s hand found the back of Spencer’s neck, an almost-matter-of-fact clasp. He let himself stay there a second longer than necessary. “I will,” he said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Spencer turned back with a crooked grin and bumped Dexter’s hip with his own. “Good. Now, let’s get back. I want to see you be practical.”

“For you?” Dexter asked.

“For you,” Spencer said simply — a small, dangerous promise — and then they vanished into the city, strangers with a map only they could read.

They left the park with the light folding into evening behind them, the city moving into its domestic rhythms while something quieter, and darker, traveled between the two of them. Spencer walked with a loose, impatient energy; Dexter kept pace because that’s what he did — measured, cataloguing, a human metronome — but he could feel the shift. There was a book in Spencer’s step, an unread page, and a hunger in the way his hands flexed at his sides.

“You said you wanted a tool with language,” Spencer murmured when they reached the edge of the market, not a question but a prompt. “Something that says what you mean without having to explain.”

Dexter’s lips pressed into a flat line. “I said I needed an order. Not a poem.”

They threaded through stalls smelling of citrus and old leather. A vendor with a tray of odd things — obsolete keys, watch springs, a cluster of hand-carved trinkets — nodded to them as customers who had been seen and dismissed. Spencer’s eyes moved faster than the crowd; he kept drifting toward edges where someone might have put a thing down and left it to speak for itself.

They found it because Spencer would not look away. It was half-hidden beneath a pile of agricultural knives and blunt tools; at first it read like a mistake, an anachronism that didn’t belong on a market table. Then he lifted it and the light caught the blade and the world simplified.

This was not a simple blade. The spine did not run straight; instead the metal described a three-dimensional helix, a sculpted double-helix of negative space and raised ridge. The helix caught the lamp, throwing tiny ribbons of light along the scallops; under some angles the hollows seemed to spiral into darkness. The handle was worked to mirror the blade’s geometry — dark resin spun around a core of woven wire so that when you held it the weight felt balanced around the axis of your wrist. The whole thing had the clinical poetry of a laboratory instrument designed by an artist who had read too much Romantic poetry.

Spencer turned it in his hand like a child with a magazine, eyes drinking every curve. “It looks like a strand of something. Like the thing we all carry inside us,” he said softly. “Like what we hide and call names.”

Dexter watched him with the careful scrutiny he reserved for live tests. “It will throw blood differently,” he said finally, in the flat voice of a man who has learned what certain objects imply. “It’s… ornate. That means more splatter, more irregularity. I don’t want a tool that makes a scene.”

Spencer’s mouth twitched. “You’re practical as ever.” He lifted his chin and studied Dexter as if calibrating him. “But sometimes you like the scene. You like the reveal. Admit it.”

Dexter let out a small sound that could have been a laugh or a warning. “I like precision. I like the end to follow rules so the living can be left with less chaos.”

“Rules are for other people,” Spencer said, and then, because he wanted the weapon as much as anything else, because he liked the theater of wanting, he went soft for a breath and added, “I want it because it looks like what we are. Fragmented, spliced, a thing that can be read in halves. It’s ugly and exquisite and I—” He stopped, embarrassed by his own heat.

Dexter’s jaw moved. He did not reach for the knife. He did not want to. He could feel the way a helix-shaped blade would complicate everything he’d learned to do: the clean arcs, the simple geometry of cuts, the economy of motion. He could imagine the aftermath, and the thought made his hands travel to his pockets. He would not be the man to let a thing complicate his work.

“Then you’ll take the mess,” he said eventually. “You understand that. If you want it, you take what comes with it.”

Spencer’s smile was quick and dangerous. “I will take what comes with it. I’ll take the sound, the hunger, the mess. I’ll take the whole unnecessary, beautiful thing. Don’t pretend you don’t want to see that, too.”

There was an ease in Spencer’s acceptance that made Dexter, for the first time since they had been drugged and chained and turned inside out together, consider both risk and pleasure on equal footing. Some part of Dexter — the part that had been trained into order and preservation — recoiled. Some other part, older and quieter, recognized a partner in risk.

“I don’t want you to burn what comes next into a thing we can’t walk away from,” Dexter said, the edges of his voice blunt. “Not because I care what happens to them. Because I don’t want it to burn you.”

Spencer’s answer was a bright, indifferent laugh. “You worry about me like I’m porcelain.”

“You’re not,” Dexter replied. “You’re flesh and will.”

Spencer considered that and then shrugged. He handed the money over with a smile that was equal parts triumph and apology. The vendor, who had been watching the exchange with the detachment of someone who sells other people’s dangerous things for a living, wrapped the knife in a plain cloth as if concealing a relic. The bundle sat wetly warm in Spencer’s hands — a paper-weight of promise and threat.

They walked back toward the hotel with the knife between them, its corked shape muffled, the helix shadowed and secret. Dexter kept one hand near the duffel where it rested, not to take it, not yet, but to record its presence as fact. Spencer walked a few steps ahead, humming an idle cadence from a line he could not place. The city breathed around them; traffic hummed faintly; someone laughed in a doorway and the sound was ordinary and domestic.

When the door closed behind them and the muted lamplight pooled on the tarp, Spencer laid the wrapped knife on the table like a declaration. He looked at Dexter the way hunters might look at each other before a coordinated strike — not to plan so much as to feel the company.

“We do this clean,” Dexter said. “We clean as we go. No trophies left in the room. Nothing to photograph.”

Spencer inhaled. “We will wash certain things away,” he conceded, “but some marks are not for water.”

Dexter tensed, because he knew that line belonged to a man who kept secrets as one keeps a lover — necessary, private, and not without cost. He closed his eyes for one measured moment and then opened them again, steady.

“All right,” he said. “We plan. We separate the roles. You take the close.” He named nothing further; he could see the choreography in his mind, and the words only clattered when they tried to form.

Spencer’s smile was all teeth and a little pity. “I like you when you make me say the real words.”

Dexter’s hand found the duffel and tightened around the cloth-wrapped knife as if testing weight and willingness both. He had not wanted that particular geometry. He had not wanted to complicate his own discipline. But he had wanted Spencer. And for the first time the want carried a private multiplicity: for containment, for witness, for the shadow-play of being known.

When they stepped back into the dusk it felt, absurdly, like permission: a small, dangerous thing tucked like a secret in the belly of their plan.

Hannibal stood by the narrow balcony, sunlight cutting across his shoulders, and said it as if the words themselves were ritual:

“Tonight,” he told them, voice even and low, “tonight’s the night.”

The room stilled. Will leaned against the doorframe, eyes on the floor, repeating it almost to himself: “Tonight’s the night.” His voice carried both echo and assent.

“You’ll need hours, to choose victims.” Hannibal continued, measured as a conductor setting a tempo. “Find the place. Prepare the room. When it is ready, we will come — to witness, to taste, to claim.”

Dexter felt the words slot neatly into him like a blade sliding into bone. Time — not much, but enough. Enough to set the room clean and exact, to work by his own terms.

They left the little hotel together. Hannibal and Will turned into the city’s thicker streets, their pace unhurried, their closeness a silent statement. Dexter and Spencer broke away toward the edges where the houses thinned, where alleys turned into stone bones of old warehouses.

The building they chose was blunt and functional, brick long sunburnt, its insides hollow as a ribcage. Perfect.

Plastic unrolled, tape pressed flat. Dexter’s hands moved with calm precision; Spencer’s with quick, impatient energy, like someone tuning an instrument. Dexter anchored the space with his order. Spencer gave it bite, angle, a sharper edge.

“Not spectacle,” Dexter said as he smoothed a tarp. “Control.”

Spencer smiled, sharp enough to cut. “Control, then.” He liked the word, tasted it like sugar and blood.

When the room was finished, it breathed with two different pulses: Dexter’s restraint and Spencer’s hunger. Tarps gleamed. Tools waited. A geometry of violence, exact and deliberate.

Spencer appeared at Dexter’s side with an absurd offering: a cupcake he’d carried wrapped in a napkin from the osteria below. He shoved it toward Dexter with a grin. “Balance,” he said.

Dexter took it, the sweetness smearing his thumb, ridiculous in the middle of so much order. For a moment, he smiled. Spencer shoved the cupcake into his mouth, laughing under his breath, and the room briefly smelled of sugar against the metallic promise of knives.

They kissed — quick, sharp, hungry — then broke apart with a heat that had nothing to do with the work.

No one stripped the room of its intent. The plastic still shone, the knives gleamed where they had been set, the syringes stood waiting.

Dexter lifted his hand, voice steady. “We prepare. I’ll find what fits.”

Spencer’s eyes glittered. “I’ll be ready.”

Hannibal’s words hung between them still. Tonight’s the night.

The warehouse kept its silence, calm as a cathedral waiting for its sacrifice. Outside, Verona’s life went on with gelato and pigeons and the river shifting under bridges. Inside, the room waited, perfect and precise.

Tonight’s the night.

Spencer stood at the center of the room, hands on his hips, eyes flicking across the geometry of tarp and plastic. He turned slowly, like he was admiring a gallery installation — one he himself had helped to hang. Then his gaze landed on Dexter, steady, unreadable.

“You remember,” Spencer said, voice deceptively casual, “the last time we were in a room like this?”

Dexter froze in mid-movement, a strip of tape pressed under his palm. He did remember. The taut quiet, the stench of fear, the blood soaking Spencer’s lips — and after, the press of bodies, violent, raw, unplanned.

“Yeah,” Dexter said finally, voice low. “It was four days ago. My memory works.”

Spencer’s smile curved sharp and slow. “Funny how a place built for death turned out to be… useful.” He stepped closer, head tilted. “Do you think it was the plastic that did it? The smell of bleach? Or just the way you looked at me?”

Dexter felt his body tighten, the line of control straining even as his mind told him: not now, not here. But the memory was thick in the air, undeniable.

“You started it,” he said finally, almost like an accusation.

Spencer laughed — low, cutting. “You didn’t exactly stop me.”

They were close now, too close. The kill room smelled of vinyl and lemon cleaner, but under it came something warmer, human, inevitable. Spencer reached out, two fingers tracing the edge of Dexter’s collar, dragging faintly downward as though marking him without teeth this time.

“History repeats itself,” he murmured.

Dexter’s mouth was dry, his pulse uneven. “We’re supposed to be preparing.”

Spencer leaned closer, lips just grazing his ear without touching. “So prepare me.”

The plastic crackled under Dexter’s shifting weight. The knives gleamed where they’d been laid out. The room was supposed to be waiting for victims — but it had already claimed them.

Spencer let his hand linger at Dexter’s collar, then dropped it suddenly, sharp enough that the absence stung more than the touch. He stepped back half a pace, smug, as though daring Dexter to bridge the gap.

“You always look so careful in here,” Spencer said, voice low and needling. “Everything lined up, wrapped, measured. But under it you’re just waiting to come apart.”

Dexter’s jaw flexed. “And you want to be the one to make me.”

Spencer smirked, leaning in again until their foreheads nearly brushed. “Not want. Will.”

Dexter huffed a laugh through his nose, tension coiling tighter. “You sound so sure.”

“I am sure,” Spencer said, biting off each word like he was tearing meat. His fingers skimmed down Dexter’s arm, lingering at his wrist, then tightening — not hard, but enough to make the claim unmistakable. “You pretend this is control. It’s not. It’s a mask. And I get to rip it off whenever I choose.”

Dexter let him hold the wrist, didn’t pull back. His voice came quiet, almost conversational, but loaded. “You think I’m the mask. You’re wrong. I’m the blade under it.”

Spencer’s laugh cut sharp, almost delighted. “Good. Then bleed for me.”

He shoved Dexter’s arm lightly against the plastic wall, not a restraint so much as a taunt. Dexter leaned into it, deliberately giving ground — but his eyes, dark and unblinking, stayed locked on Spencer’s face.

“You want to mark me again,” Dexter said, nearly a whisper, but not afraid. “You don’t even try to hide it.”

Spencer’s mouth hovered near his jaw, close enough that Dexter could feel the shape of the smile against his skin. “Why should I hide? You wear me better than anyone.”

For a long second, neither moved, their breaths hot between them, the plastic rustling faintly with the press of Dexter’s back. It wasn’t a kiss, not yet. It was the promise of one sharpened into a threat.

Dexter’s hand twitched, caught between shoving Spencer off and dragging him closer. The hesitation lasted less than a breath. Spencer saw it, of course he did, and his grin widened — cruel, knowing.

“You’re going to give in,” he murmured, voice brushing the corner of Dexter’s mouth. “I can wait.”

Dexter snapped. Not violently, but with a precision born of hunger finally uncoiled. He turned his head just enough, caught Spencer’s mouth with his, the contact rough, teeth clicking before it softened into something hotter, deeper.

Spencer let him have it for a second, then shoved forward, tilting the balance. His hand slid from Dexter’s wrist to his jaw, holding him in place, guiding the angle of the kiss until it was his to dictate. Dexter matched him beat for beat, but the rawness of it — the scrape of teeth, the stifled sound in Spencer’s throat — made it clear this wasn’t tenderness. It was challenge made flesh.

The plastic walls shivered with their movement. Dexter’s fingers dug into Spencer’s shoulder, pulling him closer, answering the taunt not with words but with pressure, lips parting against lips, breath stolen and stolen back.

Spencer broke it first, not pulling away so much as leaving just enough space to laugh, a sharp, breathless sound between them. “Knew you’d crack,” he whispered, lips still ghosting Dexter’s.

Dexter’s reply came ragged, quiet but defiant. “I didn’t crack. I chose.”

Spencer kissed him again, harder, as if to say choice had nothing to do with it.

Spencer pressed forward, lips bruising, teeth grazing — trying to take the upper hand the way he did last time.

His laugh was already half-formed in his throat, waiting for Dexter to break.

But Dexter didn’t break.

The plastic walls were his cathedral, the duct tape his stained glass, the very air sharp with the sterile tang he knew better than breath. Here, he was home. Here, everything obeyed him.

With a sudden twist, Dexter shifted the weight between them, catching Spencer by the wrists and slamming them above his head against the plastic. The sound echoed — sharp, final. He held him there, body flush, kiss punishing now, consuming.

Spencer’s muffled laugh broke into a growl, and then into a bite. He sank his teeth into Dexter’s lower lip hard enough to tear skin. Warm copper spilled between them. Spencer swallowed it like communion.

Dexter didn’t recoil. He pushed harder, lips dragging over Spencer’s with deliberate pressure, forcing his blood into Spencer’s mouth as if feeding him. The taste burned, metallic, intimate.

“You forget where you are,” Dexter rasped against his mouth. “This is my room. My rules.”

Spencer strained, wrists flexing under Dexter’s grip, but his body betrayed him — arching into the pressure, answering the kiss even as he hissed, blood staining his teeth. His eyes gleamed with fury and hunger.

Dexter kissed him deeper, riding the struggle, savoring the way Spencer fought and gave all at once. This wasn’t surrender. It was survival, twisted into something that felt dangerously close to worship.

Dexter’s grip tightened, forcing Spencer deeper into the plastic wall, the taut material groaning beneath them. Their mouths clashed, kisses raw, broken, teeth against teeth. Spencer bit again, this time at the corner of Dexter’s mouth, dragging until the skin tore and fresh blood smeared across them both.

Dexter didn’t flinch. He pressed harder, wrists locked in his hands, body pinning Spencer inescapably. He kissed like punishment, like he meant to devour.

Spencer let out a ragged gasp between the force of it, his eyes bright with something halfway between defiance and delirium. “God, I hate you,” he spat, though the words dissolved against Dexter’s lips. Then, softer, trembling with venom and need: “And I fucking love you.”

The words hung there, vibrating in the air like a struck wire.

Dexter’s breath caught for a half-beat, but he didn’t answer. He crushed his mouth back against Spencer’s instead, a silence louder than anything he could have said. His tongue forced blood and spit deeper, his refusal deliberate, cruel.

Spencer groaned into the kiss, a sound more wounded than he wanted it to be, but he arched up anyway, grinding into the violence. His wrists twisted uselessly under Dexter’s iron hold. “Say it,” he growled, blood shining wet at the corner of his lips. “Fucking say it.”

Dexter only pressed harder, swallowing the demand, turning it into another kiss.

Spencer bit him again, savage this time, and when Dexter hissed through his teeth, Spencer laughed, low and broken. “You bastard,” he whispered, voice trembling. “You won’t say it. You can’t say it.”

Dexter’s silence was absolute. His body answered instead — harder, hungrier, lips bruising, refusing to give Spencer the satisfaction of words, only the punishment of his control.

Dexter shoved him back against the plastic, their mouths colliding again, all teeth and breath and bruises. Spencer bucked hard, trying to twist free, his laugh breaking between curses. “You think—you think you can keep me down?”

“I don’t think,” Dexter growled, forcing his wrists higher, his body pressed unrelenting into Spencer’s. “I know.”

Spencer spat blood from his bitten lip, eyes burning with feral defiance. He slammed his knee up, but Dexter caught it, drove him tighter into the wall. “You son of a—”

The curse broke off into a gasp as Dexter’s hands tore into fabric, ripping Spencer’s shirt open in one clean, merciless pull. The sound of it split the air, raw and violent. Spencer froze a beat, chest heaving, the fight trembling through his arms—then faltering. His body sagged under the hold, not in defeat, but in surrender to something fiercer.

Dexter leaned in, lips dragging across his jaw, his neck, the blood still slick where Spencer had bitten him. Spencer shuddered, and his resistance cracked like glass. He was still trembling, still snarling under his breath, but he stayed.

And in that moment, when Spencer finally stilled beneath him, when the struggle turned to heat and shaking breaths, Dexter tore the last words out of himself, raw and brutal as the rip of cloth.

“I love you, Spencer.”

The name came like a confession and a claim, breaking against Spencer’s mouth.

For a second, Spencer just stared at him, wide-eyed, breath ragged, shirt hanging in shreds off his shoulders. Then he let out a half-sob, half-laugh, his hands trembling as if unsure whether to push Dexter away or drag him closer. “Fuck you,” he whispered, voice wrecked, but his lips crushed back against Dexter’s anyway, sealing the words with blood and heat.

Spencer’s chest still heaved against him, torn fabric hanging open, blood drying at the corners of his mouth. Dexter’s grip stayed firm, his control absolute now, and Spencer didn’t twist this time. Didn’t claw or bite. He only looked at him, eyes dark and shining with something rawer than defiance.

Dexter pulled back just enough to breathe, just enough to see the exact moment Spencer’s resistance dropped into hunger. His hand hovered at the edge of his waistband, and Spencer—without a word—reached down and unfastened it himself. Not tearing, not fighting. Steady. Deliberate.

“Eager, aren’t you?” Dexter rasped, the words half a taunt, half disbelief.

Spencer’s mouth curved, reckless and trembling. “You won, Dexter. I follow.” His hands slid lower, helping, stripping cloth away instead of shredding it, every gesture sharp with urgency. “I want what you want.”

Dexter didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He let Spencer work, let him pull away the last barriers, both of them shaking, both of them laughing low through their teeth at the sheer madness of it.

When Dexter finally shoved him back down, Spencer didn’t fight it. He opened himself to it, hungry, eager, pulling Dexter closer like he couldn’t stand even an inch of air between them.

There was heat between them, a feverish closeness that felt more like combustion than contact. Spencer’s laughter broke into a gasp, rough and startled, while Dexter’s control melted into something headlong and consuming.

For a breath, for a heartbeat, there was nothing outside their pulse, their breath, the ragged sound of want that bordered on pain. It was violent and tender all at once, a surrender sharpened into something savage.

The world narrowed to the shiver of skin, the grip of hands, the dizzy flood of sensation—

until there was nothing left but the echo of their names.

They stayed tangled on the plastic for a few minutes, breath slowing, bodies damp with sweat and the sharp tang of blood. Neither spoke. There was no need.

Then the clock on Dexter’s watch began to beep—an alarm he’d set with clinical precision. Five minutes.

Spencer’s head rolled against his shoulder. “That’s them.”

Dexter exhaled through his nose, sitting up, the calm of ritual snapping back over him like armor. “Get dressed.”

They pulled on their clothes quickly, not bothering with neatness. The smell of sex still hung thick, their skin marked with teeth and scratches, the floor beneath them streaked with blood and seed. Neither made a move to clean it. Not yet. Later—after Hannibal and Will were no longer standing.

Plastic glistened under the dim light, smooth and ready. Restraints lay coiled like waiting snakes. Syringe prepped, blades set aside. Spencer moved across the room like a predator rehearsing his stage—fingers brushing the curved handle of the knife he’d chosen, testing the weight again, already savoring how it would cut.

The sound came first: footsteps in the hall. Steady, unhurried. The kind of walk belonging to men convinced they had nothing to fear.

Then the door pushed open. Hannibal entered, Will just behind him. Their expressions carried expectation, almost casual hunger, as if they’d stepped into a familiar theatre waiting for the curtain to rise.

Their eyes swept the room, and for a beat they both froze.

No bodies.

Only Dexter and Spencer, standing in the middle of a spotless kill room that smelled of sweat and iron, plastic gleaming beneath their feet.

The silence was a blade drawn taut.

They’d thought they were clever. No phones, no credit cards, no digital trail. The overestimating pair, the men who fancied themselves gods, walked Verona’s streets as if the city were their private stage. Hannibal’s immaculate posture, Will’s shadowed gaze — unmistakable, even among the crowds.

It hadn’t been Interpol. It hadn’t been the Carabinieri. It was them. Just the BAU. The Americans.

Emily had spotted it first on the grainy camera feed — the two of them crossing a narrow bridge near Piazza delle Erbe, sunlight slicing across their faces. Enough to confirm, enough to chase.

Now, they stood under the iron ribs of the warehouse, a small tactical unit in civilian clothes. No vests, no shouting SWAT lines. This was personal.

“Street-side entry’s out,” Rossi muttered, his eyes narrowed at the rusting façade. “Too exposed. We funnel through the service alley, come up quiet.”

JJ checked her weapon, then lifted her gaze to the windows above. “If Hannibal really thinks he’s untouchable, he won’t be watching his back. But Will… he’s harder to read. He’ll feel it before he sees it.”

Luke shifted beside them, jaw tight. “We can’t risk Hannibal and Will slipping. No more second chances.”

Tara laid the map flat against the hood of a car, tracing lines with her finger. “Here. Stairwell at the south wall. It brings us up just behind the main floor. Minimal creak, maximum cover.”

Morgan’s voice cut through the dark hum of planning, low and steady. “We go in as one unit. No Polizia, no Interpol, no distractions. Just us. No more mistakes.” His eyes flicked across the team, sharp. “If Reid’s in there—if Dexter’s in there—we take them alive. The other two…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

Hotch’s silence was weight enough. When he finally spoke, it was calm, measured. “We’ve cornered predators before. This time is no different. Remember who they are, what they’ve done, and don’t let it shake you. We’re not here to save Hannibal or Will. We’re here to stop them.”

The team nodded, tension wound tight.

Above them, the warehouse loomed. Inside, four men waited — two who thought themselves gods, and two who were about to prove them wrong.

The plastic room smelled of bleach and anticipation. Hannibal stepped forward as if he owned the space, his shoulders squared, his gaze already assessing where the bodies should have been. Will lingered half a pace behind him, his eyes narrowing when he saw the tarps laid out with surgical precision, the faint glint of steel in the halogen light.

There were no victims.

For the first time, the stage Hannibal imagined himself arranging belonged to someone else.

Dexter moved fast, smoother than Hannibal had calculated him capable of. The syringe slid into Hannibal’s neck before he could turn. Cold fluid surged into his vein; his body jolted, muscles seizing, knees buckling. But he didn’t fall into darkness—Spencer had been specific. Hannibal was to feel everything, unable to move, every nerve alive with panic.

And then Spencer was on Will.

It was not graceful. It was not calculated. It was hunger let loose. Spencer slammed Will against the tarp, his long fingers locking around his throat. Will gasped, eyes bulging as air strangled away. Spencer’s teeth sank into the soft of his neck with a feral noise, hot blood spilling in thick sheets, painting Spencer’s mouth, his chin, his pale shirt.

Hannibal’s vision swam. He tried to scream, but his jaw locked, his body frozen. Terror didn’t come for himself—it was all for Will. He could only watch as crimson poured, as Will choked wetly, his hands clawing at Spencer’s grip, at nothing.

Spencer bit again, lower, tearing at the wrist that flailed up in defense. A fountain of blood arced, warm and terrifyingly bright under the halogen light. It spattered the walls, slicked the floor, dotted Dexter’s face.

Dexter did not flinch. His eyes gleamed, wide, watching like a man watching revelation incarnate. Spencer Unbound. He had dreamed of it. And here it was: Reid transformed into something monstrous and magnificent, drenched in blood, eyes dark and bottomless, lips pressed to the pulse of another man’s life as if feeding on it.

“Christ…” Dexter whispered, almost reverent.

Spencer yanked at Will’s shirt with his free hand, buttons scattering. The pale scar beneath Will’s navel gleamed under the light—a wound long healed, gifted years ago by Hannibal’s hand. Spencer’s lips curled into something both knowing and cruel.

He wanted to carve into history itself.

The blade—strange, twisted, its shape cruel as DNA unraveling—plunged into the scar. Will screamed, a sound mangled by choking, by blood flooding his throat. Spencer twisted the knife, once, twice, as if determined to unmake him from the inside out.

Hannibal’s heart thundered against the drug’s cage. He would have given anything—his life, his soul, all his careful control—just to tear Spencer away from Will. He couldn’t. He could only watch Will’s skin go gray, his eyes rolling back, his body slackening under Spencer’s weight.

And Spencer drank—mouth at Will’s neck again, blood spilling into him, down him, around him. His face was an angel’s mask painted in crimson ruin.

Dexter was lost in it, intoxicated. Every sound Will made, every droplet hitting the tarp, every twitch of Spencer’s jaw lit fire inside him. He didn’t move to stop it. He wanted more. He wanted to see how far Spencer would go.

And then—

The door exploded inward with a single, brutal kick.

“FBI! HANDS IN THE AIR! DON’T MOVE! DON’T YOU FUCKING MOVE!”

Six agents poured in like a storm, guns raised, safeties off, the muzzles locked on Spencer and Dexter. Their voices overlapped, sharp commands ricocheting against plastic walls. It was an instant reversal—the hunters caged in their own room.

Spencer jerked at the sound, his face a mask of blood, teeth bared, still crouched over Will’s nearly lifeless body. His hands trembled on the knife, but his eyes never left Will’s.

“You’re mine,” he roared, spittle and blood flying from his lips. “You’re fucking mine! I killed you! I FUCKING KILLED YOU!”

Morgan’s voice cracked through the chaos, low and lethal: “Reid—stop. Now.”

But Spencer didn’t stop thrashing when hands grabbed him. He howled as they ripped him back, four men dragging him, his arms flailing, legs kicking, still screaming at Will.

Dexter… Dexter barely registered it. He saw the guns, he heard the shouts, but the adrenaline didn’t hit—he was still staring at Spencer, spellbound, locked on him like nothing else existed. His resistance was clumsy, sluggish, not real. A shove of his arm, a half-hearted twist, no match for Morgan’s grip and Rossi’s cold command at his ear: “Don’t you dare move.”

Six guns. Four hunted men.

One of them immobilized. One of them half-dead.

The unbalance was absolute.

Spencer went down cuffed and raging, still shouting at Will. Dexter went down cuffed and silent, eyes fixed only on Spencer, as if the world was reduced to blood on his mouth and the echo of his voice.

Chapter Text

Fluorescent light hummed overhead, flat and merciless, giving no sense of time. The walls were poured concrete, the bars black and unyielding. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and iron.

Spencer came back to himself first. One breath, then another — shallow, uneven, like surfacing from too deep a dive. His body felt heavy, his shirt stiff with blood dried hours ago. For a moment he thought he was still in the kill room, still straddling Will’s body, still choking, still biting, until the absence of plastic beneath him and the silence around him told a different story.

He turned his head, blinked against the sterile light, and saw Dexter.

Dexter lay on his side a foot away, still as if sleeping, his chest rising slow, his face smeared with the same gore. The sight hit Spencer with a sudden jolt — not fear, but something rawer, needier. He pushed himself upright, his arms trembling with the effort, then leaned forward until he could reach him.

“Dex,” Spencer whispered, voice hoarse. His hands hovered, then landed on Dexter’s face, cold skin against cold palms. He tilted his head gently, scanning him, searching his features like a man checking for fractures in glass. “Dex… come on. Please.”

Dexter’s eyelids twitched. A low breath pushed out between his lips. His eyes opened slowly, dark and unfocused, then settling on Spencer’s face, so close it blurred into shadow and shape.

For a second, neither moved.

Then Spencer’s grip tightened, almost desperate. “Are you—are you okay?” he asked, too quickly, the words tumbling over themselves. “Did they—did they hurt you?”

Dexter’s mouth twitched at the corner, something between a grimace and a smile. “Not yet,” he rasped, his voice raw but steady. He shifted under Spencer’s hands, his gaze flicking up and down the cell before coming back. “You?”

Spencer shook his head. His hands didn’t leave Dexter’s face. They cupped him like he was still in danger of vanishing, like if he let go for even a second the whole fragile world would collapse.

The silence stretched — fluorescent buzz, their breathing, the clank of a door far away.

“Spence…” Dexter said softly, his voice low, weighted with something Spencer couldn’t immediately name.

But Spencer didn’t answer. His thumbs pressed harder against Dexter’s cheekbones, grounding himself in the reality of him, alive, here, still his.

The sound of boots on concrete broke the fragile stillness. The door clanged open, metal scraping against metal, and the echo announced them before they even stepped inside.

Hotch entered first, his expression carved from stone, Rossi just a half-step behind, his eyes sharp and glittering with the kind of cruelty that came when disgust boiled over into strategy.

They stopped outside the bars, staring in at the two men on the floor. Spencer still had his hands on Dexter’s face. Dexter didn’t move them away.

Rossi’s voice was the first to cut through the humming silence. “Well, isn’t this touching?” The word twisted in his mouth like venom. “The Butcher of Miami and our pretty boy genius, curled up in a concrete box like it’s some kind of honeymoon suite.”

Spencer stiffened but didn’t let go. His jaw clenched, eyes narrowing, but he didn’t speak.

Hotch leaned closer to the bars, his voice low, measured, like a scalpel slicing instead of a hammer striking. “You think this—” his gaze flicked between them, the grip on the face, the closeness, “—means anything? It doesn’t make you strong. It makes you weak. You’ve built your entire twisted little bond out of blood and corpses, and when that’s stripped away, you’re just two frightened men clinging to each other in a cage.”

Dexter’s lips curled, half a smirk, but his eyes stayed flat. “You don’t know what we are.”

“Don’t I?” Hotch’s voice didn’t rise, but it sharpened. “I know what you’ve both done. I know the things you bit, tore, stabbed. I know the way you smiled while you did it. You think love grows in that filth? No. All it grows is rot.”

Rossi stepped forward, close enough that his voice carried like a whisper meant to sting. “You should see yourselves right now. Blood still under your nails. Clothes stiff with it. And you sit here, pretending what—romance? You two don’t have love. You have addiction. You have obsession. You have a sickness you’re both too far gone to cure.”

Spencer’s breath hitched, almost a flinch, but his eyes burned darker as he looked up at them. His hands slipped from Dexter’s face only to ball into fists against his knees.

Rossi let the pause hang, then added, quieter, sharper: “You’re not tragic lovers. You’re animals. And the only reason you’re alive is because we put you in a cage instead of down like rabid dogs.”

Hotch didn’t look away. His stare pinned them both in place. “Think about that, while you hold onto each other like it means something. Because out there, you’re not gods. You’re not even men. You’re just criminals, waiting to be forgotten.”

The words fell heavy in the cell, heavier than the walls, heavier than the light.

Dexter exhaled slowly through his nose, jaw set. Spencer’s nails bit into his palms, his chest rising too fast.

Neither spoke.

After a while, Spencer’s voice cut through the room like a snapped wire.

“Will—Will—fucking Will.” His hands fisted the thin blanket at his knees until his knuckles went white. “He—he must be dead. He has to be dead. If he’s not—if he’s not dead I will fucking kill him again.”

The words were jagged teeth; they sounded less like a threat and more like a prayer. Dexter’s eyes opened fully at the sound, slow and bright, like a predator returning to the dark after a nap.

“No,” Dexter said, flat at first, and then there was something softer under the steel. “He couldn’t be. He’s already fallen off a cliff. He…he’s been through worse. He survives things other people don’t.” The conviction in his voice made the cell stutter. Spencer’s posture crumpled a fraction, as if the name itself—said that way—was too heavy to carry.

“Guard!” Spencer barked, suddenly sudden and raw. “Guard! Hotch—Hotch!” His voice became an animal thing, a sound pulled from a throat that had held on too long.

The door clanged; boots approached. Hotch appeared in the doorway as if summoned, Rossi at his shoulder. Hotch’s face was all reserve, but his eyes flicked immediately to Spencer’s hands and then to Dexter’s face. He took in what they had said in a single, patient inhale.

Dexter pushed himself on shaking elbows, the world narrowing to one need. “Water,” he said, the syllable thick, urgent. “He needs water. Will—give him water. Now.”

Hotch’s jaw tightened. For a beat the room filled with the small noises of confinement: breath, the scrape of fabric, a distant clank down a corridor. Then Hotch moved with the economy of someone who had given orders under worse stress than this.

“Rossi, take the corridor,” Hotch said. “Get on the radio. Call medical. Ask them about Graham and Lecter’s condition. Now.”

Rossi’s jaw clenched; the radio in his hand turned a tool. He moved toward the corridor, already barking orders into a handset as he went. The hurried, clipped syllables came back to the cell like echoes: “Medical, status on Lecter and Graham—Verona emergency—hold the line—repeat—”

Hotch watched Spencer with a quiet, surgical calm. “You made this a scene,” he said simply. “You gave them plenty of theater to work with. Do you understand what that means?”

Spencer swallowed; the words lodged like grit. “I—” He tried for defiance and found his voice a raw thread. “I did what I thought—”

“You did what you thought,” Hotch interrupted. “And you forgot there are people who show up for a living.”

The corridor doors clanged; Rossi returned, radio clipped at his belt, face set in that fast-hard look that meant news had been parsed and turned into orders. He let the report land without flinch.

“Medical’s on the line,” Rossi said. “They’ve taken both Lecter and Graham to separate wings. Graham is in surgery—cranial and thoracic trauma; they’re doing everything they can. Lecter is sedated, heavily, and they’ve placed him under airway control after he kept trying to lunge for Graham when he came in. They’re stabilizing both.” Rossi’s voice carried a coldness now that had nothing to do with facts; it had the ruthlessness of someone cataloguing consequences.

Spencer’s chest hitched at the cadence of names and procedures. For a moment the cell might as well have been sealed in another climate; the clinical report turned the air brittle.

Rossi let the silence stretch a fraction too long, then leaned close to the bars so the words could not be missed. “You failed to kill him,” he said, each syllable precise and cruel. “You did everything the wrong way. You couldn’t even finish what you started.”

Hotch didn’t smile; his voice had the bluntness of a judge. “That’s what the hospital is for—triage, salvage. They’ll fix what you broke and they’ll take their time reminding you how little control you actually have.”

Dexter’s hand tightened on the thin metal bench. For a second his face was unreadable, then the pressure eased and he breathed out slow, measured. The animal in him didn’t roar; it inventoried.

Spencer curled his hands into fists. “If they survive,” he said through teeth, “I will—” He didn’t finish. The promise didn’t need finishing; the threat hummed between his ribs.

Rossi’s look was a mix of contempt and a relish so plain it bordered on insult. “If they survive,” he echoed, “you’ll get the chance to try again in court.”

Hotch took a step back, folding the moment into administration. “You’ll tell us everything, later. The sequence. The locations. The weapons. The motives. We will need it all for the narrative the courts will tell.”

Dexter’s eyes slid to Spencer, a flicker of something private passing between them—anger, calculation, a shared denial of the contempt being flung at them. For each barb the team offered, Dexter had a ledger in his head. He didn’t speak right away. When he did, his words were small and sharp.

“We didn’t come here to be lectured by people who still believe the world is salvageable,” Dexter said. “We did what we did. If there’s time to make it right, tell them where to go.”

Hotch’s face hardened at the tone. “You’ll get your chance to explain. Through counsel. You’ll answer questions and you will do it in public. Right now, you stay put. You don’t make anything more complicated than it already is.” Rossi gave another dry sound that might have been amusement, might have been scorn. “And when you talk, don’t be clever about it. We’re tired of riddles.”

The corridor hummed again as Hotch and Rossi moved away. The scene outside the bars—boots, radios, the thin professional choreography of people who could convert panic into plan—pulled at the edges of the cell. Dexter drank the small cup of water like someone grasping an anchor. Spencer watched him take it in, the curve of his throat, the way the tension lived there and then eased. The contempt from the men outside had landed, but inside the cell something else, older and fiercer than shame, tightened like wire.

They sat with that wound between them and the reality the team had forced onto them: Will and Hannibal not dead; a hospital keeping secrets in the backs of its halls; the moral tides turned outward against them. Outside, Rossi barked more orders; down the corridor the plan for the next hours was already being drawn. Inside, there was only a small, fierce breathing and the recirculation of two men who had made a choice and would now have to pay for its public reckoning.

They moved fast once the surgeons closed up and the prognosis thinned from “critical” to “stable.” Hours bled into one another—carrying monitors, whispered signoffs between doctors, the thin blue light of an operating ward—but when the final notes came through, it was surgical economy: hold him, patch him, prepare for transit. Hotch signed forms the way men sign warrants; Rossi barked for a secure manifest; an FBI Blackbird—no commercial flight, no ordinary protocols—was requisitioned and made ready.

The plane smelled of antiseptic and dispatch. It was not built for comfort so much as containment: dedicated medical modules, reinforced restraints, a small cabin carved out for the four men whose names would now be read on every newscycle. There was an efficiency to the choreography that left no room for theatrics. Paramedics zipped collars. Agents snapped cuffs over surgical wrappings. The hospital staff transferred charges into the crate-like stretchers like technicians moving priceless, dangerous instruments. The quartet—whatever private economy of power they had traded among themselves—were reduced in those moments to cargo and live evidence.

Will went first. He was pale, tubes at his throat and an IV running the length of his arm, eyes fluttering beneath lids as if sleep could be a shield against the panic he’d survived. The anesthetic had not been reversed; sedation was safer for transit. Will’s hands were bandaged, one slumped inert on a chest that rose and fell mechanically. When a nurse murmured a bedside reassurance, he tightened a fist around air and then relaxed. He was fragile and stubborn in the same heartbeat; people who had watched him through earlier arcs knew an odd thing: the man who could be broken kept finding something to catch him from falling.

Hannibal was awake. Awake and inward, eyes clearing to the room like someone lifting a veil. The surgical sedation had softened his edges but not his mind. He accepted the sheets, the cuffs, the quieting injections with the same thin politeness he afforded any inconvenience. He spoke, when he spoke, fewer words and choices that felt like chess moves made in a whisper. He fixed Will with a look that was more room than accusation. Will did not see it; he slept. Hannibal let his hand rest near him for a breath, then allowed the agents to move them on.

Dexter’s transfer was procedural. He did not plead; he did not bargain. He let them secure him, let them pad the restraints, let the agents take his prints, his DNA swabs. The Bay Harbor Butcher tag had already been attached and, with the staged tableau in Venice still a hot dossier, the evidence that the team would bring home was already arranged like a litany. He accepted cuffs with the same cold, deliberate calm he brought to the table; it was an economy of motion as much as a temperament.

Spencer was a different silhouette. He’d been in the maelstrom longer in the last forty-eight hours than in decades of thinking himself safe inside hypotheses. He had been a neat man and a chaotic instrument at the same time; the transition from wild to contained had not dulled the hunger, only changed its shape. He stared up at the airplane chevrons as they lifted him in, craning against elastic straps until an attendant politely tightened them. For a brief breath he said the only thing that registered as private: “If I survive this,” and then closed his eyes on something like an oath.

The plane taxied with Hotch in the cockpit corridor, close enough to watch the stretchers pass and far enough away they knew nobody would mistake proximity for sentiment. Rossi had a folder, thick and humming with printed pages: autopsy prelims, chain-of-evidence logs, witness timelines. Derek and the other agents had suitcases of printouts and the same kind of hollow jaw that comes from too many hours of adrenaline. They rode back over the Atlantic with little sleep and a larger ledger of fury.

Onboard, the quartet were a study of contrasts. Hannibal lay with eyes like cut glass, consuming the routine around him; Will dreamed and dreamt of something else and perhaps, for the first time in a long while, the sedation shielded him from the precise cruelty of the world. Dexter watched Spencer breathe and measured the intervals between his own pulses. Spencer stared at the ceiling and saw, in flashes, the thing he had become and the bargain he had accepted: the hunger, the lawless permission, the awareness that this life could be wielded into a rescue or a sentence. There was no surrender, only the taut artifice of men who had pressed too close to a myth and now rode it back to daylight.

They flew under an official banner: emergency repatriation, moving wounded American citizens and fatal suspects. The press would later call it many things—“captured fugitives,” “the Verona massacre,” “the Bay Harbor revelation”—but on the plane the language was the plain one of procedure. Evidence. Custody. Medical handoff. Interrogation. Extradition. A bureau lawyer spoke to Hotch through a headset about warrants and the inevitable press embargo. Garcia, safe in Miami, had already started an information thread with legal, prepping the team’s narrative and the evidence trail; they would not let a media frenzy distort the chain.

By the time they cleared customs, the compound of consequences had hardened. Hospitals in the United States were preparing operating rooms with familiar hands; the surgeons waved off the FBI’s aggressive punditry and took files with a practiced dispassion. At the airport a phalanx of agents in dress layers met the Medical Airlift. No red carpet—this was transport, not pageantry—but there was a human pressurescape: family lawyers mounting for reconstructions; political figures circling; a media scrum that could be kept disciplined by legal seal and careful statements. Hotch’s voice into the microphone, the line that would be read across morning programs: “We will present the facts; we will follow the law.”

There would be trials. There would be medical hearings and pleas and motions and an architecture of criminal procedure designed to chew through the raw, hot parts and bring the rest into a courtroom’s fluorescent light. The labels would multiply outside their cell windows: Bay Harbor Butcher, Hannibal Lecter the Cannibal, Will Graham the wounded genius-turned-suspect, Spencer Reid the predator reborn. The national conversation would not be delicate. It would be loud, cruel, accusing and fascinated in equal measure.

Inside that next stretch of hours—agents changing shifts, the wheels screeching as they taxied into the hangar—each man kept his own counsel. Will slept because he had no other option. Hannibal watched the world arrange itself without surprise. Spencer mapped the ledger of the team’s anger and the ways a man can be unmade and remade. Dexter catalogued evidence in his head like he always did: where blood had spattered, how a break in the pattern had allowed a stage, who had set the tableau and why. He also carried one other accounting: the dangerous arithmetic of affection. It had a weight and a price.

On the tarmac, a single reporter shouted a question nobody was yet allowed to answer. A dozen camera lights blinked in the cold air like intrusive constellations. The quartet’s stretchered silhouettes passed under the hangar and into ambulances, and with each shutter click the public story began to separate itself from the private one. The courthouse would want a narrative—who did what, why, in what order. The quartet would carry their own.

They were not yet processed, not yet arraigned. They were still a set of living paradoxes: victims and villains, lovers and predators, surgeons’ patients and murder suspects. For the men in custody, that liminal space felt endless and small all at once. For the agents who had wrested them from the theatre they had built, the return flight held a different freight: the knowledge that the real work had just begun.

Hotch watched the ambulances pull away and let the moment hang. “Bring everything,” he said, to no one in particular. “Paperwork, evidence, every forensics chain. We are going to build an air-tight file.”

Rossi’s reply was a dry chuckle that had the taste of rue. “We have the file. We have the bodies. We have the prints. We just need to make sure a jury sees what we saw.”

Beyond them, in the clean hush of a corridor, the men who had been carried home from an Italian night settled into their separate realities. Somewhere, in rooms bright with law and lights, somebody opened a folder and began to line up facts that would measure out the rest of their lives.

They were back in the United States. They were in custody. The labels would follow—some earned, some spun—but those were the words other people would use. Inside the quartet, a quieter nomenclature remained: debts, vows, things spared and things taken. The plane had brought them home, but it had not brought them peace.

Outside, the news feeds would iterate the shorthand and the outrage. Inside, in a hospital and behind closed doors, men waited to be asked the questions that would, in time, define them.

The drone of the engines pressed against the walls of the military jet, steady as a metronome. Dexter sat cuffed, his wrists bruised, his body still humming with Spencer’s touch and Spencer’s violence, and yet emptied out all the same. His eyes were open, but the cabin blurred in front of him.

And then Harry was there.

Not standing proud, not with the square shoulders of a cop who knew right from wrong — but collapsed, his face a map of sorrow. His mouth shook as though the words cut themselves out against his will.

“Jesus Christ, Dex…” Harry’s voice broke, a low sob pushing through. “This is it. This is the nightmare I—” He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye, as though he could stop the tears, but they streaked down anyway. “I thought the blood, the ritual, the kills were bad enough, but this? Prison. Shackles. Your name—your face—exposed to the world.”

Dexter swallowed, staring straight ahead. He wanted to sneer, to defend himself with his usual flat mask, but Harry’s collapse pulled something raw out of him.

Harry crouched closer, his voice cracking. “You think I taught you a code to make you safe. That was the whole point. The code was supposed to save you. And now look at you. The Bay Harbor Butcher, on a goddamn military plane, flown home like some war criminal.”

He dragged in a shuddering breath, and for the first time Dexter saw him broken, no longer the implacable father-ghost but just a man, terrified of what he had unleashed.

“And Harrison,” Harry whispered, the name choking him. “What do I tell him? That his father was a monster who couldn’t stop himself? That everything I did to protect you just passed the sickness down the line?” He pressed a fist to his mouth, shoulders shaking. “God, Dex… he’s going to grow up and hate you. Hate me. He’ll never understand.”

For a terrible second, Dexter almost believed the ghost’s tears were real enough to dampen his prison-issue shirt. He wanted to tell Harry to shut up, to get out, but the pain in Harry’s face was unbearable. This wasn’t the angry mentor lecturing him on rules — this was the father who had lost.

And Dexter, for the first time, felt the truth burn: Harry hadn’t saved him. Harry had only delayed this moment.

Farther down the cabin, sedatives held Will Graham under. His body was pale, tubes still running, his chest rising in shallow tides. But his mind — his mind refused rest.

The stag came first. Its hooves clattered against the steel floor of the plane, black eyes staring straight into him, accusing, infinite. Blood dripped from its antlers in perfect beats that matched the drone of the engines. He tried to reach for it, but every step he took slid backward, like walking on glass.

The clock followed. Hannibal’s clock, the one he’d been forced to draw, hands twisted wrong, numbers smeared like blood. Its ticking was wet, a sound of knives through marrow. Every time he tried to correct it, his hand turned into claws, scratching lines that cut into the paper and into his own skin.

The porcelain teacup shattered again. Always the same — falling, spinning, breaking on tile. Pieces scattered into the void. Will reached to piece them back together, trembling fingers moving shard by shard, but they dissolved into dust. His hands came up bloody. Hannibal’s hand reached through the dust, offering another shard, and when Will took it, it cut to the bone.

Then the cliff — water roaring below, wind tearing. He was falling again, Hannibal’s body twined with his, gravity dragging them both into the abyss. But this time, as they fell, Jack Crawford stood at the edge, watching. Jack didn’t reach out. He only turned his back and walked away.

The dream shifted. Spencer appeared, not the friend of chessboards and arguments, but the predator in the kill room, his mouth red, his blade lifting Will’s shirt to bare the long smile of Hannibal’s scar. The knife pressed in. Deeper. Will screamed, but it was silent, like air leaving a drowning man’s lungs. Spencer’s eyes darkened, unreadable, as though he were drinking his life away.

And then Hannibal’s face leaned close — the same mouth that had once kissed him now tearing at him with teeth, with brutality. The intimacy and the monstrosity blurred together until Will couldn’t tell which was which.

Blood flooded the dream, hot and endless. Will’s throat filled with it. His hands clawed at nothing. The stag stood over him, dripping, watching, patient as eternity.

He woke — but no, he didn’t wake. He only plunged deeper, the nightmare a spiral that had no bottom.

The wing was custom. Not for overcrowding, not for reform. For containment. Four cages cut into stone and reinforced with steel doors, each one soundproofed enough for the guards, but not for them. When they raised their voices, it carried. When they whispered, it bled through the silence like smoke.

Hannibal was placed first. He walked into his cell as if it were a stage, tracing the barred window with one fingertip before sitting on the cot. Composed, deliberate, the silver glint of the ring visible even under the harsh fluorescents.

Will followed. He did not perform. He slouched on the mattress, bandages peeking under his shirt, eyes half-shut but alert. His silence was heavier than Hannibal’s composure — an animal refusing to be tamed, but not wasting energy on thrashing against steel.

Dexter was next. He didn’t look left or right, though he knew they were there. He scanned corners, corners, corners, like the old habit of measuring kill rooms had followed him into captivity. His cot was too thin, too dirty; the fluorescent light too weak. The absence of plastic sheeting was unbearable.

And then Spencer. He was shoved inside almost carelessly, guards wary but impatient. He didn’t sit. He paced, fast, like words were building behind his teeth and had nowhere to go. His hands still bore faint stains, scrubbed raw but never clean enough.

For a long while, silence pressed between them.

Then Hannibal’s voice, smooth as ever, carried through the wing.

“Curious. We are isolated… yet arranged. Like specimens under glass.”

Will’s chuckle was dry, brittle. “Like exhibits. Or evidence.”

Spencer laughed — sharp, too loud. “No, not evidence. They don’t want juries to see us. They don’t want us contaminating the others. We’re too much.” His voice cracked upward, then steadied again. “We scare them more apart than together.”

Dexter finally spoke, low and flat. “They’re not wrong.”

The silence after was thicker, darker.

From his cell, Rossi’s words still clung to Spencer — you left your teeth in bones. He could almost feel the echo in his jaw. He pressed tongue to teeth and leaned against the bars. “They’ll try to break us. They’ll try to play us against each other. That’s what they do.”

“Of course,” Hannibal murmured, sounding amused. “They always forget the simplest truth.”

Will’s eyes opened fully, fixing on the opposite cell. “Which is?”

“That we don’t break,” Hannibal said. His fingers brushed his ring again, a deliberate tic, and Will didn’t look away.

Dexter exhaled, short and sharp, and finally glanced across at Spencer. “Everyone breaks. Even us.”

The fluorescent hum filled the silence. Four men, four cages, each within arm’s length of the other’s voice.

And for the first time since capture, there was no blood to hide behind. Only words.

It was Will who broke first. His voice came rough, scraped thin from disuse, but it carried.

“You tried to kill me.”

Across the corridor, Spencer stopped pacing. His head snapped toward Will’s cell, eyes glittering under the fluorescent buzz. “Tried? Look at your bandages, Will. That wasn’t a try.”

Will’s jaw tightened. His hands curled into fists against the thin mattress, nails digging through gauze into his palms. “You think it makes you something more? You think it makes you stronger?”

Spencer laughed — raw, too sharp for the quiet space. “It makes me honest. You’ve played at being a killer for years, Will. Pretending it was Hannibal pulling your strings. Pretending you didn’t want it. At least I don’t lie to myself.”

Will sat forward then, the ring of the cot springs snapping loud in the silence. His voice sharpened, cold enough to cut.

“You’re a child with blood on his mouth. A parasite that thinks biting makes him a predator.”

Spencer’s body jolted, a flash of rage across his face. He pressed against the bars, shoulders taut. “And you’re a dog that let Hannibal put a leash around his neck. At least I chose.”

The words echoed, bitter and clean, cutting between the cells.

From his cot, Hannibal only tilted his head, watching the exchange like opera, silent but alight.

Dexter’s eyes moved between them, steady, unreadable — but his silence was deliberate, the weight of someone cataloguing every fracture.

The fluorescent hum seemed louder after that, like static filling the cracks their voices left.

Will’s voice dropped lower, steadier, almost too calm. “You think you were born a monster. That it excuses you. But you weren’t. You made a choice. Every time you sink your teeth into someone, every time you imagine tearing them open — you choose it. That’s the difference between us. Hannibal broke me. No one had to break you.”

Spencer leaned forward until his knuckles went white on the bars, his face shadowed, eyes fever-bright. “Don’t flatter yourself, Will. Hannibal didn’t break you — he made you. And you thanked him for it. Over and over again. That’s worse than me. You begged for it.”

Will surged to his feet, every muscle tight, veins standing in his neck. His words were fire now, each one spat through clenched teeth. “I never begged. I loved. And you don’t even understand the difference. You think ripping flesh is intimacy. You think blood on your mouth is closeness. You’ve never loved anyone in your life.”

Spencer’s laugh cracked, hollow. “You think what you have with Hannibal is love? It’s a prison cell with velvet wallpaper. He owns you. At least Dexter doesn’t own me.”

“Doesn’t he?” Will shot back. “Look at you. Chained to him like an addict, waiting for scraps of attention. You’d carve your own throat if he told you to.”

Something flickered in Spencer’s eyes — too raw, too close to true. His voice turned jagged.

“At least when I kill, it’s mine. Not borrowed. Not guided. Not given. Mine. You wouldn’t know how that feels if it gutted you from the inside.”

The cells vibrated with silence after that, a silence edged with iron and rage.

Hannibal’s fingers brushed the bars of his own cell, eyes half-lidded, drinking every fracture like wine. Dexter remained still, jaw locked, as though choosing which fire to let burn and which to put out.

But Will and Spencer stared across the corridor at each other, eyes like knives, daring the guards, the bars, the law itself to vanish — just long enough to finish what Venice had started.

Spencer’s smile came slow and terrible, the shape of a wound that refuses to heal. He leaned his forehead to the bars and, quiet as the last thing you hear before the lights go out, said, “When you die in their eyes, Will — and you will — I will be the one who keeps your name pure. I will be the one who makes sure they remember what you were, not what they claim you became.”

It landed like a fist. The wing held its breath; somewhere a door clanged; the fluorescent hum seemed suddenly obscene. Will’s face folded, not with submission but with a new kind of calculation — or maybe it was acceptance. For half a beat the corridor belonged only to that line, and then the world came rushing back.

Hours later the team was in the briefing room, the flat light of monitors washing their faces, when the PDFs started to arrive. At first it was a trickle: an Italian broadsheet with an indignant headline they had not expected the press to print, a regional paper with a screaming banner. Then the torrent — cutlines, translations, live feeds. Their carefully muted operation, the cordon the Carabinieri had promised, the silence they had fought so hard to preserve — all of it shredded across pages and screens at once.

The headlines did not mince words.

FOUR SAVAGES IN VENICE — AMERICAN AGENTS LINKED.

FBI HUMILIATED: AGENTS, CIVILIAN COLLABORATOR AT CENTER OF EUROPEAN KILLING SPREE.

‘WE TRUSTED THEM’: FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND A NATION REEL.

The language varied — outrage, disbelief, accusation — but the thrust was the same. The story the papers stitched together left no room for the nuance they’d tried to keep: three members of the team implicated, a man who had worked with the Bureau for years now standing in the center of a tableau of carnage. That implication, more than any body or blood, was the thing that made them all flinch.

Rossi’s hand curled tight around the edge of the table until his knuckles whitened. “They printed everything,” he said, voice low and hard. “They printed that.”

Morgan paced, fists clenching and unclenching. “They make it look like we’re complicit. Like we turned away. Like we—” He cut himself off, the rest swallowed by a wheeze of anger.

Hotch shut his laptop and sat very still for a long time. When he spoke it was measured, but it had the gravity of someone who’d had a life built of contingencies suddenly toppled. “Control the leak. Official channels only. No statements until we coordinate with Interpol and the Department. We don’t feed them a narrative they can use.”

Emily’s eyes were red; she pushed a stack of printouts toward the center, finger tracing the headline that accused them most bluntly. “They’re not just attacking the killers,” she said. “They’re shredding our credibility. They’ll try to make this a political thing. They’ll try to make it look like an institutional failure down to us.”

JJ stood, palms on the table, the steadiness of a parent who has been given awful news. “We kept the Italians in their lane. We did everything by the book. But every time we move, they’ll say we moved to hide something. We have to be transparent where we can be — and ruthless where we must.”

Derek — who had been the one on the street the week before, who had confronted the bloody aftermath and spoken bluntly of disgust — let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-growl. “They’re going to make monsters of us in print,” he said. “They’ll call it a scandal. They’ll call it corruption. They’ll call it betrayal. We’ll have to be better than the story they want.”

Garcia would have torn into the digital trail, found the first angle the tabloids had used; she would have wanted to scrub, to patch, to plant counter-evidence. But without her workroom there, without the forensic certainty she could provide, the room hummed with something else: an animal, rank fear.

Hotch’s eyes swept the faces he knew so well — the fatigue in Morgan’s jaw, Rossi’s silent rage, Emily’s tremor, JJ’s tight control. “We will not let them define this,” he said. “We will not let them corrupt the facts with sensationalism. We’ve done the work. We’ll show it. But understand this: the public has already turned. The narrative is out there. It will be ugly. It will be personal.”

Rossi’s jaw worked. “They’ll put us on trial in the court of public opinion before they— before we get a chance to do anything else.”

“Then we move faster,” Hotch said. “We control what we can. We find the holes in their story and close them. We find the witnesses and put them on the record. And we do not, under any circumstance, let this become about politics. This is about four people who crossed every line. We’re police. We’ll prove it.”

The room exhaled, in different ways — some with resolve, some with dread. Outside, through the concrete and glass, the feeds kept spinning, and red banners crawled across foreign channels. The headlines multiplied. The team had anticipated resistance, even anger; they had not expected the sense that the very institution they’d served could be turned, in the space of a day, into the angle of a story designed to wound them as deeply as any evidence ever could.

And in the quiet that followed, each of them felt the same terrible truth: whatever else this case became, the public eye would make it a crucible — and they could not afford, not for one moment, to stumble inside it.

The prison wing slept under fluorescent light that never dimmed. Four doors, four cages, four killers isolated from everyone but each other’s echoes.

Hannibal sat on the edge of his cot, posture still immaculate, but his hands trembled in the shadows. He kept them hidden, clasped tight between his knees like a child hiding bloodied palms. His eyes, usually calm pools of calculation, were wide and rimmed with red. He stared across the corridor, at Will’s cell, as if the act of watching him breathe might anchor the universe in place.

Will noticed. He was lying on his bunk, arms folded under his head, pretending at rest but not sleeping. He tilted his chin toward Hannibal, frowning at the way his lover’s body betrayed its own control — the slight shake in his shoulders, the shallow, measured breaths.

“You’re scared,” Will said finally. His voice wasn’t cruel, but it wasn’t gentle either. Just a fact pressed into the stale air.

Hannibal didn’t look away. “Yes.” The word left him quietly, like something torn loose. “Not of these walls. Not of the judgments that will be passed. I have lived through both before. But…” His gaze faltered, then returned to Will with raw insistence. “I thought I had lost you once. Yesterday, I almost did.”

Will’s throat tightened. He turned on his side, meeting Hannibal’s stare fully, letting the silence drag until it scraped. “You didn’t. I’m still here.”

For how long?” Hannibal whispered. The fear was naked now — not the fear of death, but of absence, of emptiness. His shoulders curled slightly inward, an animal trying to cage itself against the cold. “What Spencer Reid did to you… what Dexter Morgan abetted… I saw you collapse, drowning in your own blood.

I was powerless.” His voice caught, rich with a despair he almost never permitted. “That powerlessness haunts me more than any cell.”

Will’s lips twitched, not into a smile, but into something weary and sharp. “You’re not powerless, Hannibal. You’re just caged, same as me. We’ve always been caged — by law, by circumstance, by our own choices.” He shifted, pushing himself up to sit, elbows on his knees. His hair fell into his face, his eyes lit strangely by the buzzing light. “But you don’t get to unravel. You don’t get to break now.”

For a moment Hannibal said nothing. His hands unknotted and pressed flat against his thighs. The mask of composure began to slide back into place, but not fully; the rawness lingered in his eyes, too human to be hidden entirely.

Will leaned his forehead against the bars, voice low, almost conspiratorial. “You’re terrified of losing me. Good. That means you’re still mine.”

Something trembled in Hannibal’s chest — relief, pain, devotion — and he let it show, just for Will.

And for the first time since the kill room, Will felt the balance shift: Hannibal, the god, the aesthete, the predator, stripped to the bone of fear.

Will’s face softened, the sharp edges of his fear easing into something like mischief. He let out a small, incredulous laugh that didn’t quite reach his eyes and said, half-ironically, half-pleading, “You should have given me the ring sooner.”

Hannibal’s mouth tipped at the corners — an answer that was equal parts apology and triumph. He watched Will for a long, careful moment, then said, quietly, “I could have. But I wanted you to want it without being asked.” His voice was steady; the tremor had receded but the honesty remained. “You make the weight worth carrying.”

Will let the words settle between them, then shrugged, a rueful, private gesture. “Next time,” he said, softer now, “don’t make me wait so long.” There was humor in the demand, but also an undertow of need that Huck’s prison lights could not flay away.

Hannibal’s laugh was a whisper. He reached up and, without touching the bars, mimed the slow, deliberate brush of his ring across his palm as if handing the intention through the metal. “Sooner,” he promised, and the promise held them together in the thin, fluorescent dark.

The clatter of trays and the rattle of keys came down the corridor. Noon. The guards slid tin plates through the bottom slot of each door, the smell of boiled potatoes and overcooked meat souring the stale air. Dexter sat on his cot, waiting until the guard’s shadow passed, then stood, fingers curling tight around the bars.

“I want a private meeting with my son,” he said evenly, tone clipped, precise. “Vis-à-vis. Constitutionally, it’s my right. I’m still Harrison’s legal guardian, and you know it.”

The guard — broad-shouldered, unimpressed — turned his head slowly, one eyebrow lifting. “Your right?” He let the word drip like poison. “Your right ended when they dragged you out of that kill room with a syringe in your hand and blood on your shoes.”

Dexter’s jaw twitched, but he didn’t step back. “You don’t get to decide. Legally, I’m his tutor. Harrison deserves to see his father.”

The guard gave a sharp bark of a laugh, shaking his head. “Deserves? Kid deserves a childhood without a monster breathing down his neck. You think we’re gonna let him sit across from you, hear you talk, maybe pick up whatever rot is in your blood? Forget it. That’s not a right. That’s a fantasy.”

Dexter’s face stayed neutral, mask perfected over years of hunting in daylight. But his knuckles whitened against the cold iron. “The law doesn’t bend to your opinion.”

“Law?” The guard leaned in, his grin vicious. “You’re not a man anymore, Morgan. You’re a case number. A cell block. Your boy’s with his grandparents — decent enough people, from what I hear. That’s more family than you’ll ever be again.”

For the briefest flicker, Dexter’s eyes burned — grief, rage, the ache of Harrison’s name spoken by another man’s mouth. Then the mask slid back into place, colder than before. He released the bars, sat back down on the cot, and said nothing.

The guard smirked, satisfied, and moved on, boots echoing down the corridor.

But Dexter’s mind was already working, sharp and relentless: if the system won’t give me Harrison, I’ll find another way.

Spencer waited until the corridor quieted, until the guards’ boots no longer rang against the concrete. He’d heard every word — of course he had — the guard’s mocking voice cutting through the thin silence, Dexter’s request sharp as glass. He pressed his palms against the cool bars, leaned his forehead there a moment, then said softly, just loud enough for Dexter to hear:

“They won’t let Harrison in. But maybe… maybe I can get someone else in.”

Dexter’s eyes cut toward him, narrow, searching. “You think they’ll allow that?”

Spencer’s lips twitched, dry, humorless. “I know JJ. She’s a mother. She’ll understand the pull. And she knows what it does to lose time with your children. She’d rather cut her own throat than let Henry or Michael think she abandoned them. If anyone would bend… it’s her.”

Dexter didn’t answer, but the weight in his gaze shifted — not trust, not hope, but something knotted in between.

Later, across bulletproof glass, JJ sat stiff-backed in a steel chair, her arms crossed so tightly her knuckles whitened. She hadn’t wanted to come — the memory of the kill room, the blood, the betrayal still raw in her throat. But when Spencer asked, the tremor in his voice made her falter. She’d agreed, reluctantly, her stomach sour.

“Don’t think this is forgiveness,” she said immediately, eyes cutting sharp to him, then glancing once, unwillingly, at Dexter. “I’m here because… because I know what it means to be cut off from your kids. Nothing more.”

Spencer nodded, slow. “I didn’t expect more.”

JJ’s eyes softened — but only for a second. Then they hardened again, a wall snapping back into place. “You terrify me now, Spence. You both do. But Harrison didn’t choose you. And he doesn’t deserve to pay for your choices.”

Dexter leaned forward, voice low, rough. “That’s all I’ve been saying.”

JJ’s gaze locked on his, unflinching. “Then don’t make me regret this.”

The silence stretched. A heavy silence, where fear and faint mercy knotted in the air between them.

JJ’s badge still carried weight, even in the bowels of that maximum-security wing. She didn’t flash it too openly — just enough, just in the right corners. A favor called in here, a sympathetic guard there. Her voice lowered, reasonable, mother-to-mother with the female corrections officer she finally cornered in a corridor. You have kids? Then you know what it does. You know what it means.

And so it was done in shadows. Not on the record. Not with anyone’s approval. Not Hotch’s, not Rossi’s. Especially not Derek’s. JJ knew what she was risking, but she did it anyway — because Spencer’s request had sounded like a plea for his life, and because the image of Harrison alone, cut off, wouldn’t leave her chest.

The room was bare except for the steel table bolted to the floor. Double glass paneled one wall, reflective on the outside, see-through from within. Cameras watched every corner. Dexter was already seated when Harrison was escorted in, the manacled weight of chains clinking against his wrists as he lifted his head.

For a second, he couldn’t breathe.

Harrison was taller now, his face drawn with a boy’s sharp edges but soft with a child’s confusion. He didn’t look scared. He looked… betrayed. Like he’d known this moment was coming and hated that he was right.

“Dad,” he said, the word stiff and too practiced.

Dexter swallowed. His voice cracked when he answered. “Harry.”

The guard shifted by the door but said nothing. JJ’s shadow lingered just out of sight, behind the mirrored glass.

Dexter leaned forward as far as the chains allowed. “I wanted you to know… I asked for this. I—” He broke off, his throat working. His whole life, he’d practiced masks. Masks of calm, masks of control. But now, before the only person who still mattered, the mask cracked wide.

“I’m sorry,” Dexter whispered. “I’m so sorry. Everything I wanted was to keep you safe from me. From this. And now you’re here, looking at me like—like I’m the monster they say I am. And maybe I am. But not with you. Never with you.”

Harrison’s jaw tightened. His voice came quieter, sharper. “Then why, Dad? Why them? Why all of this?”

Dexter couldn’t answer. His eyes brimmed, and for the first time in years, tears fell unhidden. He let them. He let his son see every fracture, every regret.

Outside, JJ pressed her fist against her mouth. She shouldn’t have done this. She knew it. But she also knew she would have again.

Harrison’s eyes were cool and shut like a window. He stood inside the little vis-à-vis room as if he’d rehearsed the posture—shoulders squared, voice measured—while everything inside him tightened. He didn’t look like a boy any longer; he looked like someone who had learned to hold himself at arm’s length from disappointment.

“Dad,” he said again, the single word stripped of appeal.

Dexter drew in a breath and made himself contain a world. He had rehearsed variants of this conversation in the long hollow hours; none of them felt like rehearsal now. He leaned forward until his chained wrists cut cold through the sleeve of his coat.

“Harrison.” His voice broke once and he swallowed it back. “I asked for this. I pushed—” He stopped. The rest of the sentence would be a confession too heavy for the glass between them. He softened his tone, because the hardest thing in the world right now was to be softer than the truth demanded. “I understand if you hate me. If you don’t know what to call me. If you’re… afraid. That’s okay. You’re allowed to be.”

Harrison watched him as though cataloguing the evidence of a stranger. He turned his jaw, and his mouth made a small, private line. “You made choices.”

“I did.” Dexter’s throat worked. “I did, and I will carry that. I won’t ask you to forgive me. I only asked—” He paused and found his calm by sheer force. “I only asked that you know I tried to do the thing I thought would keep you safe. I know it looks like cowardice or monstrosity. I know. I won’t make excuses.”

Harrison’s eyes flicked to the metal of the handcuffs that held Dexter to the table. For a moment the boy was younger than his years—the faint curve of incredulity on his face—and then the wall went back up again.

“You don’t get to tell me about safety,” Harrison said, flat. “You don’t get to pretend this keeps me safe.” He dropped his voice until it was brittle, private: “You left. You left and you told me you were keeping me safe when you took everything else.”

Dexter felt the old polite mechanisms—calculated warmth, practiced distance—slide into place without permission. He was good at those masks. He used one now like a splint.

“You’re right,” he said. “I left. I took a path I thought would protect you. I can only accept how that looks to you. If you want time—I understand. If you want nothing—I’ll accept that, too. I don’t want to make this harder. I—” He stopped because the sentence would break him. Instead he let the steadyness of the words be a kind of liturgy. “Take care of yourself. Be with people who love you and are good for you. I did terrible things. I don’t want to ask for your forgiveness.”

Harrison’s lips thinned. “I don’t know what I want,” he said, quieter. “But I know I don’t want to see this again. Not like this.”

There was no pleading in him, no softening. Just the decision of a child who had to shore himself against whatever he feared the most. He looked at Dexter once more—sharp, appraising—and then the guard moved forward and Harrison was led away. In the little glassed room JJ’s figure was a shadow at the edge of sight; she did not step in. She only pressed one hand flat to the cold pane, as if the glass were the only stitch left between them.

Dexter watched Harrison go. He watched the door close. He watched the guard’s keys rattle like an indifferent metronome. He had survived confessions before; he had survived the busiest, bloodiest hours of his life. He could keep it together. He had to.

When the slot in the door clicked and the guard returned the chain that tethered him to the table, Dexter sat up with everything held along a single, brittle seam. He spoke in clipped, careful sentences that kept feeling at bay.

“It’s okay,” he said finally—an offering, not a bargain. “I understand. Be… be careful.”

The guard’s nod was perfunctory. The whistle of the corridor beyond the visitation room returned them to their institutional rhythm. JJ’s silhouette receded. The glass cooled behind his eyes.

He got up slow, palms slick in the fluorescent light, and shuffled back into his cell. The metal door closed with a bureaucratic finality—a wordless click that severed the last thin thread of performance.

Then the world folded.

He made it two paces across the concrete before the sound began—an animal sound that was not exactly a sob and not exactly a cry. He tried to keep it in his throat, to manual the shapeless thing into a measured cadence. He could not. He buckled at the knees, one hand on the bunk, the other pressed to the glass of the small, barred window that let in a slice of pale sky. His shoulders shook with everything he had boxed and boxed and boxed away for years: apologies, the weight of the dead, the remembered faces of those he’d tried to protect and had failed, the absurd, impossible image of his son walking away from him as if he were someone else’s ruin.

The mask dropped from his face and shattered in private shards across the cell. He let the sounds come—raw and animal and stupidly human. He clawed at the metal band on his wrist as though he could claw his way back into a different life. When words finally scraped themselves up through the noise, they were not for Harrison or for JJ or for the guards. They were for the empty air, for the ghosts he carried.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated until the syllable had no shape left. “God, I’m sorry.”

The cell smelled of disinfectant and cold stone. In that stink of sterility his body finally admitted what his face had been trying to hide all visit long: the thing he had tried to be—protector, teacher, repairer—had come unstitched. He slid down the wall and brought his knees to his chest and folded in on himself until every small part of him fit inside the smallest, most private place he could find.

Outside, beyond the bricks and the double glass and the protocols and the phone calls that would ring and the headlines that would flare, JJ’s hand left the pane and her shoulders bowed. She turned away without looking back.

Inside the cell, as the first deep, exhausting quiet settled, Dexter let himself break. The sound he made that time was not meant for anyone. It was a fissure: grief and terror and love braided together, finally free.

The sound of heels striking polished concrete rang sharp in the prison wing. It was out of place here, in the heavy corridors where footsteps usually dragged. Alana and Margot walked with deliberate grace, coats tailored, hair perfect, as if they had dressed for a gala instead of a penitentiary. They looked untouchable, luminous even under the harsh fluorescent lights. Guards turned their heads. Everyone did.

The door to the interview chamber clanged open, and Hannibal Lecter was waiting. He sat straight-backed, chained at the wrists, yet somehow still managing poise, still looking like the man who once dined on caviar in Florence, who had taught patients to read their dreams as if they were operas. He gave the faintest smile as the women entered.

“Alana,” he said, voice rich as ever, rolling the name like a remembered aria. “Margot.”

Alana tilted her chin, studied him like he was no more than a specimen. There had been a time she had loved him — or the man she thought he was. Now, all that intimacy had soured into something sharper.

“You caged me once, Hannibal,” she said, her voice as crisp as her suit. “You put me in your story like a piece of stage scenery. A puppet to be moved.” She leaned across the table, eyes hard. “Look at you now. All that genius, all that taste, all that hunger — and here you are. Caged.”

For a moment, Hannibal’s mask held. That serene calm, that cultivated control. But Alana saw the small betrayals — the slight flex of his bound fingers, the flicker of his gaze.

“You mistake circumstance for defeat,” Hannibal said, low. “Cages are temporary. Influence is eternal.”

Margot gave a low, cutting laugh. “Spare us the philosophy. You’ve been stripped of everything, Lecter. Your knife, your kitchen, your disciples. You don’t even get to choose what you eat. And that—” she pointed at the shackles, her hand gleaming with the ring she and Alana had chosen together, “—that’s all the control you’ll ever hold now.”

Hannibal’s eyes dropped briefly to the ring. For the first time, something like a shadow passed through them.

Alana smiled at that flicker, a small, cold triumph. “You once told me I couldn’t trust you. You were right. I couldn’t. But you should never have trusted yourself either.”

The room went still. Hannibal’s silence was heavy, not his usual cultivated pause, but something weightier.

Then the door opened again. The guard barked a command, and Will Graham was brought in. Shackled at wrists and ankles, pale still from the sutures hidden under his prison jumpsuit, eyes darker than they had ever been. He looked like he’d walked through fire and only half come back.

The guard shoved him into the chair across from Hannibal. He slouched back, restless energy coiled under his skin. He glanced at Hannibal once, then fixed his gaze on Alana and Margot.

Alana’s tone shifted. It wasn’t fury now, not like with Hannibal. It was disappointment sharpened into a blade. “You could have been better, Will,” she said quietly. “You could have stopped him. But you chose him.”

Will’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite a grimace. “I chose,” he said simply, voice rasping.

Margot stepped forward, steel in every line of her. “Whatever you thought you were building together—it rotted. It’s nothing but a carcass of obsession now. You dressed it up as art, as love, but it was just consumption. And now the world sees you for what you are.”

Will gave a sharp laugh, bitter enough to sting. “And what are you, Margot? You who carved your brother’s throat? You who bred death in your family’s greenhouse?”

Margot didn’t flinch. She leaned closer, her voice smooth, merciless. “I killed because I had to. Because survival demanded it. You killed because you wanted to. Don’t confuse the two.”

The air between them tightened. Hannibal’s gaze cut toward Will, the faintest warning in his eyes, but Will ignored it, leaning forward as far as his chains allowed. “You think you’re righteous? You came here to gloat. To show off your pretty clothes and your pretty life. But you came because you needed to see me. You needed to see us.”

Alana’s lip curled. “We came because we wanted to see the monsters caged. And because we needed you to know that whatever devotion you shared — whatever mockery of marriage you thought you were living — it doesn’t scare us anymore. It disgusts us.”

For a moment, silence hummed. Then Hannibal, who had remained strangely quiet, finally spoke. His voice was softer than before, less weapon than wound. “You mistake disgust for fear, Alana. But fear — fear is yours. Always has been.”

Alana’s answer came fast, bitter. “Not anymore. Not when I can walk away with Margot and our child. Not when you’re the one locked up, staring at what you’ll never touch again.”

The guard banged the door then, signaling time. The spell of the confrontation cracked.

Alana rose, Margot beside her, both regal, composed, untouchable. Alana’s final glance at Hannibal was cutting: no longing, no trace of the woman she had once been with him. Just cold dismissal.

Margot’s parting words were worse. “Enjoy rotting together.”

Then they turned, heels striking the floor again, carrying their triumph out of the prison with them.

Hannibal and Will were left behind, shackled, silent, in the heavy air the women had left like smoke.

The chamber felt colder once Alana and Margot were gone. Hannibal sat back, chains clinking faintly, and let silence lap around him. He replayed Alana’s eyes: not the softness of the student who once admired him, not the woman who once yielded to his kiss, but the surgeon who had gutted him with words sharper than any scalpel. He felt it in his chest — not rage, but a hollow.

Alana had once been possibility. The mother of a future, perhaps. A companion in intellect, in taste. Margot had once been a pupil of power, someone who owed him for carving a space in her life. And now both of them had looked at him as if he were a grotesque. They had their child, their empire. He had chains.

For the first time in years, Hannibal felt the shape of loss settle fully in his body. It was not something he admitted, even to himself. But as he turned his head slightly toward Will — who sat still, shackled, staring at the floor — Hannibal realized: They will never look at me again as they once did. And I will never forgive them for it.

Will sat beside him, the aftertaste of Margot’s words sharp in his mouth. Obsession. Consumption. Carcass of love. He almost laughed. Almost.

But what stung wasn’t Margot. It wasn’t even Alana’s blade-sharp dismissal. It was memory: the dogs he hadn’t seen in what felt like lifetimes, the quiet mornings by the water, the small, unspoken life he might have had. And Jack Crawford’s face floated unbidden — the man who had once said, I believe you. Who had caged him once before, who would now watch him rot with the same cold detachment.

The thought tightened his jaw. If Jack comes here, Will thought, I will break my hands on these chains just to feel his throat in them.

Then he glanced at Hannibal. Saw the flicker in those brown eyes, almost wet, almost human. It shook him, though he didn’t show it. For once, it wasn’t Will who was breaking. It was Hannibal.

The click of her heels came before the guards’ announcement. Sharp, purposeful, like a metronome keeping time for her own entrance. Freddie Lounds swept into the visitation wing with a silk scarf trailing from her throat, sunglasses pushed up into a crown of red hair, the faint perfume of smoke and spice preceding her. She carried no folder, no recorder — she didn’t need them. She never forgot a word.

The guard shut the door behind her, leaving Will and Hannibal caged in opposite glass boxes, side by side, the cold steel benches holding them rigid.

“Gentlemen,” Freddie said brightly, planting herself between the two panes of glass as if she were the star of the show. “Or should I say—husbands.”

Her smile was bright, sharp, cutting.

Will’s shoulders stiffened. Hannibal’s face remained composed, but his eyes narrowed fractionally, a storm just beneath the stillness.

“You’ve survived me again, Freddie,” Hannibal said at last, his voice smooth as ever. “How miraculous.”

“I like to think I’ve earned my own headline,” she replied, leaning close to the glass on Will’s side, hand cupped as though sharing a secret. “The girl who outlived the Cannibal and his cursed lover.”

Will’s jaw flexed. His gaze didn’t waver, but the muscle twitched once beneath his beard.

Freddie straightened, laugh bubbling up. “Don’t glare at me, Will. If I hadn’t written my little articles, you’d still be a misunderstood profiler, not a myth. People forget bodies, but they don’t forget headlines.”

“You cheapen everything,” Will muttered, voice low enough the glass almost swallowed it.

“And yet—” Freddie spread her arms, silk scarf fluttering, “—here I am. Still alive. Still writing. Because of you.”

Hannibal tilted his head. “Because of us, or in spite of us?”

Freddie’s grin widened. “Both. Always both.” She pivoted to him fully, eyes glinting behind the glass. “You ran off together. You were gods for a season. Do you know how that read from here? Europe bent around you. Fear bent around you. You’ll never be ordinary again.”

Will gave a short, bitter laugh. “Ordinary. That’s not the word I’d use.”

Freddie ignored it, stepping back to take them both in at once. Two cages, two men, joined by silence more than speech. “You should know,” she said, softer now, almost reverent, “that the world doesn’t care if you’re monsters or men. They just love that you did it together.”

The word came again, sharper this time, aimed like a dart. “Husbands.”

Neither spoke. Hannibal’s hands folded in his lap, one finger brushing the signet ring that caught the sterile light. Will’s eyes flicked to it, then away, the sting of her word clinging in the air like smoke.

Freddie leaned in close to Will’s glass once more. “If you escape—and let’s be honest, you probably will—call me. Europe always loves a sequel.”

She turned then, scarf trailing, heels clicking on concrete. She didn’t look back. The guards followed her down the corridor, and the scent of her perfume lingered long after the sound of her steps was gone.

The silence she left behind was heavier than her presence.

The room was different this time. No cages, no glass. Just a table bolted to the floor, steel legs and scarred surface. Two chairs chained to the ground, one meter apart. Hannibal and Will sat in them, uncuffed, but each wrist marked faintly where iron had pressed too long.

They looked tired — not broken, not bent, but worn. A tiredness of being seen too much, questioned too much, dragged open too often. They had faced Alana and Margot’s triumph, then Freddie’s taunts, all in quick succession. Their silence now was heavy, like a pause in music before the downbeat.

The door opened. Jack Crawford stepped in.

Not the Jack of their memories. He was grayer, heavier, but his stride still carried command. The guards shut the door behind him and left them three alone.

Jack stopped on the other side of the table, hands pressed against its surface, leaning in. His eyes found Will first, and didn’t move.

Will’s lip curled, a humorless smile. “Of course. It was only a matter of time.”

“Shut up, Will,” Jack said, voice flat with restrained fury. “You don’t get to be clever here. You don’t get to smirk your way through this.”

Hannibal’s gaze flicked between them. He remained still, folded neatly in his chair.

“You dragged me into this,” Jack continued, voice rising. “You dragged my team into this. You dragged the Bureau into this. Do you know what it’s like out there right now? The press is tearing us apart. Three agents turned killers, and one of them—” His hand shot out, jabbing a finger toward Hannibal. “—our prized consultant. Do you know what that looks like?”

“We look like what we are,” Will said coldly. “Efficient.”

Jack slammed his palm against the table. The sound cracked through the room like a shot. “You look like a disgrace. You look like you made a fool of me, of every agent who ever trusted you.”

“Trusted me?” Will barked a laugh. He leaned forward, his face lit with raw, uncontained anger. “You locked me in a cell, Jack. You drugged me, you lied to me, you strung me along like a dog on a leash. And then when it suited you—” he jabbed his own finger now, stabbing the air toward Jack— “you let me off that leash to chase your monsters. And I caught them. Every time. Until I caught myself.”

Hannibal shifted slightly, as though savoring the words, but said nothing.

“You think this is about you?” Jack snapped. “This is about everyone you destroyed on the way. The bodies, the families. Jesus, Will, Spencer Reid is in a cell two doors down. Reid! You turned him loose, you made him—”

“I didn’t make him anything,” Will cut across, voice sharp as broken glass. “He was already breaking. Just like me. Just like you, if you’d had the courage.”

Jack’s face darkened, his jaw tightening. He leaned across the table until his shadow fell on Will. “You don’t get to throw this back at me. You don’t get to act like you’re some tragic martyr. You’re not. You’re a murderer. Both of you.”

Will’s voice dropped, low and seething: “Say it again.”

Jack blinked. “What?”

“Say it again,” Will growled, leaning in closer, eyes burning. “Say murderer. Say it loud enough for the whole wing to hear. Say it until it sounds like truth to you. Because every time you say it, I’ll say this: I was yours first. Your weapon. Your monster.”

The room went dead silent. Jack’s breath caught in his throat.

Hannibal finally spoke, softly, cutting through the weight of their standoff. “Will is correct, Jack. You shaped him. You pointed him. You squeezed the trigger. And now you’re furious that he aimed himself elsewhere.”

“Shut your mouth,” Jack snarled, snapping toward Hannibal. “You don’t get a word. You’re not a man, you’re a disease.”

Hannibal only smiled faintly. “It amuses me that you think the disease came from me alone. Contagion requires a host.”

Jack’s fist tightened on the table edge. He wanted to swing. Will saw it in his stance.

“Go ahead,” Will said, almost whispering, his voice trembling with the mix of rage and exhaustion. “Do it. Hit me. Put me down like the dog you think I am. That’s what you wanted all along.”

Jack’s chest heaved, his knuckles still white on the table’s edge. He didn’t move, but his silence was worse than shouting.

Will leaned in, refusing to break eye contact. “Say it, Jack. Say you wanted me to do the things you never could. Say you wanted me to be you without the badge.”

“You think I wanted this?” Jack roared, the words finally ripping free. “You think I wanted you bleeding out in hospital beds, rotting in cells, covered in other people’s blood? I wanted you alive! You idiot, I wanted you safe!”

“Safe?” Will’s voice cracked like a whip. “You left me in cages. You let Hannibal carve me open. You called it necessity. You called it the job. Don’t you dare tell me you wanted me safe.”

Jack slammed his palm again, the sound reverberating. “I fought for you! Every damn day, I fought for you, Will! And you—” he jabbed his finger again, fury raw now— “you spit in my face. You betray every ounce of faith I ever gave you. You joined him!”

Will surged to his feet, the chair scraping loud against the floor. His voice broke open, louder than Jack’s: “Because he didn’t lie to me! He didn’t leash me and call it loyalty. He didn’t tell me I was broken and then use the broken pieces. He took me as I am. That’s more than you ever did!”

Jack rose too, both of them over the table now, almost nose-to-nose, voices colliding.

“You’re a damn fool, Will! You let him turn you into this!”

“No!” Will spat. “You turned me into this. He only showed me the truth.”

“Truth?” Jack’s laughter was harsh, joyless. “The truth is you’re a killer. Always were. And I was blind enough to think you could be saved.”

Will’s hands shook where they gripped the edge of the table. His eyes blazed. “I was never yours to save, Jack. Never. You had your chance. And you wasted it.”

For the first time, Jack faltered, just half a beat. His mouth opened, but no words came. Then the fury surged back.

“You disgust me,” he hissed. “Both of you. You think this—” he gestured between Will and Hannibal— “is love? It’s rot. It’s poison. And it’ll kill you both.”

Will slammed the table so hard the metal screeched. “Better his poison than your leash!”

The room shook with their voices, loud enough for the guards outside to hear. The door burst open — two armed men rushing in, shouting over them.

“That’s enough! Sit down! Both of you!”

One grabbed Jack’s shoulder, pulling him back, while another shoved Will roughly into his chair. Hannibal remained seated through it all, serene, eyes alight as if savoring every shard of chaos.

Jack struggled against the guard’s grip, but didn’t lunge again. His eyes still locked on Will’s, hatred and heartbreak tangled together.

Will’s chest heaved. He didn’t look away either.

The guards forced silence into the room, but the air still vibrated with the echoes of what had been said — the ugliest truths, flung like knives and cutting just as deep.

The guards escorted them down the narrow corridor, boots echoing against concrete. Hannibal walked with the posture of a man who had not been humiliated, though the faint tension in his jaw betrayed the effort it cost him. Beside him, Will radiated fury, the kind that set his shoulders high and his stride sharp. He didn’t speak—wouldn’t give Jack Crawford’s shadow the satisfaction—but every line of him bristled. When they reached their cells, the guards swung open the doors. Hannibal paused just long enough to give Will the briefest glance, a flicker of steadying calm. Will ignored it, storming inside, and the steel clanged shut between them. Hannibal sat down, composed, while across the block Will paced like a caged animal, rage humming against the walls.

On the other side of the wing, Dexter was still slumped on his bunk, head heavy, the aftershock of seeing Harrison less than an hour ago leaving him raw and hazed out. He hadn’t allowed himself to break down in front of the boy, but the ache in his chest hadn’t left, not for a second. His thoughts spun—Harry’s ghost, Harrison’s eyes, JJ’s face—and the exhaustion of it all dragged at him, made every sound in the prison echo louder than it should have.

The rattle of keys broke through the haze. A guard stopped outside his cell.

“Visitor,” the man said flatly. “Get up, Morgan.”

They walked him down to a private room—small, sterile, a table bolted to the floor. No rings, no talismans, no comforts. Just the weight of what waited for him.

And then the door opened. And Angel Batista stepped inside.

He looked older than Dexter remembered him, but no less steady, no less sure of himself. The years had drawn deeper lines around his eyes, but his stare was as unwavering as ever. Batista didn’t waste time sitting; he planted himself across the table and leaned forward on his palms.

“You know, Dexter,” Batista began, his voice gravel but steady, “I used to think I’d seen everything. Miami makes a man think that way. But then they send me here, and I see you. I see what you did. And I realize I didn’t know a damn thing.”

Dexter blinked slowly, pulling his composure around him like armor. “If you came here for shock value, you’ll have to try harder. The world already thinks I’m a monster.”

“Monster?” Batista snapped. “Don’t flatter yourself. Monsters are myths. You’re just a man who kills because it makes him feel like God. Same as Hannibal Lecter, same as Graham. But you—” He jabbed a finger toward Dexter, the cuff chains rattling at the motion. “You had a family. You had a kid. A son who looked at you like you hung the moon. And you still chose blood over him.”

Silence stretched. The air felt thinner.

“And I’m not done,” Batista said, leaning in. “You want names? Let’s count them.”

The fluorescent light seemed to buzz louder.

“Debra.” The name cracked something in him. At once, she was there—Debra Morgan, all sharp eyes and filthy mouth, arms crossed, jaw set. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. She looked at him like she used to—like he was hers to protect and to damn—and the shame landed like a fist.

“Maria LaGuerta,” Batista pressed, voice shaking once then hardening. “My wife. My fucking wife.” LaGuerta materialized behind Debra, immaculate as ever, a red slash of lipstick like a wound, gaze clinical,disappointed, relentless. Dexter’s fingers flexed against the cuff chain.

“Harry Morgan.” The room tilted. “He shot his brains out because of you.” Harry appeared in the corner, tie neat, eyes gone with sorrow, one hand lifted in that old, useless calming gesture. Dexter’s breath hitched.

“James Doakes.” The temperature dropped. Doakes stepped forward out of nowhere, eyes burning. Surprise, motherfucker was on his face even if he didn’t say it. Dexter’s heart kicked too hard against his ribs.

“Frank Lundy. Agent Lundy.” Across the table, Batista’s stare didn’t soften. Lundy’s tall, quiet presence slid into the back of the room like a ghost of law itself—tired, decent, dead.

They were all here. The walls pressed in, shrinking. Dexter tried to draw breath and the air wouldn’t come fast enough, his chest cinching tight, a high, thin ring starting somewhere behind his ears. Sweat prickled cold along his spine. The chain at his wrists felt too short; the room, too full.

Batista’s voice kept coming, relentless. “You want a pattern? Here it is: everyone who gets close to you winds up in the ground. You chose that, Dexter. You chose it over and over.”

Dexter’s composure fissured. The ghosts crowded closer. Debra’s eyes were wet, furious. LaGuerta’s were knives. Harry’s were a wound. Doakes burned. Lundy grieved.

“And don’t think I’ve forgotten the kid,” Batista said, quieter, more lethal. “Rita on the bathroom floor. You made Harrison sit in his mother’s blood. You write it like a curse into everybody you touch.”

Rita’s perfume—clean, soft—seemed to slip through the air. She didn’t appear, not like the others; that was worse. It was only the blood, only the empty space where a life had been, and Dexter’s breath snapped in his throat. He pulled air that wouldn’t fill his lungs, vision edging white, the room warping around the faces he couldn’t stop seeing.

“Look at me,” Batista said. “Look at me.”

Dexter forced his gaze up. Batista didn’t blink.

“You’re not the Bay Harbor Butcher anymore. You’re a man in chains. And the only legacy you’ve got left is a boy who deserves better than the ghost you made him.”

Dexter swallowed against the lock in his chest and couldn’t get it down. His pulse roared. The tabletop swam under his palms.

Batista finally straightened, exhaustion overtaking anger. “That’s all I came to say.”

The door clicked. He turned to go, then paused, looking back with something like pity and something like contempt.

“Live with it,” he said softly. “That’s the one sentence left for you.”

He left. The door sealed.

The ghosts didn’t. Debra’s mouth trembled; LaGuerta’s stare flayed; Harry’s sorrow undid him; Doakes’s fury seared; Lundy’s disappointment weighed like lead. Dexter’s breath came in ragged, shallow pulls; the edges of the room pulsed. He bent forward, forearms to the table, fighting for air, fighting not to drop, fighting not to let any sound out at all. His cuff chain scraped the steel, a small, ugly noise in a room suddenly too full of the dead.

He shut his eyes and counted, the way he had taught himself: in for four, hold for four, out for six. Again. Again. Again.

When he opened them, the room was empty but for him.

And the door’s small window showed a square of gray hallway, quiet as a morgue.

The guard’s boots hit the floor hard, each step too loud in the quiet of the wing.

“Reid. Move.”

Spencer stood, cuffs biting his wrists. He’d already learned to rise slow—like a man, not an animal. But his eyes flicked sideways once before the door clanged open.

Dexter.

Bent forward on the cot, hands pressed to his knees, head down. His chest lifted shallow, stuttered. His lips parted but no air seemed to move. The tremor in his shoulders wasn’t rage. It was the lock of a panic attack. Spencer had seen them before—on civilians, on agents, on himself once, in the aftermath of torture. His instinct was immediate, brutal in its helplessness: go to him.

He shifted. The guard’s grip caught his arm, hard.

“Reid, I said move.”

Spencer dug in his heels. “He can’t breathe. He’s panicking—”

“Not your problem.”

It was. God, it was. His body tensed against the pull, but the steel weight of chains slowed him, and the guard’s shove forced him toward the exit.

“Spence.”

The word came like gravel dragged across glass. Dexter had lifted his head enough to meet his eyes, pupils wide, sweat at his temple. His voice scraped raw, but he forced it out.

“They didn’t—Batista didn’t—” He broke on the air, tried again. “He didn’t know about us.”

Spencer froze for half a beat. Then the guard yanked him forward and the door slammed behind, sealing the moment in.

It hit him halfway down the corridor, sharp as a match-strike: Batista hadn’t said his name. Not once. Not in the litany of ghosts, not in the catalogue of ruin. Reid hadn’t been dragged into Dexter Morgan’s tally of destruction.

Because they didn’t know.

The BAU had kept it quiet.

The Bureau, desperate to preserve the last rags of its reputation, had hidden the truth—that Spencer Reid had chosen the Bay Harbor Butcher over them. That in three months, Dexter had eclipsed two decades of loyalty, of friendships, of cases. That Spencer, eidetic memory and all, had looked at the world and sided with a killer.

If that came out? If the press got it? The BAU’s bones would crack in the open.

He felt it settle in his chest: a card up his sleeve, sharp as an axe. Their silence wasn’t protection. It was leverage.

By the time they shoved him into the interview room, Spencer’s breathing was calm again. His eyes steady, almost bright. He’d lost blood, lost sleep, lost control in ways that still hummed through his veins. But here, he wasn’t weak.

He was dangerous.

And they didn’t even know it yet.

The door swung open with the metallic screech of hinges that hadn’t been oiled in years. Spencer was shoved forward.

The room was small, bare but brutal in its arrangement. A table bolted to the floor, a single chair for him, and all around — in a half-circle, like professors at a tribunal — sat his team. Rossi at the center, grave and composed. Hotch to his left, unreadable, but iron beneath the surface. JJ, Morgan, Emily, Tara. Six pairs of eyes, six guns in civilian clothes.

It was deliberate. They wanted him to feel it: cornered, caged, inspected.

Spencer sat, chains rattling as he folded his wrists onto the table. His back was straight, his face unreadable. Inside, he felt the aftershock of Dexter’s words — they didn’t know about us. The card up his sleeve. His silence hummed like a live wire.

For a moment, no one spoke. The team watched him like scientists waiting for the specimen to twitch.

Finally Rossi leaned forward, voice low. “You’ve made choices, Spencer, that will haunt you until the day you die. And us along with you.”

Spencer tilted his head. “That’s already true, David. It was true before Dexter Morgan, before Verona, before any of this. You know it as well as I do. The difference is, now the world knows.”

Hotch’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t interrupt.

Spencer continued, calm, precise. “But let’s not forget — I’m not just another name on your roster. I’m not an agent you can bury in a file. I’ve been a public face for the Bureau for twenty years. Lectures. Publications. Conferences. Universities. I’ve been quoted in textbooks. Students have called me a genius since I was twenty. I’m as recognizable in academic circles as Rossi is in criminology.” His gaze flicked to Rossi, not with arrogance, but with fact. “The same credibility. The same weight.”

JJ flinched, as if the reminder stung more than an insult.

“I’m forty years old,” Spencer said softly. “I’m not a relic of reputation — I’m in my prime. And the Bureau knows it. That’s why they kept quiet.” He let the words hang, razor-sharp. “That’s why Batista didn’t mention me when he listed Dexter’s ghosts. Because the Bureau buried it. They buried me.”

A ripple of tension crossed the table. Emily shifted, her jaw tightening. Morgan’s hands curled into fists against his knees.

“You think that makes you untouchable?” Rossi’s voice cut, sharp.

Spencer’s mouth twitched — not a smile, but a shadow of it. “No. It makes you vulnerable.”

Morgan exhaled sharply, leaning forward. “Reid—Spence—do you even hear yourself? Do you know how twisted that sounds?”

Spencer’s eyes flicked to him, weary but steady. “It’s not twisted, Derek. It’s strategy. It’s damage control. And you all know it.”

There was silence then — not agreement, not rejection, just silence.

He looked at each of them, and his voice cracked, softer than before. “I still care about you. All of you. I don’t expect you to forgive me. But don’t pretend you don’t still care about me, too.”

The silence stretched until Derek finally leaned forward, both hands flat on the table, his voice rough.

“You know what kills me, kid?” Derek said, and the word kid hit like a slap. “I watched you grow up. I watched you go from some scrawny twenty-three-year-old genius tripping over his words to a man I trusted with my life. I saw you bleed for this job, Reid. I saw you break and crawl back. And I saw you—” His voice cracked; he swallowed hard. “I saw you fight like hell not to be your worst fear. Not to be this.”

Spencer’s throat tightened. His eyes burned, but he didn’t look away.

Derek’s jaw clenched. “And now I look at you, and all I can see is him.” He jerked his chin, a hard motion, as if Dexter’s ghost lingered in the room. “The Butcher. You didn’t just fall, Spence — you picked the worst possible bastard to fall with. And don’t you dare tell me it’s love. Don’t you dare.”

The words hung jagged in the air. JJ flinched like she’d been struck. Emily pressed her lips together, her eyes fixed on the table.

Spencer’s voice shook when it finally came. “Derek—”

“No.” Derek’s hand slammed the table once, low but final. “You don’t get to Derek me like it fixes anything. You wanted raw? Here it is. You’re still my little brother. You’ll always be that to me. That’s the worst part. I can’t stop caring. But I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done. Not to them. Not to us. Not to yourself.”

The silence after was suffocating. Spencer’s face was pale, but he nodded once, like he took the words as both wound and medicine.

When the guards came to pull him from the chair, Spencer’s voice cracked out one last time, almost too soft to catch:

“Tell Garcia I love her. Tell her I forgive her for hating me. She was right to.”

Then he was gone, chains rattling down the corridor, leaving the team in their circle of grief.

The wing was never silent; even without words, it breathed. Chains scraped, footsteps echoed, steel doors groaned like old animals.

In one cell, Dexter had folded himself into the corner, knees drawn up, head pressed against the wall. His chest heaved in uneven bursts, every breath dragged through a throat gone raw. Batista’s litany of names hadn’t left him — Debra, LaGuerta, Lundy, Harry — they crowded his cell like ghosts, their outlines flickering in the corners of his vision. He couldn’t swat them away. His hands shook, nails digging into his scalp as if pressure alone could stop the suffocation clawing at his ribs.

And worst: Spencer wasn’t here. Taken, marched off to the team. Dexter hadn’t even managed more than a broken warning, a fragment of a thought. Now he was alone with the dead, and their judgment was crushing him.

Across the wing, Will sat on his bunk, fuming so hot it felt like he might ignite the sheets beneath him. Jack’s voice still rang in his skull, every accusation like salt rubbed into bone. His fists opened and closed, restless, aching to smash against something. He hated how much it still mattered to him — Jack, the team, the betrayal of being seen caged again.

Hannibal watched from his own narrow bed, head tilted, brown eyes darker than usual. Fear had carved hollows into his expression; rare, raw, almost boyish in its honesty. He was not afraid for himself. He was afraid for Will, still pale from blood loss, still trembling from rage, still caught in the undertow of wounds no surgeon could stitch. Hannibal’s hand twitched once toward the bars, toward Will, then fell still.

Will didn’t look at him, not yet. The silence between them was thick with things neither could break.

Somewhere down the hall, Dexter gasped for air, the sound of a man drowning on dry ground.

The door opened.

Spencer’s body went cold before he even registered her face.The chair was too big for her. That was Spencer’s first thought when they led Diana Reid into the room and sat her down across from him. She looked smaller than he remembered, frailer, as though the years and the illness had conspired to hollow her out.

The cuffs on his wrists rattled when he shifted forward, trying to breathe her in, trying to recognize her the way she had always been the one place he belonged.

“Mom,” he said. His voice cracked. Not the way it had cracked before in the field, not out of exhaustion or anger — this was a child’s fracture.

Her eyes found him, uncertain, like the light was too sharp, like the image in front of her didn’t fit. Her lips parted, trembling. “Spencer,” she whispered, testing the name like it might not hold.

Something in him loosened at the sound, and just as quickly tightened into a knot.

“They told me,” she said then, soft but breaking, “they told me you… hurt people. That you drink their blood.” Her hands twitched at her lap, fingers folding and unfolding. “Is it true?”

Spencer’s chest caved. He couldn’t marshal facts, couldn’t spin words into armor. He shook his head, but not with conviction — with desperation. “I’m still me. I’m still your son. I—” The words jammed.

Her gaze stayed steady, the kind of clarity she rarely had, and that clarity was worse than the confusion. “You used to read to me,” she murmured, “even when I forgot the ending. You were so good. You were good.” Her voice thinned. “Now all I hear is monster.”

Spencer swallowed hard, but his throat burned raw. Tears came, unbidden, hot and shameful. “I love you, Mom,” he whispered, pleading, almost choking on it. “Please. I love you.”

Her eyes filled, but not with recognition — with distance. A wall rising where once there had been fragile doors. “I don’t know you,” she said.

It was quiet. Too quiet.

Spencer broke. Shoulders shook; his breath came ragged, his forehead pressing to the cold edge of the table. The cuffs clanged with the movement, metal biting his skin, but he barely felt it. He sobbed — not the sharp anger of the kill room, not the controlled grief of the cell. This was the grief of a child, centuries too old, unraveling at the seam no one else could touch.

“I’m still your son,” he whispered again, over and over, like if he repeated it the world would bend back. “I’m still your son.”

The guards moved when she rose, guiding her gently to the door. She didn’t fight them, didn’t even look back. Her last words hung like barbed wire in the room:

“I don’t know you.”

When the door closed, Spencer stayed folded on the table, wrists chained, chest heaving, words stuck in the wreckage of his throat. Not clever. Not defiant. Just broken.

And that was the last visit.

The bullpen felt heavier than any prison wing. Files spread across the table, names scrawled on whiteboards, photographs staring back at them like ghosts. But it wasn’t the evidence they were studying tonight. It was Spencer Reid.

Hotch leaned forward, elbows on the table, voice clipped. “What he said in there wasn’t just emotion. It was strategy. He wanted us to hear it.”

Rossi exhaled through his nose, slow and deliberate. “He didn’t threaten us outright. He didn’t have to. Reminding us who he is — who he was — that was enough. He knows we’ve buried his reputation for the Bureau’s sake. He knows the press hasn’t touched the story of him and Morgan’s Bay Harbor butcher. And he knows why.”

JJ’s hands twisted in her lap, restless. “Because if it gets out…” She glanced at the others. “The Bureau doesn’t just look negligent. It looks complicit. We let him into our homes. Into our children’s lives.”

Morgan shook his head, jaw hard. “He’s not stupid. He knows that card gives him power. And he’s right. The Bureau doesn’t want that story printed. The whole damn world thought he was untouchable — genius, professor, Boy Wonder of the BAU. Now? Now he’s a killer who fell in with Miami’s monster. If that gets out, it’s not just a scandal. It’s blood in the water.”

Emily crossed her arms. “So the question is, do we treat it as a threat? Or as desperation?”

“Both,” Hotch said flatly.

Silence stretched. For a moment, they weren’t looking at the files — they were looking at each other, at what this case had done to them.

Finally, Rossi broke it. “We rationed visits on purpose. Two for Morgan’s butcher, that’s it. He’s the most famous of the four. Most dangerous. The one journalists would kill to get a look at.”

“Two?” Emily repeated.

“Angel Batista,” Rossi said, “because he’s the only living cop who knows Dexter Morgan inside and out. And one family connection.” He paused. “Though there’s no record of that second one.”

Everyone turned, slow and sharp, toward JJ.

Her mouth tightened, but she didn’t flinch. “He’s still a father. Harrison has a right to know.”

“You went around protocol,” Hotch said, the words a low burn.

“I protected the Bureau,” JJ snapped back, but softer than she wanted. “A journalist would have eaten him alive. At least Harrison walked out of there intact.”

Morgan pushed away from the table, pacing. “So Batista and the kid. That’s it. The Bureau shut the rest down. No colleagues, no friends, no gawkers. Which means…”

“Which means,” Rossi finished, “Reid’s right. We’ve kept the clean narrative for ourselves. We’ve already buried the truth once.”

No one said it because it was written across every face in the room: Spencer had chosen the Bay Harbor Butcher over them.

Morgan’s voice cut the silence, raw and unflinching. “He chose a killer over us. He chose the most prolific serial killer of the last century over us. He chose our worst enemy over us.”

Hannibal sat very still. His pulse was slow, his face composed, and to anyone looking through the bars, he might have appeared almost at ease. Inside, though, the residue of Alana’s words still pressed against him like a bruise. But he would not show that. He never would.

The guards expected cracks — a flash of anger, a curse, a plea. They wanted proof that the monster was just a man. He would give them nothing. Serenity was power. Stillness unsettled more than violence ever could. Rage was a cage; calm was a key.

He knew this was theatre. Always theatre. Every gesture, every silence was a mask he held up to the world. But Hannibal Lecter did not wear serenity for their benefit alone. He wore it for Will.

Will had burned with anger in the visitation room, his voice shaking with fury at Jack Crawford. Hannibal had watched him, every muscle in his body taut with the need to strike. And Hannibal had known: one of us must remain steady. If Will was fire, he would be stone.

It was also a message — a subtle signal across steel and concrete: I am still here, unbroken. You are not alone in this ruin. I will not let them see me reduced, and neither should you.

The serenity tasted bitter, but it was armour. He wanted the guards to see him serene, because serenity was his last weapon. Even caged, he would be the one to dictate how they looked at him. Not an animal. Not a criminal. Hannibal Lecter.

And as long as he could project that calm, even Will’s rage could find something solid to lean against.

Hannibal let the air in his lungs move with deliberate care, as if each breath were a line of music he alone could hear. To be calm was not denial; it was art. And like all art, it required discipline.

He thought of how easily others mistook stillness for weakness, or for peace. They could not know what it cost. The memories of chains, the indignities of being paraded like a beast — these were sparks that could ignite fury. But he refused the fire. Fury was inelegant, unshaped.

Serenity, though—serenity had teeth. It unsettled wardens, disarmed interrogators, reminded even the most jaded guard that the man in the cell was not conquered prey but something older, patient, and waiting.

He had always been waiting. Even in Florence, even in Baltimore, even in the forests and villas and blood-slick kitchens. He waited, and he chose. Gods chose. Mortals raged. That was the difference.

It was not that Hannibal was without anger, without grief. He felt both keenly, sharp as the edge of a scalpel. But he placed them where he wished, like instruments laid on a tray. He could set them aside until the time was right. He had done so when Will rejected him. He had done so when Alana turned her back. He would do so again now.

He wanted the guards to see serenity because serenity told a truth they could not interpret: I am unbroken. I am more dangerous calm than you are armed.

And deeper still, beneath the armour and the poise, another truth curled like smoke: serenity was the only gift he could give himself. If he let them see the wound, it would fester. If he held still, he remained Hannibal.

A man may be caged. Hannibal Lecter would never be.

But inside, his thoughts pressed against him like the weight of centuries.

He remembered the questions they would ask in court, the hunger in their eyes not so different from his own at a table. They would not want Hannibal the doctor, Hannibal the aesthete, not even Hannibal the monster. They would want the child. They would drag him back to the forest, back to the snow, back to the first hunger that was not chosen. They would make him explain the unspeakable, as though explanation could ever transfigure it into something smaller, more acceptable.

And here, alone, he rehearsed the serenity. He rehearsed the stillness. He rehearsed the smile that could make atrocity sound like philosophy. But he knew—he knew—that a single name could undo it.

Misha.

He did not say it aloud. He never said it aloud. Even in his own mind, the syllables cut. It was the one truth no performance could quite contain.

They would ask him. They would strip him down with words sharper than scalpels. And he would not let them see him bleed—except perhaps Will. Will, who already knew the shape of that wound, even if he did not yet know its name.

So Hannibal sat serene. He wanted the guards to see marble, unbroken. But beneath the marble lay a crack, a hairline fracture running through the stone. One day, in a courtroom full of lights and questions, they would force their fingers into that fracture. They would make him remember not the predator, but the boy who lost everything.

And Hannibal knew—if anything could undo him, it would be that.

Dexter sat slumped against the wall, the chains biting at his wrists as though they were meant to carve him into submission. His breath came sharp and shallow, too fast, and the cell pressed in closer with every second. Faces crowded the corners of the room — Harry, Debra, Doakes, LaGuerta — all staring. Judging. Condemning. He shut his eyes, but they did not leave. They never left.

Across the corridor, Spencer mirrored him. Knees pulled to his chest, rocking without realizing it, every exhale coming out in broken gasps. The fluorescent lights hummed above, steady, merciless, and the sound alone made his pulse skitter harder. He pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum as though he could keep his heart from bursting through.

For long minutes, they were both trapped inside themselves, drowning separately in the same cage of fear.

Then Spencer forced his head up, jaw trembling but eyes fixed through the bars. His voice cracked on the first try, too thin, barely audible. The second came stronger, pulled from somewhere desperate:

“Dex.”

Dexter’s head jerked up, eyes wild, as though dragged out of water.

Spencer’s breathing was still uneven, but he anchored himself on the syllables, each one steadier than the last. “What you told me earlier. Batista didn’t say my name.” He paused, chest heaving, then forced the thought to completion. “That’s our card. Our leverage. They’ve kept us quiet. They’ve kept us separate. They don’t want the world to know about us.”

Dexter blinked, still half-suffocated by ghosts, but the words caught. They cut through enough haze for him to hear.

Spencer leaned closer to the bars, voice hoarse but sharp. “Think about it. You—Bay Harbor Butcher. Hannibal—the Ripper. Will—his mirror. Everyone knows their crimes. But me?” His mouth twisted into something close to a laugh, bitter and small. “They erased me. They’re trying to protect themselves. Protect the Bureau. They can’t afford the press to know one of their golden boys chose you. That I chose you.”

Dexter’s chest still rose and fell too fast, but the panic faltered. The room wasn’t closing in quite as tightly now.

Spencer’s voice softened but stayed steady. “That’s why we’re not done. That’s why we still have power. They think we’re broken, but we’re not. Not yet.”

For the first time since Batista left him drowning in ghosts, Dexter felt something other than terror: the faint, razor-thin edge of control returning.

He looked back at Spencer, meeting his eyes across the corridor. For a moment, just a moment, the panic dulled.

And Spencer, trembling but unyielding, held his gaze as if to promise: we are still us.

The room was locked, curtains drawn against the winter light. A long mahogany table, the kind used for war, stretched across the chamber. Around it: senior FBI leadership, Justice Department attorneys, congressional committee chairs, White House staff. Phones surrendered, aides excluded.

The air was taut, the way it was in the first hours after catastrophe.

A senator broke the silence first, voice low but steady:

“Gentlemen, ladies. The confirmed body count attributed to these four individuals is—” she glanced at the file, as though she didn’t quite believe it, “—just under six hundred. Six hundred confirmed dead.” She paused, her voice sharpening. “That is the scale of a small terrorist attack. And in its symbolism? It reminds us of the Twin Towers.”

Someone exhaled, long and sharp.

“The difference?” she pressed on. “This wasn’t Al-Qaeda. This wasn’t ISIS. This wasn’t Russia or China. This was us. Our agents. Our collaborators. The Federal Bureau of Investigation itself.”

The words hung like smoke.

Across the table, the Attorney General adjusted his glasses. “We can’t allow that framing to take hold in the public mind. We need to stress—over and over—that these men acted alone. Pathological individuals. Not the Bureau.”

“Three of them were in the Bureau,” a congressman snapped. “Reid. Graham. Morgan trained with Reid, ate lunch with him. These weren’t outsiders—they were family. The American people won’t see pathology. They’ll see betrayal.”

A White House advisor leaned forward, careful in tone. “Which is why this must be a national-security trial, not just a criminal trial. Try them like terrorists. Military tribunal.”

Murmurs, sharp and disbelieving.

“No.” The FBI Director’s voice cut through. “No black sites. No tribunals. We don’t disappear U.S. citizens. We bring them into court, we prove their guilt, and we let the world watch. If we handle this like Guantánamo, we lose the very legitimacy we’re trying to salvage.”

Another senator banged his hand on the table. “You’re thinking like a cop, not a politician. The optics of a public trial will kill us. Every journalist in the world will remind Americans that these butchers wore our badges.”

“And if we hide it,” the Director countered, “we look worse. Cover-up would cripple faith in law enforcement for a generation. Better a wound that heals under light than an infection that festers in the dark.”

Silence again. A storm of tension barely held in check.

The ranking member of the Intelligence Committee finally spoke, his voice like gravel: “Europe is already screaming. Italy feels humiliated—these men rampaged across their cities for weeks before our team contained them. The EU Parliament wants a statement. The Brits want extradition—remember, Lecter killed in London, too. France is hinting at The Hague. If we don’t assert control now, they’ll drag this circus into international court.”

“Which we cannot allow,” muttered a DOJ lawyer. “An American court, or no court at all. Otherwise we look weak. Worse—we look colonized.”

At the far end of the table, a presidential advisor cleared his throat. “There’s another factor. Partisan blame.” His smile was humorless. “The Republicans are already preparing talking points: ‘FBI corruption under Democratic leadership.’ If the midterms were bad before, they’ll be catastrophic now. Unless—

“Unless we spin it first,” the senator from the other side said coldly. “Pin it on decades of mismanagement. Say it predates us, spans administrations. Call it institutional rot.”

“And meanwhile,” another voice added, “six hundred families want justice. And we’re sitting here playing politics.”

The room rippled with bitter laughter—because of course, it was all politics.

Finally, the Chief of Staff spoke, cutting the noise. His tone was final, presidential by proxy:

“Whatever else happens, these trials will define us. Not just the Bureau. Not just this administration. This generation of politics. That’s the reality. The only question left is whether we collapse under the weight, or whether we walk into court and carry it like a badge.”

The room fell quiet. Pens scratched. Calculations began.

And outside the locked doors, the world already waited for blood.

The wing of the prison was quieter now, save for the electric buzz of lights and the distant echo of boots on concrete. They had been left facing one another across the corridor—Hannibal and Will in opposite cells, iron and air between them like a held breath.

Will sat with his back to the wall, knees drawn up, breathing slow but not calm. The rage Crawford had stoked in him earlier had burned down to ember; it wasn’t gone, only banked. He hated that he’d given it so much space, that he’d fed it while Hannibal had simply absorbed the same blows in silence.

He let his head fall forward, staring at the floor. The words pushed up anyway. “I should’ve seen it sooner,” he said, voice roughened. “You’ve been carrying something for me. The whole time. Like you always do.”

Across the corridor, Hannibal sat perfectly composed on the edge of his cot. His hands rested loosely on his knees, a scholar in meditation, though his eyes never left Will.

Will rubbed at his mouth, restless, then lifted his gaze again. “I kept thinking about Crawford. About what he said. About everything I wanted to throw back at him. And there you were, sitting through it like a statue. Like it couldn’t touch you.” He shook his head, bitter at himself. “But it did. It does. You’re just too good at hiding the cost.”

Still Hannibal didn’t speak. His silence wasn’t distance—it was presence, condensed, dense as gravity.

Will leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. “And I was so fucking stupid,” he said, softer now. “So busy being angry, I didn’t even look at you properly. Didn’t see what it was costing you to hold it together—for me.”

Hannibal’s head inclined almost imperceptibly, a priest’s nod, an acknowledgment without words. His eyes—dark, wet with something unshed—held Will’s like a tether.

“You’re carrying it,” Will whispered, more to himself than to Hannibal. “Carrying me, carrying this… holding the walls up so I can afford to lose my temper.” He let out a dry laugh, almost without air. “I’m an idiot. I’ve always been an idiot.”

Hannibal’s lips parted, then closed again. At last, in the lowest register of his voice, he said, “You see me.” A pause. “That is enough.”

Will sat back, struck by the simplicity. For a long moment, the hum of the lights was all there was. The prison, the guards, the walls—all receded. There was only the taut line between his eyes and Hannibal’s.

He dragged in a breath, then exhaled slowly. “I don’t deserve it,” he admitted. “But I see you. And I’ll keep seeing you. That much I can do.”

Hannibal’s silence was a vow in itself. His stillness said more than any flood of words could have: the discipline of a man who had already chosen, and would not choose again.

The hum of the lights returned to being just a hum. Between the cells, the space didn’t feel like distance anymore—more like a thread stretched taut, neither of them willing to let go.

Will tipped his head against the bars, eyes never leaving Hannibal’s. Hannibal’s posture didn’t shift, but his gaze softened almost imperceptibly, as if even now he was memorizing Will’s face, fixing it in some private gallery.

They didn’t reach for more. They didn’t need to.

But, far off, the real storm awaited.

Time lost its edges inside the concrete wing. Days bled into each other, measured not by clocks or meals but by the scrape of guards’ boots in the corridor, by the clang of doors opening and shutting, by the muted voices overhead in places they could not see.

For four days there were no visitors, no attorneys, no interruptions from the outside world. Only isolation, boredom, and the restless knowledge of each other’s presence just across the way.

Dexter counted cracks in the ceiling until they blurred into webs. Spencer walked the length of his cell, one end to the other, until the soles of his feet burned. Hannibal sat immaculately still, spine straight on his narrow cot, the mask across his face reducing him to a pale statue. Will alternated between furious pacing and long spells lying flat on his bunk, staring up, jaw tight, eyes red from the strain of sleeplessness.

They could hear one another if they raised their voices. They could speak, if they chose to. But none of them could touch.

It was worst for Dexter and Spencer. They had built their strange bond on proximity — teeth in skin, lips against lips, hands at each other’s throats — and now that was stripped away, denied them. When one shifted on his cot at night, the other could hear it, and the silence afterward pressed down harder than the walls. The absence of touch felt like a wound that refused to close.

Hannibal and Will bore it with more discipline, but they too frayed at the edges. They could see one another’s faces across the hall, could look, but looking was not enough. Not when every instinct screamed for closeness. Hannibal’s hand would twitch, as if to reach through empty air. Will’s throat would work as though forcing back words that couldn’t be spoken in front of guards.

Boredom was its own torture. The cells had nothing to distract: no books, no paper, no pens, no clocks, no playing cards. Only metal and stone. Every cough echoed. Every sigh seemed amplified. Every word from one cell hung in the air for all of them to hear.

At night the silence grew unbearable. Dexter sometimes whispered Spencer’s name just to make sure he hadn’t disappeared. Will sometimes muttered Hannibal’s, bitter, longing, both. Hannibal rarely spoke, but when he did — a single syllable, low and steady — Will would grip the edge of his mattress until his fingers ached.

Four days of this stretched thin, unbearable. The absence of visitors, of confrontation, was not mercy. It was suffocation.

By the end of the fourth day, every man in the wing knew the sound of the others’ breathing better than his own.

On the fifth day, the silence broke.

Not cleanly, not mercifully — but like a door pushed ajar, letting in the faintest gust of what was coming.

The guards came earlier than usual, their voices sharper, their boots faster on the concrete. The sound of keys in locks rang different. Not routine. Something else.

The first attorney arrived. Then another. Then another. Four in total.

They were not men or women chosen by Hannibal, by Will, by Dexter, or by Spencer. No — these were state’s men, court-appointed, flown in under pressure of law. The prisoners had no hand in choosing them, nor would they have paid even if they could. The system itself was dragging them to trial, forcing representation onto them so no one could claim injustice later.

For four days, they had lived with nothing but each other’s breathing, the scrape of chains, the hunger for touch. Now, at last, there were new faces — but they brought no comfort. Only the storm’s first breath, sharp against suffocated lungs.

The attorneys came armed not with kindness but with questions. Paper, pens, manila folders, stacks of charges. A hundred murders, two hundred, six hundred. Numbers written like tally marks of damnation. Words like life sentence, death penalty, international tribunal.

The suffocation cracked — and in its place came the first hint of the storm.

They came one by one, like weather fronts.

—Hannibal—

The attorney they’d assigned him was young enough to be offended by his own tie. He spread files on the metal table with all the reverence of a coroner opening a chest.

“Doctor Lecter,” he said. “I won’t pretend.”

Hannibal nodded once. Pretending was a lesser art.

“Capital exposure on every axis,” the lawyer continued, voice steady because it had to be. “Federal charges, multiple states. Extradition requests waiting in a line that stretches around the block. They’ll argue your crimes are uniquely aggravated—serial, theatrical, cannibalism, desecration. There will be no appetite for deals.”

A very faint smile at the inadvertent metaphor. “No appetite,” Hannibal murmured. “How apt.”

“The best we can do is posture for competence and dignity at trial, preserve issues for appeal, and start building the mitigation record now. Childhood trauma, wartime conditions, psychiatric scaffolding. Even then—Doctor, they will try to kill you.”

The cuffs ticked against steel as Hannibal folded his fingers. “They may try.”

The lawyer looked as if he wanted to ask what “may” meant and wisely did not. He gathered his papers like a man saving them from rain and rapped for the guard.

Across the corridor, Will watched the lawyer leave. Hannibal did not meet Will’s eyes, because to look too long would be to show the part of him that was already bleeding.

—Will—

Will’s attorney was older, the kind of man who kept a pencil behind his ear as if a sudden equation might save a life.

“You know how this goes,” he said, sitting without ceremony. “I’m going to be blunt.”

“Please do.”

“They want your head.” He set down a stapled stack. “Accessory and principal counts, conspiracy, interstate flight, multiple homicides. The cannibalism component complicates jury sentiment, even where you didn’t partake. They’ll paint you as co-architect—lover, disciple, butcher by proxy and by hand. No jurisdiction is going to be gentle.”

“Spare me their adjectives,” Will said, quiet.

“I’m telling you the landscape. We can argue diminished capacity where it fits, government complicity where it helps, misconduct where it happened. We can litigate everything down to the stitching on the warrants. But at bottom: they’ll seek death. On you, on Lecter, on Morgan. And on Reid—”

He stopped, weighing something.

“What about Reid,” Will said.

“The politics are uglier than the charges. He’s them. Was them. That makes him a uniquely attractive example. If they can secure death there, they will. If they can’t, they’ll try for life without. I won’t sell you comfort.”

Will felt the shape of the words settle like cold iron. He signed where he had to, sent the man away.

—Dexter—

Dexter’s lawyer had a jaw that looked like it had argued with bricks. He didn’t sit right away; he measured Dexter as if verifying inventory.

“You’re the one who needs the least explanation,” he said finally, dropping into the chair. “Everyone knows your name. The Bay Harbor Butcher. I need you to understand: there is no jurisdiction in this country that won’t try to nail you to the wall.”

“Clear,” Dexter said.

“Any talk of plea will be political theater. Best case, we stack so much procedure on their backs they trip over it. Worst case, which is the likely case, they walk the capital charges straight to a jury with a brass band. And they will march.”

Dexter’s mouth twitched. “Always hated parades.”

The attorney didn’t smile. “I’ll do the job. But you should prepare yourself for a sentence that ends things.”

Dexter nodded once, eyes already far away—counting doors, counting breaths, counting seconds between each cough in the hall because order was the only thing left that didn’t bleed.

—Spencer—

Spencer’s attorney came in with a legal pad and a look like he’d been awake for three straight days. He put the pad down and laced his fingers, as if he were about to deliver a diagnosis he didn’t want to say.

“Doctor Reid,” he began, and the title fell into the room like a coin in a well. “You already know you’re famous.”

Spencer stared past him at the seam in the wall. “Infamous.”

“Both.” The attorney leaned forward. “Here’s the paradox. If you’d been just anyone, five bodies would already have you earmarked for the needle. You aren’t just anyone. You are their protégé, their exemplar—FBI’s golden mind. That makes you a prize and a humiliation. Some U.S. Attorneys will push for death to prove a point. Others will call that obscene and demand life. Your exposure is high. Your outcome will be driven as much by politics as by law.”

Spencer swallowed. “Luigi Mangione killed one person.”

“And they’re still posturing death with him. You see the calculus.”

The room tipped for a second. Spencer pressed thumb to thumbnail until it hurt and steadied. “What do you need from me?”

“Truth. Records. Names of anyone who can speak to your capacity, your trauma, your service, the Bureau’s… role.” A careful word. “We’ll build mitigation like we’re building a cathedral.”

“And if they want a bonfire instead?”

“Then we try to rain.”

He left the pad and went.

—The whisper between cells—

When the footsteps faded down the run and the slot doors clanked shut, the wing fell into that strange hollow quiet that made every exhale sound criminal.

Will said nothing for a long time. Hannibal matched him. They let the silence line up between them like a blade on a whetstone.

Finally Will said, low enough the microphones would call it dust, “Maybe we don’t wait for their justice.”

Across the way, Hannibal didn’t move. “An old thought, visiting in a new suit.”

“They’ll try to kill you,” Will said. “They’ll try to kill me.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not ready to give them that.”

“Nor I.”

Will’s eyes were dark and very awake. “Could we? Actually do it.”

Hannibal weighed it like a surgeon’s instrument in hand. “The mechanisms are formidable.” A beat. “But not metaphysical.”

“That’s not a no.”

“It is a recognition.” His voice softened around the edges, something almost raw passing through it. “The thought itself is a door. One we can hold open, even if we never step through.”

From the side cell, the scrape of knuckles on concrete. Spencer’s voice, thin but sharp, slid into the space. “You won’t make it ten feet.”

Will didn’t turn his head. “You hoping they fry us before you?”

“I’m saying you two keep mistaking yourselves for inevitabilities.” A humorless breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Stop flattering yourselves. If anyone becomes the example, it’s me.”

“Politically convenient,” Hannibal said, still not looking away from Will.

“Exactly.” Spencer’s voice raked lower. “They fed me to the press before they fed themselves. Why stop at life when they can make it theatre?”

Dexter’s voice entered at a rough angle, the rasp under his words not yet out of his system. “They’ll try to kill all of us. Different prosecutors, same hymn.”

Will shut his eyes. “So we agree on the choir.”

Hannibal’s hands lay still, open on his knees. “We won’t act rashly.” A whisper. “But we will not live in cages inside cages.”

“Fine by me,” Dexter said, a dry bite of anger through the wall. “Just don’t mistake talking for planning.”

“Noted,” Will said.

Another long silence. Somewhere far down the corridor a guard coughed; air moved; the building dreamed of being something else.

Will finally turned his head and let his gaze find Hannibal’s. There was no bravado in it, no speech—only the exchange of weight neither of them could put down alone.

No one said escape again. They didn’t have to.

Far off, the storm waited.

The storm outside the prison was only in the papers for now, but its winds seeped through the bars.

The BAU sat in their cramped conference room, blinds drawn, the table buried under a chaos of newspapers, clippings, and official briefings printed in stark black. The air was heavy with the smell of ink and stale coffee. It was suffocating — every headline was another knife, another betrayal.

“AMERICA BREEDS MONSTERS.”

“THREE FBI AGENTS REVEALED AS SERIAL KILLERS.”

“THE CHESAPEAKE RIPPER, THE BAY HARBOR BUTCHER, AMERICAN VAMPIRE, CURSED LOVER: A FAMILY OF DEATH.”

The words bled together in bold, merciless print. But the worst wasn’t the killers’ names. The worst was the government’s. The FBI’s. Theirs.

“Three of the four,” Rossi muttered, voice low but edged with bitterness, “were our own. Our agents.” He spat the last word as if it burned him.

Hotch didn’t answer. His silence was worse than any tirade. He stared at the grainy photographs pinned across one of the papers: Will Graham’s pale face in custody, Hannibal Lecter’s cold eyes behind chains, and beside them, Spencer Reid. His own. Their own.

JJ’s fingers trembled against the paper she held, though she tried to still them. REID: GENIUS, KILLER, TRAITOR? The press had printed it in English, as though the accusation should be clear to the entire world. She wanted to tear it in half, but her hand would not obey her.

Morgan shoved his chair back, pacing the narrow space. “It’s not just them,” he snapped. “It’s us. The Bureau. The team. Look at this.” He slammed another paper onto the table.

On its front page, in bold italics:

“He chose a killer over us. He chose the most prolific serial killer of the last century over us. He chose our worst enemy over us.”

The room froze. JJ’s face went pale. Rossi leaned forward, lips tightening. Hotch finally lifted his head, eyes narrowed.

Morgan’s voice was raw. “I said that in private. In this room. To you. So how the hell is it in the press?”

No one answered. The silence admitted the truth — someone else had been listening. Some unseen ear had carried their words out, twisted them into ink, and printed them for the world to see.

The walls pressed closer. Trust shrank with every breath. If their words could bleed into the newspapers, what else could? Who else was listening?

Rossi exhaled slowly, but his hands clenched on the table. “We can’t trust anyone. Not even the government officials we’re supposed to be working with.”

But that wasn’t the worst of it. JJ could feel the unspoken terror, sharp as glass: the press doesn’t know everything yet.

If the papers ever discovered the full truth — the private truth — then the BAU was finished. It wasn’t only that Reid had become a killer. It was who he had become a killer with.

Two agents. Two men from the same team. Both defecting at the same time, into the arms of their enemies. It would look less like coincidence and more like contagion.

“The Bay Harbor Butcher,” Rossi said finally, his voice like gravel, “wasn’t just a killer to them. If the press gets wind of Reid’s… attachment, they’ll twist it. They’ll call Dexter the master, the corrupter. Reid won’t be remembered as a genius gone astray, he’ll be cast as a boy led astray. Another victim.”

“Or worse,” Hotch said flatly. “They’ll call it partnership. Make it sound like some kind of pact between them. Two monsters bound together in blood.”

Morgan swore under his breath. “Love’s too human a word. Nobody out there’s gonna label it that. Hannibal and Will — sure, the cursed lovers, it plays. People eat that kind of tragedy up. But two more? No way. They’ll just say Reid got brainwashed, corrupted, turned.” He spat the word.

JJ swallowed hard. “It doesn’t matter what they call it. If it gets out, we’re destroyed. They’ll tear us apart for letting him fall. They’ll ask how we didn’t see it. How we didn’t stop it. How one of our own could choose the Butcher over us.”

The silence afterward was thick, suffocating.

Reid’s face stared back from every paper. Genius. Colleague. Friend. Traitor.

They were no longer merely criminals on a wire; they had become an instrument in a game that could be played across continents.

In a secure conference room whose glass had been blacked out against the cameras, a different set of actors began to speak one another’s names as if they were treaties: State, Justice, Embassy legal attaches, a handful of senators’ aides with folders of briefing memos. The problem, in the language they used, was less “who did this” than “what this lets others say about us.”

First, the legal tangle. The men had bled across borders: Italy’s piazzas, the Apennines, the freight trains, then Venice; a half-finished tableau staged in a Roman alley; bits of evidence planted and removed with a deliberation that suggested foreign actors might be able to claim more than an aesthetic motive. Each location opened questions of jurisdiction—who would prosecute what, where would witnesses be compelled to testify, which forensic chain could be trusted across languages and legal codes? The American system could demand custody of its own agent; Italy could insist on local charges for local deaths. Lithuania, France, even a parish in Palermo whispered up through the cables of diplomats: we, too, have an interest.

Second, the spectacle. Foreign ministries took notice not only of law but of optics. Beijing’s foreign ministry—imagined in whispered cables and op-eds—would frame the story the way it framed most things: the evidence of internal decay. Moscow’s talking points could be clipped and sent to sympathetic outlets: look how American institutions fail their guardians; the liberal order is brittle when its watchmen break. European capitals would fret less publicly but just as keenly: the continent did not want a smear that could be used to delegitimize NATO commitments or to fuel populist demagogues in elections. Italy did not want its streets known worldwide as the stage for a new “family” of killers, nor the Vatican asked to explain a desecrated hearth in Palermo.

Diplomatic cables flew. An embassy asked gently whether the U.S. would consider quiet transfers of custody for certain Italian victims; another asked whether extradition would be waived on procedural grounds to consolidate trials in one forum. The State Department debated how candid to be with its allies—how much to reveal of the BAU’s internal failures before there was a public bench trial, before depositions and evidence that could be subpoenaed leaked like lead into the press.

Congressional pressure waited like a landmine. Senators with tough re-election calendars smelled headlines. “Were American agents complicit in murder?” a staffer drafted into a speech; another suggested that the Administration request a closed-door session at the UN to preempt a wave of international motions. A committee clerk produced a short list of options: impose a media blackout and push for consolidated trials in the U.S.; permit Italy to conduct local criminal process while the U.S. handles espionage and corruption inquiries; initiate diplomatic demarches to discourage sensational coverage. Each choice carried political poison. Consolidation in the U.S. would look like cover-up. Allowing Italy to prosecute could be painted as the U.S. abdicating responsibility.

Intelligence agencies had their own calculus. Were these four simply nihilists in costume—killers who happened to be colleagues—or had they been operating in patterns that intersected with foreign interests? If, publicly, the explanation could be given as intimate pathology and aesthetic mania, quietly the docket would have to be checked against any signs of foreign exploitation—payments, communications that threaded through proxy servers, travel that touched embassies and private security firms. That work fell into the hands of analysts whose primary task was to make sure this case did not become an international incident that jeopardized operations and informants.

Then there was propaganda: the crowded, quick marketplace of outrage. Social feeds that moved faster than diplomacy would not wait for indictments. A tweet with a grainy image of a courtroom sketch might rack up millions before a judge’s gavel could temper the narrative. Adversaries would not only point fingers; they would manufacture patterns. A video with carefully clipped archival footage of FBI missteps, a voiceover asserting rot at the Bureau’s core, would be seeded in multiple languages. Punditry would do the rest: calls for resignations, demands for hearings, a chorus of outrage in outlets that had never written a law review but that had influence enough to bend public sentiment.

The human cost of that shift was practical and immediate. Security officials held emergency briefings about the trial’s location, the likelihood of protests, the threat of violent actors seeking notoriety by targeting courtrooms or jails. Extradition talks stalled whenever a minister feared a public uproar that could hand an election to an opposition. The Italian government, acutely aware of domestic pride and a judiciary that prized public trials, balked at quiet handovers; its prosecutors wanted their day in court. The Lithuanian prosecutor’s office—consulted only because of a lead that had winked on a previous case file—requested archival access to phone records; the American legal team replied with formal requests that took weeks to process.

The press, meanwhile, became an instrument and a weapon. Sensitive witness lists were redacted and then leaked. A freelance journalist in Rome, promised an anonymous tip about the Palermo hearth, filed an explosive piece that forced a diplomat to call a colleague in Washington at midnight. Governments that once traded favors on the margins now found themselves bargaining on the record. Promises to restrict the press—difficult in a democracy—were floated in private and denounced in public. “We will not hide the truth,” said one foreign minister, while behind closed doors they asked to coordinate statements, to avoid an international cascade of indictments and counter-indictments.

At the BAU’s level the fear was granular: if the Reid–Dexter relationship became headline news, then even measured, legally defensible counsel would be overwhelmed by impression. “They’ll make it seem like the unit manufactured the monsters,” a senior prosecutor warned. “They’ll ask how many times agents sat down for coffee with men like this, how many times ‘profile work’ crossed into friendship. They’ll demand resignations. They’ll want scapegoats.”

That electoral aftertaste mattered. A senator on the Judiciary Committee began pressing for videotaped testimony, arguing that to preserve credibility the hearings must be public. Another senator, newly ascendant and hungry for headlines, suggested bringing in foreign observers to attest to procedural fairness—a move which would only add fuel to the narrative that America’s institutions were under international scrutiny.

Under the legal and political theatre, one practical reality grew heavier by the hour: the trial could not be about pure justice. It would be about containment. Someone had to hold the line so that no other country could turn the case into a doctrine. The options looked like choices between evils: consolidate the prosecution and risk charges of secrecy; split jurisdiction and invite coordinating chaos; leverage diplomatic pressure for a joint tribunal and risk losing control of the narrative.

Compromises were sketched on legal pads and sent up the chain in memoranda. A special prosecutor was proposed—someone with experience in war crimes and cross-border prosecutions, an American acceptable to allies and difficult for critics to demonize. A limited media-gag order, narrowly tailored to protect witness identities and forensic processes, was drafted; legal counsel worried it would be overturned in an instant by civil liberties groups. Diplomatic channels thrummed: “If you take them to the U.S., we will cooperate on witness travel,” an aide wrote, only to cross out the sentence and replace it with “subject to appropriate guarantees.”

All of this politics changed the way guards would stand in courthouse corridors, and how juries would be selected. It reshaped the meaning of evidence: not merely what a pathologist could testify under oath, but what a state could afford to make public without sacrificing alliances. Prosecutors whispered that strategy would have to include a narrative that soothed allies—a legal framing that explained institutional failure without inviting claims of moral bankruptcy. The press would have to be fed just enough to feel satisfied, but not enough to weaponize.

In one quiet, incandescent draft, a senior adviser scribbled: “We must convert spectacle into process.” The phrase read like a prayer and a command: turn the world’s hunger for drama into months of sterile procedure. Let the choreography of subpoenas, sealed affidavits, and witness protection plans drag the story into the comfortable exile of legalese. Slow the news cycle. Make the problem administrative rather than existential.

They would try. They always tried. But the calculus had shifted: a domestic criminal case had become a foreign policy problem; a prosecutorial decision could tip an election in a friendly state or be amplified into a volley of propaganda by an adversary. The worst possible outcome—trial scenes splashed on the same networks that carried foreign heads of state’s pressers—now sat on no one’s agenda as tolerable.

Back in the cells, that was abstract; the men on bunks could not feel the levers being moved. In Quantico, in embassies and ministries and in the small rooms where clerks redacted names from witness lists, the world was already changing its tone, pronouncing the case in diplomatic, legal, electoral terms. The fight for narrative control would be as important as the fight for conviction.

Outside, the weather gathered itself into a low, slow threat—the first taste of a storm that would not be confined to the courthouse steps.

The days stretched into sameness: steel doors clanging shut, meals slid through a hatch, fluorescent lights buzzing above. They could not touch. They could not even see each other directly—only the grid of bars across the corridor, voices carrying through echoes.

It was worst for Spencer and Dexter. Their intimacy had been physical as much as verbal, bodies pressed together as punctuation for every sparring word. Now, separated by steel, they found themselves gnawing at scraps of banter, starving for what they could not reach.

One night—if it could be called night in a place where the lights never truly dimmed—Dexter’s voice drifted through the silence. Flat, half-serious, half-taunting:

“Bite me.”

Spencer snorted, the sound raw in the quiet. “Ask nicely.”

The air carried the weight of what was missing—if they’d been free, those words would have led to teeth in skin, blood on lips, a fight that blurred into something else. Here it was only the echo of what they craved. They let it hang, no laughter, no follow-up, just the unbearable ache of imagining the touch they couldn’t have.

From the opposite cells, Hannibal and Will listened. They did not comment, but silence was never neutral. In confinement, every overheard word became part of the collective air. Intimacy bled outward. The four of them had been bound together already—by hunts, by betrayals, by blood spilled in different directions. Now, the cage forced their boundaries thinner.

Will saw Spencer differently when he heard the dry laugh that followed Dexter’s request, softer than the man he had faced with a knife. Hannibal saw Dexter differently when he heard the hesitation in his voice, the edge blunted by longing. Each couple still knew their own half best, but now the shadows of the others sharpened. Not transparency, but something closer: the recognition that even monsters sounded human when they were starved.

And so silence became layered: one pair whispering, another listening. Each voice folded into the others’ solitude. In the cells, the absence of touch made every syllable heavier, like a hand passed through bars.

Night laid its thin ash across the block, the fluorescents humming like tired wasps. Four doors, four throats of steel, and a corridor that carried sound as if it were a sacrament. They had counted the screws, the routines, the footsteps, the cough of the distant elevator. They had also learned the music of one another’s silences.

“You ever notice,” Dexter said at last, “how the air tastes like coins after lights out?” His voice was measured, as if he’d weighed it before letting it go.

From the cell opposite, Spencer answered without moving. “Ferric ions. Or imagination. Either would explain it.”

“Either would,” Dexter agreed. A pause. “Both usually do.”

Will, stretched on his bunk with his forearm draped over his eyes, let a small breath escape that could have been a laugh. “There’s a word for that. When two explanations court the same truth and neither is decent enough to bow out.”

“Science,” Spencer said.

“Marriage,” Will countered, dry.

Across from him, Hannibal turned his head on the thin pillow and studied the grain in the concrete as if it might offer a text. “Compromise.”

“Compromise is for daylight,” Dexter said. He sounded almost amused. “Night is for what we really mean.”

“What do you really mean?” Spencer asked. There was no challenge in it, only curiosity sharpened to a point.

Dexter took his time. “I mean I can smell the blood under the bleach. Not in here—” a glance at the drain in his floor that none of them could see but all imagined, “—in memory. Like the son of a carpenter might have smelled fresh-cut wood and, for a moment, thought of home. Only mine isn’t wood.” He let the sentence hang. “And it isn’t home.”

Spencer’s answer slid out softer than he intended. “You got a taste for blood licking your own wounds.” He swallowed. “I did, too.”

Silence gathered, not offended, just attentive.

Will rolled his wrist, exposing the faint network of veins. “Twain asked who prays for the one that needs it most,” he murmured. “Satan, he meant. Nobody volunteers. Not even when praying is cheap.” His mouth twitched. “I’m not in the habit of praying. But some nights I understand the question.”

“The gods are less generous than writers,” Hannibal said, voice barely above a breath. “Yet the Greeks were precise. Storge, philia, eros, agape, xenia… names for the ways we fall into one another. The Romans were less innocent: Fata viam invenient.” The Fates will find a way. “Even here.”

“Even here,” Will echoed, and let his arm fall so he could see Hannibal’s face. The lines were calm; the eyes were not. “There’s a line I keep thinking of. Kafka.” His gaze held. “You are the knife I turn inside myself. This, my dear, is love.”

Hannibal’s eyelids trembled—no more than that. “Byron would have said we are ‘half dust, half deity.’ You and I have spent years pretending to be one without admitting the other.”

“Pretending?” Will’s mouth crooked. “We were very convincing.”

“Convincing enough to be believed,” Hannibal said softly. “Not convincing enough to be saved.”

Spencer shifted, the mattress spring complaining. “Saved by whom?”

“By anyone who thought salvation was on offer,” Hannibal replied.

Dexter’s laugh was low, almost affectionate in its bitterness. “Salvation is a product with bad customer service.”

“Spoken like a man who’s returned a lot of merchandise,” Will said.

“Or stolen it,” Spencer added, and now there was the ghost of mischief in his tone. “Plath wrote: I could love you violently, if I let myself. The problem is not the verb. It’s the adverb.”

Dexter smiled into the dark. “You don’t have much trouble with either.”

“No,” Spencer said. “I don’t.”

The hum in the corridor deepened as the building shifted in its sleep. Somewhere, a guard cleared his throat, and the sound went on and on in the ducting like the sea in a shell.

Hannibal turned his face to the bars. “A name,” he said. “When Patroclus spoke, Achilles did not slur it. He pronounced every syllable, as if the care itself were devotion.” He looked across at Will and articulated, with slow, deliberate precision, “Will—Graham.” A beat. “Every letter.”

Will’s reply was barely audible. “Hannibal Lecter.” He lingered on each vowel, made the consonants clean, as if washing them. Something like light moved between the cells.

Dexter’s voice came quiet, almost curious. “And his lips,” he said, and it was unclear at first whether he meant memory or metaphor, “were wine—scarlet madness. And I wanted the bite, gentle, strangled agony.” A breath. “But it wasn’t wine. It was blood. Mine.” He didn’t sound ashamed. He sounded awake.

Spencer let the confession settle. When he answered, it was with a scalpel instead of a hammer. “An hour before Lucifer fell, God thought him beautiful.”

“Arthur Miller,” Will said.

“Gives the devil better lines than most angels get,” Dexter murmured.

“Because devils require recognition,” Hannibal said. “As lovers do.” His eyes moved to Will. “We make each other legible.”

Will’s throat worked. “I have never known myself as well as I know myself when I with you.” He didn’t dress the sentence up; he didn’t need to. “That’s the trick and the sin.” A sentence Will had already pronounced, years ago, re-emerging now for Hannibal’s ears.

“The first sins were acts of trust,” Hannibal answered. “The woman trusted the serpent. The man trusted the woman. What, after all, is God to the one you love?” A faint, wry tilt to his mouth. “Theology is a poor argument in rooms like these.”

“Rooms like these are why theology was invented,” Will said. “To explain why we do the things we already did.”

Across the hall, Dexter folded one arm under his head and stared at the ceiling until the perforations arranged themselves into constellations. “Deb once said—” His breath snagged on the name and then went on—“that when they split two brothers in the womb, they didn’t divide them evenly. One got kindness. One got longing.” He exhaled. “I don’t think that’s true. I think kindness and longing share a ribcage. They crowd each other. They bruise.”

Dexter continued. “She never stopped praying for me. She never learned how to stop loving the person who hurt her. That’s a kind of cruelty, too. To hold someone upright when gravity wants its due.”

Will tipped his head toward the corridor. “Fitzgerald said we’re all drunk on the idea that love alone can heal us.”

“We are also drunk on the idea that it should,” Hannibal said. “And resentful when it refuses.”

“Love doesn’t refuse,” Spencer said. “People do.”

Dexter tasted that. “You believe that.”

“I do.”

“You also believe,” Dexter went on, “that the knife you bought doesn’t always have to be turned.”

Spencer considered. “Not always,” he allowed. “But when it is, the point is honest.”

The fluorescent buzz thickened, broke for a heartbeat, came back. Somewhere a compressor kicked in. The night reset.

Will turned his head toward Dexter’s cell. “You told me once,” he said, “that gods envy mortals because everything is more beautiful when it can end.”

“I stand by that,” Dexter said. “Deadlines improve the work.” His voice softened. “Especially this work.”

Spencer’s mouth curved. “You just compared love to a term paper.”

“It gets graded,” Dexter said. “Sometimes on a curve.”

Hannibal’s chuckle was a low thread. “By whom?”

“Everyone with an opinion,” Dexter replied. “And ghosts.”

They let the word live in the space without touching it.

Hannibal lifted his eyes to the slit of Plexiglas that pretended to be a window. No stars. Only a sodium wash. “It interests me,” he murmured, “that you two—who insist on pagan clarity, blood and consequence—speak of love like men writing catechisms.”

Spencer angled his face toward the voice. “It interests me that you—who made an altar of appetite—speak of love like an aesthete who is afraid of ugliness.”

A brief, bright silence. Not hostility. Agreement discovered by accident.

Will let out a small breath that acknowledged the hit and did not contest it. “We were always better at composition than confession,” he said.

Hannibal’s eyes softened. “And still we confess.”

Spencer drew his knuckles over the concrete, feeling the grit. “Brontë wrote, Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” He didn’t name a his. He didn’t have to.

Dexter answered without hesitation. “That one I don’t argue.”

Will looked at the ceiling again, seeing antlers where there were only holes. “It’s funny,” he said. “Everyone wants us to be one thing. Monster, hero, patient, predator, saint, symptom. But the old poets had it right. We’re composite creatures. Half dust, half deity. We keep pretending we’re not because it’s tidier.”

“Tidiness is the enemy of truth,” Hannibal said.

“Tidiness keeps you out of prison,” Will returned.

A beat, then—unexpectedly—laughter from all four cells. It wasn’t loud; it wasn’t long. But it was real.

When it faded, Dexter said, “Say his name again.”

He didn’t clarify which name he meant. He didn’t have to.

Hannibal spoke first, and he pronounced every syllable like a vow. “Will Graham.”

Will answered, matching the cadence. “Hannibal Lecter.”

In the echo, Spencer said, very quietly, “Dexter.”

“I know,” Dexter said, and something in it sounded like sleep finally making an offer.

They lay with their faces turned toward one another’s cages, arranged by fate into a cross. The corridor held them like a string holds notes that don’t quite resolve.

Hannibal closed his eyes. “Fata viam invenient.”

“Or they already have,” Will whispered. “We’re just slow readers.”

Dexter let his head tip back against the cinder block and, after a long moment, spoke into the hum as if to no one and to all of them. “No one ever prays for the devil,” he said, picking up the old thought where Will had left it. “Maybe that’s why we learned to pray for each other.”

Spencer listened, that brilliant, damaged mind turning language over like a coin to test its edge. “Then here’s mine,” he said. “Not a prayer. A promise.” He exhaled. “When they come to carve us into stories that make sense to them, I’ll remember this—this room, this night. I’ll say: we were not neat. We were not simple. We were not saved. But we were not liars.”

Hannibal’s mouth curved, the smallest benediction. “Truth,” he said, “is a better epitaph than purity.”

Will shut his eyes at last. “And better company.”

The fluorescents hummed on. The elevator coughed and went still. Somewhere, beyond concrete and razor wire and policy and the appetite of a thousand mouths waiting to judge, a summer storm rolled itself together, patient and inevitable.

Inside the block, the four of them lay awake a while longer, each keeping vigil over the others’ breathing, until even that small attention became a kind of prayer that required no god at all. Then—one by one, in a sequence known only to the dark—they let the hush take them, not absolved, not at peace, but—like every mortal beautiful thing—temporary, and therefore unbearably, indelibly, true.

They brought them in separately to make it feel like control.

Hannibal entered first, flanked by two guards who did not meet his eyes. The room was a square of poured concrete and fluorescent fatigue: a table, four bolts where restraints might attach, a clock that had stopped at some careless hour. No cameras visible, though the little red diode in the ceiling smoked its unblinking light. The chill raised a flock of small bumps across his forearms beneath the prison fabric. He folded his hands, breathed once, and waited.

The door rasped. Will.

He didn’t stride in; he slipped, the way a river finds a crack in stone. The guards hesitated as if expecting an immediate problem—this was, after all, Will Graham—but Will simply lifted his wrists for the cuffs to be removed and kept his gaze on Hannibal’s face as if orienting by a star. The door shut. The lock bit down. The room, suddenly, belonged to them.

For a heartbeat neither moved.

Weeks without touch had made their bodies into tuning forks held too long in a fist. The nearness rattled. Hannibal could hear the geometry of Will’s breathing—measured, careful, each inhale pulled through a chest that had known too many blades and too much rage. Will could see what restraint did to Hannibal’s posture: the perfect stillness that wasn’t stillness at all, only pressure distributed so evenly it read as calm.

“Will,” Hannibal said, and it wasn’t a greeting so much as a permission: be whole, here.

Will’s mouth twitched. “You look terrible,” he said softly, and it was almost fond. What he meant was: you’re here. What he meant was: I can breathe.

Hannibal’s answer was a small, wry curve that belonged to another life. “And you,” he offered, “look alive.”

They stood with the table between them. A bad joke of furniture; a suggestion that conversation ought to happen instead of the thing both of them had crossed rooms and countries and years to reach. Hannibal’s gaze slipped—briefly, deliberately—to the clock’s frozen hands, then back to Will, as if to say: let’s not waste the only honest minutes we’re likely to get.

He reached—slowly, palms open—and drew from the seam of his prison-issue waistband what should not have been there at all: a small wrap of white gauze, folded upon itself with a surgeon’s economy. The guards had searched him. Not well enough. Or perhaps they’d missed the fact that smuggling isn’t always external.

He set the gauze on the table. Unwound it. The metal inside caught the fluorescent and made it softer somehow, as if the light itself recognized ceremony: the signet, silver, the stag’s relief worn smooth at the antlers from the turn of a thumb. He didn’t touch it for a moment. He simply let it exist between them, an object dense enough to bend time.

Will did not step back. He didn’t smile. He didn’t deflect with humor or anger or the jagged brilliance that had saved him and cut him in equal measure his entire life. He only watched, shoulders tight, eyes bright with a shine he would deny.

“You’re certain,” Will said—not a question. A statement about inevitability.

“Yes.” Hannibal’s voice had gone low, unembellished. “I have been certain since certainty learned your name.”

A breath left Will he hadn’t known he was deferring. He moved around the table. They did not touch yet. Close enough that Hannibal could see the fine map of pale scars across Will’s knuckles, the faint new seam healing at the wrist, the softness that always surprised him at the corner of Will’s mouth when he stopped bracing for impact. Close enough that Will could count the flecks of amber in Hannibal’s irises and remember—suddenly, painfully—the night air in Verona and the way laughter had come to them like a bird that no longer believed in cages.

Hannibal lifted the ring.

No speech. Not for lack of words, but because anything he might say would only be a smaller version of what the act already declared. He took Will’s left hand. Will didn’t tremble then; his palm was warm, his tendons strong beneath the skin, his pulse a steady tap under Hannibal’s thumb—the sound a metronome makes when the musician has finally decided on a tempo.

The ring slid home. It fit as if the finger had been measured long ago and the intervening years had simply been the metal’s patient journey to meet it.

Will made a sound—half laugh, half breath punched out of him—and then he did what a life of second-guessing had taught him not to do: he let himself lean.

The embrace was clumsy in its hunger and perfect in its arrival. Will’s arms came around Hannibal with more force than he intended, as if he needed proof of mass; Hannibal’s hands slid to Will’s back with a restraint that read as reverence. Their foreheads touched. The sudden heat of skin against skin felt obscene in a room that had learned only to catalogue. It shattered something. The cataloguing could wait.

Will’s eyes closed. A tremor ran through him, the kind that starts too deep to stop. “I kept thinking,” he said into the space by Hannibal’s ear, “that I had forgotten how you smell.”

Hannibal’s fingers tightened, just enough to answer. “And?” he asked, voice nearly gone.

“I hadn’t.” Will inhaled once more, as if to anchor the words to something he could keep. “I never do.”

Hannibal’s laugh was a tug at the corner of his mouth—no sound, only light against a storm. He could have said: I have never been more frightened than when I imagined you alone in a room like this without me. He could have said: I would trade the finest symphony in the world for the sound you just made. He did not. He let the weight of the ring do the speaking and the holding do the rest.

They stood like that long enough for the fluorescent to hum itself into the background and for both of their heartbeats to match, slow as tide. When they eased apart, it was by degrees, reluctant, hands sliding down arms, palms lingering at wrists. Hannibal’s gaze dropped to the silver again—astonished, as if he were allowed astonishment—and then up, finding Will watching him watch.

“You’re not subtle,” Will said, voice ragged but steady. He was almost smiling.

“No.” Hannibal’s answer was barely a breath. “Not any longer.”

Something eased in Will’s shoulders, a knot he’d been tying for so many years he couldn’t remember the first loop. “Good,” he said. “I’m tired of hiding the best parts.”

He lifted his left hand—the new weight a small gravity tugging his whole arm into honesty—and pressed the ring against Hannibal’s sternum, over the rhythm that had steadied him in ambulances, in forests, in the noise of his own mind. “This is going to make everything harder,” he murmured.

Hannibal met his eyes. “Only for them.” He didn’t need to say who they were.

A sharp rap at the door. The guards’ silhouettes blurred through the narrow wired glass.

Will didn’t step away. He angled his body, a subtle shield that said: one more minute, one more inhale, one more proof. “Do you know what I thought about this morning?” he asked, and when Hannibal shook his head the smallest degree, Will’s mouth quirked. “Potato chips.”

A soft huff. The fondness in Hannibal’s face made the room warmer. “You are perverse.”

“Balance,” Will returned, quiet triumph in the single word. The ring glinted as if it agreed.

The lock turned. Hinges complained. The world, smelling of metal and policy, pushed back in. The nearest guard cleared his throat with the officiousness of someone pretending not to see an altar where a table stood.

Will released Hannibal’s shirtfront last, fingertips catching for a second in the fabric as if the cotton itself were unwilling. He nodded once—no bravado, no theatre, just I know and I’m coming back—and let the guard angle him toward the hall.

“Mr. Graham,” the second guard said, tone practiced bland. “It’s time.”

Will started to move, then pivoted half a step and, without touching again, gave Hannibal the look he reserved for thresholds. “We’re married,” he said, too soft for the guards to mark, perfectly clear for the man who needed to hear it. “Whatever happens in there, that doesn’t change.”

Hannibal’s throat worked around the ache that language rarely reached. “Yes,” he answered, and the single syllable was a vow.

They separated. The fluorescent buzz grew loud again; the room remembered it was small. As the door swallowed Will, Hannibal lifted his hand as if to smooth a stray hair at Will’s temple—too late, the gesture unfinished, the tenderness hovering in the air like steam from a winter mouth.

The ring’s shine on Will’s finger flashed once in the doorway. Then it was gone, traveling into a day that would try to grind them down with questions and headlines and the lazy hunger of other people’s certainties.

Hannibal stayed a moment longer, listening to the phantom of Will’s breath, to the echo of his own. He did not look at the camera. He did not look at the clock. He looked at his open hands—the hands that had taken life, the hands that had just been allowed to hold it—and found them steady.

The guard coughed again. Business resumed its performance.

Hannibal followed the escort into the corridor’s sterile light, and the door sighed shut on the emptied room, where the air still held a shape two bodies had made, and the stoppered clock—oblivious, obstinate—refused to name the hour that had just begun.

The convoy slid through the city streets under a crush of blue lights and sirens. Four armored vans, windows blacked out, tires humming like the slow heartbeat of inevitability. Helicopters circled overhead; reporters clustered along barricades with their cameras raised like weapons. The courthouse itself loomed ahead, a stone beast of columns and flags, already swollen with the weight of history.

Inside their separate cages, the four killers sat in silence.

Will’s palms pressed into his knees, every nerve screaming at the sheer absurdity of daylight after weeks of fluorescent confinement. He could see flashes through the slit-window — bursts of cameras, white like lightning. He thought of storms, again. Hannibal sat opposite him, still as marble, hands folded, mask of serenity polished to perfection. But Will knew better. He always knew better.

Spencer chewed the inside of his cheek, his wrists trembling against the cuffs. He hated the rhythm of sirens, the counting of seconds between wails. He tried to multiply them in his head, to lose himself in numbers, but the math broke against the walls of the van. Beside him, Dexter closed his eyes, not in calm but in calculation. His breathing was shallow, trained, as if every inhale had been chosen in advance.

When the doors opened, noise crashed in — the roar of the crowd, the flash of cameras, the metal shriek of doors being pulled wide. Guards stepped forward in armor and visors, rifles raised. The killers were marched out one by one, into a canyon of shouted questions and angry voices.

“Cannibals!”

“Monsters!”

“Justice for the dead!”

The air smelled of sweat, asphalt, and fury. Reporters leaned over barricades; microphones shoved forward like spears. Somewhere a woman screamed; somewhere else, a man laughed.

Up the courthouse steps they climbed, shackles clinking, guards bristling around them like wolves around prey. Will caught sight of a placard — Cursed Lover scrawled in black marker — and another with American Vampire. The words clung like chains heavier than steel.

The doors of the courthouse closed behind them with a sound like a vault sealing. Inside, the air was cooler, hushed, but no less charged. Rows of cameras lined the back wall. Journalists whispered. The jury’s faces were already set like stone.

Each of the four was led to his place at the defense table, cuffs removed but guards never far. Their attorneys leaned close, murmuring last instructions, but the weight of the room was elsewhere — in the gaze of a nation fixed upon them.

The judge entered, robe dark as mourning cloth. “All rise.”

The chamber obeyed. The killers rose too, four figures under fluorescent light, shadows thrown long against the paneled walls.

The judge’s gavel struck once, sharp, like a crack of bone.

“All seated.”

Wood creaked. Murmurs died. The silence was immense.

Then the prosecution rose, voice smooth and loud enough to echo.

What followed was hours of slow bleed.

The litany of routine: Name? Age? Birthplace? Occupation? Parentage? Education?

A thousand administrative cuts. Spencer’s answers fell in clipped monotone. “Spencer Walter Reid. Forty. Las Vegas, Nevada. Mother Diana, father William. FBI agent. Doctorates in mathematics, chemistry, engineering, psychology, philosophy, sociology. Former lecturer. Former profiler. Former son.”

The room dulled. The jury slumped. The gallery shifted in restless waves of cloth and paper. Even the press — ravenous as they were — began to lose focus. Reporters scrawled half-hearted notes, eyes glazing over as if this trial, promised as spectacle, had sunk into bureaucracy.

But the drone was part of the strategy. Hours of boredom made the pivot strike sharper.

“Doctor Reid,” the prosecutor said at last, leaning forward, tone heavy with mock courtesy. “What is the precise nature of your relationship with the accused Dexter Morgan?”

The courtroom stilled.

Spencer lifted his head. No stammer. No delay. No gentle euphemism that might soften the fall. His voice was cold, vulgar, deliberate:

“We fuck. He fucks me, I fuck him. However the moment wants it. That’s what we are.”

The word fuck cracked against the marble walls like a gunshot.

Gasps tore through the benches. A ripple of stunned silence ran over the jury box, like the collective breath had been knocked from them. Reporters surged forward, pens tearing across paper, already shaping headlines that would circle the globe by evening.

On the defense bench, Dexter didn’t flinch. His eyes fixed forward, jaw locked, as if he’d expected — even wanted — this precise phrasing.

On the opposite side, Will’s head snapped up, blue eyes flashing toward Spencer, not with shock but with a grim recognition of how sharp a blade the boy had chosen. Hannibal’s lips curved into the faintest suggestion of amusement, like a connoisseur savoring a rare note in a symphony.

The prosecution stood still, as if trying to decide whether to press further or let the bomb reverberate through the walls.

But nothing else mattered.

The words were out. They belonged now to the room, to the jury, to the press, to the world.

The silence after was heavier than the hours of questions before.

The gavel struck once, sharp as a coffin nail.

And the headlines wrote themselves.

The gavel fell again, but it could not cut through the storm that Reid’s words had summoned.

Outside the courthouse, the press exploded. Headlines bled onto screens before the ink had even dried in the gallery:

“FBI Genius Admits Affair with Bay Harbor Butcher.”

“Dr. Spencer Reid: From Boy Wonder to Butcher’s Lover.”

“We Fuck: Reid’s Bombshell Confession Rocks Bureau, Nation.”

The live broadcast clipped to anchors pale with disbelief, whispering about “moral collapse” and “institutional rot.” Commentators spoke the word treason without hesitation.

Inside, guards moved fast. Too fast. They knew what headlines like this could ignite beyond the courthouse doors: crowds, mobs, the scent of vengeance.

“Move them. Now!”

Hands seized the accused. Shackles clanked, wrists twisted. Hannibal and Will were dragged first, their calm bearing the only thing preventing chaos. But Dexter and Spencer—oh, the guards were not gentle with them. They shoved, slammed, jerked chains hard enough to bite into skin. Spencer stumbled, shoulder smacking the wall; Dexter was rammed forward into a steel frame. Blood welled from a split lip, from torn skin on wrists.

They were thrown into the van like cargo. Metal door slammed shut behind them. Darkness, the sound of chains settling, the roar of the crowd muffled beyond iron walls.

Spencer’s hair was plastered to his forehead, blood at the corner of his mouth. Dexter’s knuckles were scraped raw. Both were breathing hard, still half-laughing from adrenaline.

Their eyes caught in the dark. Bruises already purpling. Blood already drying.

Spencer grinned, sharp and wicked, teeth red.

Dexter leaned close. Their chains clanked together. And they kissed, hard, the copper tang of blood traded back and forth.

When they broke apart, Dexter’s laugh was ragged. “You should’ve said you drink my blood too.”

Spencer’s smile cut through the shadows. “Next time.”

And the van rattled forward, carrying them all deeper into the storm.

The flat-screen in the conference room glowed with chaos. The trial feed had ended, cut by the court after the outburst, but the networks hadn’t stopped. Anchors leaned forward across glossy desks, words tumbling over each other: shock, betrayal, institutional collapse.

On the ticker, in bold red letters:

“WE FUCK”: FBI’S REID CONFESSES LOVE AFFAIR WITH BAY HARBOR BUTCHER

No euphemism. No softening. Just the vulgarity, raw and stripped, blasting across every screen in America.

JJ pressed a hand to her mouth. She looked pale, the weight of motherhood and friendship crashing in at once. “Oh my God.”

Morgan slammed a fist against the table, hard enough that the coffee cups rattled. “He chose a killer over us. Over all of us.” His voice cracked with fury, but underneath it was grief, old and jagged.

Hotch stood stiff, arms crossed, face unreadable—mask iron-tight. But his silence said enough.

Rossi’s jaw worked as though he were chewing glass. “This isn’t just scandal. It’s evidence. It’s motive. They’ll twist it as corruption inside the Bureau, as collusion. We’ll be on trial next.”

On the screen, a talking head from a morning show already speculated: “If two FBI agents could fall under the thrall of known serial killers, what does this say about the Bureau’s culture of oversight? About its leadership?”

The words stung because they were true.

JJ turned, eyes bright with tears. “The public will never forgive him. Or us.”

Hotch’s voice was razor-sharp. “We’re not here for forgiveness. We’re here to hold together what’s left.”

But when the camera cut to a replay, Spencer’s voice echoed again, vulgar and final:

“We fuck. He fucks me, I fuck him. Whatever the moment commands.”

No one in the room breathed.

It wasn’t just a headline now. It was history, branded into the Bureau’s skin.

The van rattled forward, steel on asphalt, chains clinking like teeth. Hannibal and Will sat side by side, shackled but close enough for the warmth of each other’s arm to seep through cloth and bruises.

The rear doors clanged again. Guards shoved Dexter and Spencer inside with a violence too casual to be impersonal. Spencer stumbled hard, lip already torn, shoulder wrenching against the cuff. Dexter caught him in a brutal embrace, ribs colliding, both of them exhaling sharp in pain.

For a moment they froze—suspended, tangled—and then Spencer’s bloody mouth found Dexter’s, a kiss fierce and graceless, swollen with defiance. The guards cursed. One slammed his baton against the van wall. Neither man pulled away.

Will’s eyes slid to Hannibal.

Again. The single word passed without sound. Again we watch it happen.

Hannibal tilted his head, gaze unbroken. His expression didn’t move, but his stare replied: Yes. The mirror reflects and multiplies. They love as we love, though their language is different.

Will’s jaw flexed. His stare tightened. It’s vulgar. Clumsy. Blood and teeth. It’s—

—still love, Hannibal’s glance interrupted, soft as a scalpel. Do not deny recognition when you see it.

Will’s eyes burned with fatigue, rage left over from the courtroom, but also something older—ache, empathy, the marrow of his ruin. He stared harder, not blinking. We’ve been them. We’ve been seen. We’ve been kissed under blood and threat.

Hannibal let his lids narrow slightly, the faintest smile twitching behind his stillness. We are still them. Nothing changes but the witnesses.

The guards shouted again, chains rattled, the van rocked into another turn. Dexter and Spencer only clung tighter, whispering ragged things into each other’s mouths.

Will shifted his gaze away for a heartbeat, then back to Hannibal, daring him to contradict what they both knew. Do you envy them?

Hannibal’s stare sharpened, dark amusement flickering like a match. No. They are crude copies. But I understand them. And you?

Will’s lips curved faintly, not quite a smile, more resignation. I don’t envy them either. I just… recognize it. It’s normal. We’ve been seen too many times to flinch now.

Their eyes locked again, a still point in the jolting chaos of the van. Rings glinted faintly between them, small suns. Hannibal’s fingers inched closer to Will’s cuffed hand, a ghost of touch that said more than any word: You are mine. Even here. Especially here.

Will’s eyes softened, finally, and he let his head lean back against the cold steel. The staring contest ended, but not the conversation. In silence, it went on.

The vans rolled into the plaza as if through a gauntlet. Crowds pressed forward, screaming, flashing, thrusting paper into the air. The guards tightened their grip, shoving the four killers out into daylight.

Headlines were everywhere, painted in ink and fury, shouted aloud by journalists and citizens alike:

“WE FUCK: Reid’s Vulgar Confession Shatters Court.”

“Boy Genius Turns Butcher’s Lover.”

“American Vampire, Bay Harbor Butcher: A Partnership in Blood.”

“From BAU to Bed: Bureau in Ruins.”

Spencer caught sight of the words before a guard shoved him toward the steps. His mouth twisted—not quite a smile, not quite a wince. Dexter saw too, and for one instant, both men almost laughed, bloodied lips pulling tight with the same bitterness.

Inside, the courthouse was colder than yesterday. The air smelled of fresh ink, hot microphones, sweat under suits. Everyone sat stiffer. Reporters leaned forward as though one word might spill a second scandal.

The morning dragged beneath routine: name, age, birthplace, profession. Questions asked in identical tones, answers recorded in identical words. Pages turned, clocks ticked.

And then—

The prosecutor rose. Voice smooth, loud enough to ripple against the marble.

“Dr. Lecter, yesterday Agent Reid named himself lover to the Bay Harbor Butcher. Today I ask you plainly: do you consider Agent Graham your husband?”

Silence thickened. All eyes cut to Hannibal. His gaze slid across the table until it caught Will’s. They held it—a stillness, a private language spoken without sound. Only then did Hannibal return his eyes to the prosecutor.

“I do.”

The courtroom cracked open with noise. Some jurors shifted in their seats; others stared, transfixed. The prosecutor tried to recover control, but the words hung there like an oath, unbreakable.

Hannibal did not blink. His voice, measured, wrapped in the old elegance of truth.

“It is not a claim I make lightly. You may strip us of titles, freedom, even life. But husband—husband is mine to give. And I have given it.”

Will’s jaw tightened, not in resistance but in a raw tremor that almost looked like tears. He nodded once, the smallest, sharpest nod, and in that instant his silence became assent. No jury could mistake it.

The judge’s gavel struck three times. Order demanded. Order ignored. Reporters scribbled, already translating that nod and those words into headlines.

By the time the four were ushered out, the press outside had swollen into riotous noise. Cameras flared like artillery, microphones lunged.

NEW HUSBANDS OF CRIME

CANNIBAL’S WEDDING VOW

CURSED LOVER, CLAIMED

The guards shoved them toward armored vans, but Will and Hannibal kept their eyes locked, a tether no manacle could sever.

For all the brutality of the day, the headlines, the gavel, the questions — what endured was this: they had named each other before the world.

Not master and pawn, not predator and victim.

Husband. Lover. Equal.

And for the first time since their capture, that felt like victory.

The van smelled of metal and diesel and the thin, antiseptic tang of too-clean cuffs. It rolled through a city that had already learned the new vocabulary — headlines, handbills, the obscene little cartoon of the two pairs scrawled by some anonymous satirist — and inside that moving steel box the world had been reduced to four bodies and the silence between them.

—

Dexter sat with his hands locked at the waist, wrists chafed where the leather met skin. The bruises on his jaw were drying into a pale, angry map. He watched Spencer more than he watched the road — watched the way Reid’s laugh came out raw and high, watched the small, practiced cruelty that curved the boy genius’s mouth when the world bent to its shock. Spencer caught his gaze and leaned his shoulder into Dexter’s, a contact small as a punctuation mark, as if to say: we did this.

“Bet they’re still choking on it out there,” Spencer said, the words a bright, obscene thing in the hollow of the van. He tasted victory and copper and had not yet learned to be modest.

Dexter’s reply was a measured tilt of his head. He did not laugh. He didn’t need to. The silence that followed was permission enough. He let Spencer’s voice fill the space. He let the tenderness in that permission root into him. He allowed himself the small, terrible smile that came when something impossible settled into fact: this was theirs, however briefly, and the world could scream about it.

There was blood at the corner of Spencer’s mouth, dried and dark; his fingers were still faintly stained. He held his hand so that Dexter could see the flat of his palm, an index of what he had done and what he wanted to do again. Dexter looked, catalogued, and felt the old mechanic’s hum, the careful, clinical interest. He liked the way Spencer took up space now — not the shy professor he’d once been, but a thing sharpened by hunger.

Spencer laughed again, quieter, and pressed the heel of his hand against the inside of Dexter’s wrist. The metal clinked. It was almost a touch.

—

Across the aisle, Will’s gaze was an animal’s calculation folded into human intelligence; Hannibal’s was the slow, even tide of someone who’d learned to let meaning arrive like a fish to a net. They had seen the press spectacle, the truck of shouting bodies, the way the world made the private public and then sold it back for a profit.

Will watched Dexter watch Spencer and felt the odd double vision of a man who knew both predator and prey. He did not look away. There was a look he and Hannibal shared — less a language than a contract — and in it was something like relieved grief. They had been dragged through the mud for what they were; now the others had been dragged with them. It complicated the geometry of pity.

Hannibal’s hand rested on his knee, fingers uncurling and closing with the rhythm of the van. He let his lips lift, an expression that was more about amusement than triumph. He looked at Will with the sort of affection that read like a thing more sacred than spectacle.

“Spectacle suits them,” Will said, quiet, the voice that had once sketched monsters now noting the mise-en-scène. “It clarifies. It concentrates.”

Hannibal’s smile deepened by a degree. He watched Dexter and Spencer in the rearview mirror of the van cabin — two men who had chosen to announce themselves in a way that could not be unmade by headline or hashtag. “They have a theatricality we might envy,” he murmured. “Or perhaps the envy belongs to the audience.”

Their knees brushed in the small cross of movement as the van negotiated a roundabout; a private, almost accidental intimacy. Will’s fingers closed fractionally over Hannibal’s, then loosened again. Nothing theatrical; merely a pressure like an answered prayer.

—

The guards were taut as crossbows. They moved with the practiced, nervy coordination of people who had learned not to assume anything. Since the courtroom, they had been leaner, sharper — hands quicker to the throat, voices sharper with command. One of them cursed at the traffic; another checked the rear mirror with a look that flicked between caution and animal boredom. If the public had turned the four men into mythology, the guards had been deputized by fear: fear of what the public might do, fear of what those men might still be.

When Spencer turned and spat some small, private defiance in the direction of the window, one guard’s jaw tightened like a trap. He reached for the radio. A different guard’s elbow nudged him off it. Protocol, not heroics. The van hummed on.

—

Outside, the press had not yet learned discretion. Voices rose and fell like waves: the clack of cameras, the practiced outrage, the woman who cried to be interviewed about what it meant to be living in such a world. Their chants were less a narrative than a chorus, an ambient noise the van left behind. Heads in the windows leaned forward to shout; a placard flipped in the evening sun. The city was a stage that did not care for gentle things.

Inside the van, the four men were the only thing that mattered, the only thing that could be parsed by their own private grammars. There were two faces for the public and two entirely for themselves. Two kinds of violence — one theatrical, one domestic — nested in the small body of that moving box.

—

“Do you think they understand?” Spencer asked suddenly, words low enough that the guards’ backs hid them.

Dexter looked at him — at the cut of his cheek, the smear on his lips, the deliberate set of his fingers. “They’ll understand something,” Dexter said. “Maybe not what you wanted them to.”

Spencer’s grin sharpened. “Better than nothing.”

Will watched that exchange and felt the old, complicated amusement that had once made room in his chest for admiration and mourning in equal measure. He considered announcing something to the guards — that these were not merely criminals, that this carriage of souls carried more contours — but he swallowed the impulse. Words could be fed to the wrong mouths.

Hannibal, always the patient observer, said instead, “Spectators love extremes. They prefer spectacle to nuance. You have given them both.”

Will’s shoulder brushed his. A pressure, small. He closed his eyes and allowed himself the knowledge that the pressure meant nothing and everything at once.

—

A pothole made the van shudder; a cup in a holder rattled. Spencer’s laughter spilled forward again, less a sound than an exhalation of relief and fury.

“Bet they’ll put my face next to a cartoon,” he said. “Bet they’ll print it on mugs.”

Dexter’s smirk was almost tender. “Then sell them, Spence. Let the world wear its shame like a souvenir.”

Spencer’s fingers found the space between Dexter’s thumb and the groove of his palm. A contact only, but it was the kind of anchoring that had nothing to do with legality and everything to do with belonging.

Hannibal watched that gesture with a private curiosity and a private hunger of his own. He imagined — for a half-second, and with a shock that felt rather like pleasure — what it would mean to have that contact without glass, without cuffs, without any witness at all. The thought was like a fine, illicit cologne, and he let it sit on the edge of his sensible mind. It was a dangerous pleasure, the kind that smelled of possible transgressions and, therefore, tasted like permission.

Will smiled in the slow, small way that told you the joke had landed and that the landing had softened something brittle in him. “They will print everything,” he said. “They will print it until the ink is worn thin.”

—

A siren cut far off and then faded. The van took a right and then another, a route the driver called from habit more than instruction. The city loomed and then receded, but the van was its own little continent, the four men its odd sovereigns.

Spencer idly licked his thumb and pressed it to the dried edge of his mouth, smearing a dark crescent across his skin. “You should have said you drink my blood, too,” he told Dexter, and the words were half a dare and half a caress.

Dexter’s head tilted. For a moment his face lost the neat, practiced armor of composure and something like mischief came through; a private, small cruelty that belonged only to them. “I don’t drink,” he said. “I take. Different verbs.”

Spencer huffed, delighted. He turned his face up and let the van’s lamplight carve his cheek into a map of shadows. “Noted,” he said. “File it under: confession, embarrassingly theatrical.”

Dexter did not reply, but he let his eyes say what his mouth did not: I saw you, I wanted you, we have done what we did.

—

One of the guards checked the lock on the partition and, for a moment, the scrape of metal made everyone’s bones feel brittle. Will’s hands flexed as if through his cuffs he could feel the world’s edges. Hannibal’s hand drifted a fraction closer to Will’s knee and then stopped, as if remembering that there were laws and then forgetting them again.

They had traded the courtroom for the van and the world for a narrow, rumbling universe where headlines could not reach the soft intimacies of breath and clasp. Outside, a bad world screamed for blood and spectacle. Inside, the four men held to their own.

Spencer’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “When they read that headline tomorrow,” he said, eyes bright, “someone somewhere will choke on their coffee. I want them to choke nicely.”

Dexter’s smile this time was small and savage and genuine. “They will,” he said. “They will choke on a lot of things they thought they’d digested.”

Hannibal’s eyes found Will’s and held. Will’s eyes found Hannibal’s and softened. Two men who had learned to be imperfectly human in each other’s presence let the contact be its own quiet theology.

The van carried them forward. Outside the world roared; inside, they were a small, sealed colony where a new language was being carved from bruises and jokes, from hands on knees and hands at wrists. Each small touch was an ordinary rebellion, each silence an oath.

When the driver slowed for the next set of lights, the four of them — bloodied, cuffed, ridiculous, magnificent — met the passing glare of the city and, briefly, let themselves believe that what they had done would not reduce them entirely. They would be carved into the public shape for a thousand editorials, but inside that clattering box of travel and custody there was a private weather that no headline could wholly map.

Hannibal’s fingers moved once more, this time to the small ring he had slipped into his pocket earlier — a gesture he kept folded tight, a private liturgy for a world that had chosen to be both audience and judge. Will watched. He did not ask, and Hannibal did not answer. They had time for gestures later; for now, there was the van, and the press trailing after like a tide, and four men who had finally taught the world a new grammar.

The van swallowed the next intersection and the city opened and then closed around them. Inside, Spencer’s laugh died into a satisfied hum. Dexter breathed, steady, his eyes on the road in the back of his mind. Will let himself rest his forehead against the window and watch the world smear by. Hannibal leaned his head just the slightest degree toward Will.

They were fugitives in a world that had just learned how to pronounce them. The ride was a private postscript to a day the papers would not stop summarizing, and in the small acts — a shoulder against a palm, a knee that brushed a knee, a hand that stayed where only skin and cuff allowed — they made a language they would take into the days of shouting and strategy and, when it came, into the slow, long rooms of legal theater.

For now: motion, containment, the click of metal and the soft, dangerous sound of two men who loved each other speaking in a language no headline could translate.

The third morning broke harder, sharper. The plaza outside the courthouse was barricaded now, layers of steel and uniforms keeping the frenzy at bay. No civilians, no shouting masses—only press lined in cages of their own, cameras stacked high, voices muffled behind the cordon. The government had decided: there would be no more chaos, no more interruptions, no more escapes into vans and violence. If a bombshell was dropped again, it would land in the courtroom itself, and the killers would remain under the lights.

Inside, the atmosphere was brittle with this new order. The prosecution read their notes with a kind of ritual patience. The defense lawyers leaned in closer to their clients, whispering strategy that might or might not be heard above the iron hum of the cameras.

And the killers themselves—Hannibal immaculate, Will taut and quiet beside him, Dexter watchful with that permanent air of calculation, Spencer twitching between exhaustion and razor-wire control—were already deciding that if they were to be caged like beasts, they could still negotiate like men.

During one of the longer recesses, when the jury was led out and the air turned to whispers, Spencer leaned into his lawyer’s ear, his voice so low it almost disappeared:

“We want sunlight. One hour a day. We want access to the yard, the four of us. Together.”

The lawyer froze. “That’s impossible. You can’t—”

But Dexter’s eyes were steady, glinting with the logic of someone who’d spent his life making the impossible routine. “Tell them it’s necessary. If they want testimony, if they want composure, if they want us alive enough to answer their questions without cracking, then they give us sunlight.”

Hannibal, without looking at anyone, added like a man suggesting the natural order of things: “And we want joined cells. At least by pairs.”

That froze even Will for a beat. The audacity of it.

But Hannibal continued smoothly: “You cannot keep lovers starved without consequence. Ask any prison psychologist. The state desires truth. Then the state must permit intimacy.”

The lawyers looked pale, but they nodded, scribbling furiously. Whether the court would ever accept such demands was unknown. But the killers knew how politics worked now: pressure, spectacle, negotiation by fire.

And outside, beyond the cordon, the press smelled it already. Rumors filtered through like smoke—the monsters are making demands, whispered headlines, half scandalized, half enthralled. On every news ticker, questions bloomed:

“Can intimacy be denied to men awaiting death?”

“Should America let monsters touch sunlight?”

The third day of the trial had not yet begun in earnest, and already the storm was shifting shape.

The decision came down faster than anyone expected. It wasn’t framed as mercy — nothing so sentimental. The Bureau of Prisons called it a “controlled adjustment to minimize destabilization.” But the press translated it more bluntly: the killers made demands, and the state bent.

They did not get both. No sunshine and no joined cells — the prosecution would not allow it. So the court framed it as a choice: one hour beneath a caged sky, or nights together. It was no choice at all.

The request was logged, reviewed, and approved under “psychological accommodations.” The cells were altered. Iron doors thickened. Ventilation rerouted. Padding and layers of reinforced concrete meant that, for once, the walls did their job: the couples could no longer hear each other. What happened in one chamber stayed there, muffled, sealed. Private.

For the first time in weeks, they could touch. Spencer and Dexter collapsed into each other as though gravity had finally been given permission; Hannibal and Will moved more slowly, like men reacquainting themselves with a ritual too holy to rush.

The guards pretended to be deaf. The press was told nothing. Officially, they were still four specimens under glass, bound and catalogued. But within those insulated walls, at least at certain hours, they were spared the cruelty of being forced to overhear each other’s intimacies.

The guards shut the door and left them in their new cell. For a moment, silence. Just the sound of iron clicking into place.

Then Spencer started to laugh. A sharp, disbelieving sound that cracked and tumbled out of him, until Dexter was laughing too, low and rasping, like something torn free from his chest.

“No more whispering,” Spencer said, almost giddy, leaning back against the wall. His smile was blood-bright, savage. “We can scream.”

Dexter’s grin flashed, boyish and wolfish all at once. “We can fucking scream,” he echoed, stepping closer, shoulders loose in a way the prison hadn’t seen yet. “Say it again.”

Spencer bared his teeth. “We can fucking scream.” His voice ricocheted off the concrete, bouncing back at them louder than it had any right to be. He tilted his head, amused at the echo. “They can’t hear a thing. You realize how dangerous that is, right?”

“Dangerous,” Dexter repeated, savoring the word, then brushing his fingers through Spencer’s hair with mock tenderness. “You think I care?”

Spencer shoved him — not hard, but enough to make Dexter stagger and catch himself on the bunk. They both laughed again, like boys set loose in a playground of knives.

Then Dexter steadied, watching him, head tilted. The laughter softened but didn’t die, became something sharper. “So tell me, genius,” he said, voice low, teasing, cruel only in the way it wanted the answer. “What does the moment demand? Do I fuck you? Or do you fuck me?”

Spencer’s eyes flared, bright, feral, caught between humor and hunger. He didn’t step back. He never did. “You ask like it’s my choice,” he said, voice dry as dust. “But you’ll do what you always do — whatever feels inevitable.”

Dexter moved in closer, close enough that Spencer could feel the warmth of him, close enough that the next laugh might break into something else entirely. His smile was knife-clean. “Exactly.”

Spencer tilted his head back, throat bared, pulse racing beneath pale skin, and laughed again. Loud. Unrestrained. Wild. The sound filled the cell, filled the walls, and this time there was no one to hear it but Dexter.

The lock clanged shut and they were alone. No hesitation, no banter — just need.

Dexter slammed Spencer into the concrete, hard enough to rattle the frame of the cot, one hand choking him, the other ripping at his shirt. Spencer bucked against him, not resisting but demanding. His mouth found skin and he tore without warning, teeth breaking flesh at the throat.

The blood came fast. A gush, hot, metallic, flooding Spencer’s mouth. He groaned like an animal, swallowing greedily, body jerking with every pull. Three weeks of hunger made him savage — he gnawed, he worried the wound open wider, until it ran like a faucet down Dexter’s chest. The collar of his prison uniform turned black with it, soaking in waves.

Dexter didn’t stop him. He held him there, forcing his head tighter to the wound, smearing blood across Spencer’s face with his palm. His voice was low, guttural: “Drink. Drown in it. But don’t forget—this is mine to give.”

Spencer whimpered into the mess, his mouth slick, his jaw trembling as he sucked harder. Blood coated his teeth, his tongue, his chin — he looked rabid, feral. When Dexter finally yanked him back by the hair, strings of red saliva clung between them. Spencer gasped, throat raw, his voice cracked: “More. I need more.”

Dexter shoved him down onto the cot. The sheets stained instantly when Spencer bit again, this time into Dexter’s shoulder. He tore skin, ripped deep, and blood sprayed in hot arcs across the mattress. He licked it up, smeared it across his chest, sucking at the wound until the veins pulsed under his tongue.

“Greedy little bastard,” Dexter hissed, grinding his weight into him, pinning him down. He forced Spencer’s wrists above his head again, bruising the bones, rutting against him until Spencer writhed helplessly, choking on moans and laughter.

Spencer’s voice was a rasp, desperate: “Don’t stop. Don’t you fucking stop.”

Dexter leaned in, pressing his bloody mouth to Spencer’s ear. “You’ll get what I give you. Nothing more.” And then he bit him — hard, cruel, breaking skin at Spencer’s shoulder, gnawing until blood welled.

Spencer screamed, not in pain but in ecstasy, arching into it, begging for more. Their bodies collided, slick with blood and sweat, grinding, thrusting, breaking each other open in rhythm. Every bite left another wound, every wound another mouthful of iron, another spurt to lick, another bruise to bloom dark.

The cell reeked of copper and salt, of sex and gore. Their groans echoed against concrete, obscene, animal. Spencer twisted under him, half-laughing, half-sobbing, his chest and stomach smeared red, his lips painted like a wound themselves. Dexter dominated every movement, holding him down, pounding into him, making him stay.

When release finally ripped through them, it was violent. Spencer bit down so hard on Dexter’s neck that more blood spurted across the cot, soaking the mattress in fresh crimson. Dexter ground into him until his body convulsed, until Spencer was left shuddering and broken open beneath him, mouth dripping, eyes wild.

They collapsed together in the gore-soaked bed, shaking, clutching each other with bloody hands. Spencer licked the wound one last time, swallowing thickly, before whispering against Dexter’s throat: “Three weeks. I thought I’d die without this.”

Dexter kissed him hard, teeth clashing, both their mouths iron-rich. His answer was a growl, soft but certain: “We kill each other, or we keep each other alive. There’s nothing in between.”

They lay in the wreckage of the cot, sheets ruined, the stink of copper thick enough to choke on. Blood streaked the concrete, smeared across their stomachs, pooled beneath their spines. Both of them were still trembling, their breaths ragged, ribs scraping against one another as they clung close.

Spencer was the first to laugh. It wasn’t light; it was cracked, raw, halfway between hysteria and triumph. “God,” he rasped, licking the blood still caked around his teeth, “imagine their faces tomorrow. The guards walking in here, trying to strip the bed—” He broke off into more laughter, delirious, almost choking on it.

Dexter smirked against his temple, his own body still heaving with aftershocks. He tightened his arms around Spencer’s shoulders, the grip bruising. “They’ll think we murdered each other,” he muttered, voice low, amused. “They’ll bring hazmat suits just to deal with the sheets.”

Spencer tilted his head back, blood-stained curls plastered to his forehead, eyes glinting dark with fevered delight. “Let them. We’re still here. We’re still alive. We won.”

Dexter kissed him then, sudden and rough, tasting nothing but iron and spit. When he pulled back, Spencer’s lips were split, his smile savage. “I love you,” he said, fierce, unflinching. “I fucking love you.”

For a moment Dexter just looked at him, all the violence between them distilled into something steady, something that endured. His palm slid to the back of Spencer’s neck, pulling him close until their foreheads pressed together. “I love you too,” he whispered, voice hoarse, as though saying it cost him blood of its own.

They lay there in silence after, broken only by the occasional sharp breath or half-delirious chuckle, sticky with gore, wrapped around each other. Spencer traced a line through the blood on Dexter’s chest with one finger, childish in its cruelty, writing nothing in particular. Dexter let him.

Finally, Spencer whispered, half laughing still, “Tomorrow, when they come in… we should tell them we sacrificed a goat.”

Dexter chuckled darkly, pulling him tighter, burying his face in Spencer’s hair. “No,” he said. “We’ll tell them we made a masterpiece.”

The cell stayed thick with their laughter, bitter and sweet, until exhaustion dragged them both under.

The next morning, Spencer and Dexter were marched into the common area, wrists still cuffed, skin raw, cuts fresh and shining. They didn’t bother hiding it. Spencer’s lip was split, teeth stained red; Dexter’s neck bore half-moon bites, his shirt stuck with dried gore. Together, they looked like survivors of some unspeakable battlefield — and in a way, they were.

Will’s eyes narrowed as he took them in from across the room. Hannibal, beside him, tilted his head, studying the spectacle with that unreadable stillness that only made Will more unsettled. The silence between the four was almost unbearable — Spencer’s grin made it worse.

Then the guards arrived at the cell. They didn’t speak. They didn’t even make eye contact. Just carried in fresh linens, stripped the cot with quick, mechanical hands, their latex gloves peeling away sheets so saturated they looked more like butcher’s aprons than bedding. The smell carried into the hall — copper and salt, sharp enough to sting.

One guard gagged quietly and turned his head. Another muttered something under his breath, but the others silenced him with a look. They knew better than to joke in front of them.

When they were done, they left without a word. No threats, no orders. Just a door slammed shut, and the echo of their footsteps retreating.

Later that evening, the attorney arrived. Not their usual polished calm — this time his tie was loosened, his voice sharp with fatigue and something bordering on disgust. He sat across from Dexter and Spencer, leaning forward until his knuckles pressed into the table.

“You can’t do that again,” he said flatly. “The intimacy clause was already controversial. You two were granted concessions because you asked for them with dignity. What you did last night—” He stopped, eyes flicking between the bruises and dried blood. “That was not intimacy. That was something else. Something the director will not allow.”

Spencer leaned back in his chair, smirk curling at his swollen lip. “We broke the bed, didn’t we?” he said softly.

Dexter didn’t smile. He simply held the attorney’s gaze, voice quiet, controlled. “We’ll adapt.”

The attorney slammed his palm against the table. “You won’t ‘adapt,’ Morgan. You’ll restrain. If the director decides you’ve crossed the line, you’ll lose even the cell you share. Back to isolation. Permanently.”

For a moment, there was silence. Spencer, his lip still bleeding, leaned forward, resting his chin in his hands, watching the attorney like he was some animal pacing in a cage. Then, out of nowhere, he laughed. A raw, breathless sound, rolling up from somewhere deep.

Dexter followed. Not loud, not wild — but low and steady, enough to fill the room with that unnerving duet of amusement. Their laughter didn’t belong here. It was too free. Too alive.

The attorney shoved back his chair, disgust curling his lip. “You think this is funny? You’re on a leash, both of you. Do this again, and you’ll rot in separate cells until the day of your execution.”

But Spencer only grinned wider, and Dexter’s smile sharpened into something like defiance.

When the guards dragged them back, Hannibal and Will, watching from their end of the common area, didn’t need to exchange words. The message was clear: Spencer and Dexter would never adapt.

And they didn’t.

Not the next night — their bodies were still too raw, too shredded to risk another frenzy. But two days later, the cell reeked of copper again. The guards, silent and grim, stripped blood from the sheets once more, their faces pale under the flickering fluorescents.

The morning after, the order came down. The director had made his decision.

No more shared cell.

Dexter and Spencer were hauled apart, dragged back into solitary confinement like chained beasts returning to their cages. Spencer fought until his wrists bled against the cuffs. Dexter didn’t resist, but his silence was worse — that quiet, unreadable calm that meant he had already begun planning.

Behind the reinforced doors, the walls closed in again. And this time, they knew the laughter wouldn’t carry.

The cellblock hummed with its familiar dirge: steel clanging against steel, boots tracing the rhythm of patrols, the murmur of voices too far away to matter. But in the narrow slice of space between bars, Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham existed in something altogether different.

Marriage.

No priest, no paper, no pomp — only the weight of a ring slipped onto Will’s finger with the promise, whispered like a spell: today we win.

It was enough.

The guards treated them like they always had — dangerous, irredeemable, to be marched, shackled, herded. But between them, every detail was transformed. Hannibal’s hand hovering just a second longer when the chains were clipped. Will leaning a fraction closer in the van so their shoulders touched. A glance that could be read as defiance to outsiders but was, in truth, domestic sweetness: I am here, and you are mine.

They spoke less than they looked. Words felt unnecessary. Their conversations stretched through silence, strung on the invisible thread that had always bound them, now taut with a new name: husband.

One morning, before court, Hannibal reached across the narrow space as a guard shoved Will into his seat. His fingers brushed a wrinkle from Will’s collar. The gesture was so absurdly mundane that Will almost laughed — almost, because there was no comedy in the look Hannibal gave him. It was reverent. As though smoothing cloth was smoothing Will himself, shaping him into the image of beloved.

Later, when the courtroom lights flared and cameras snapped, Will felt Hannibal’s gaze on him like a hand on his back, steadying. He answered questions not as a broken man or as a murderer, but as someone claimed. When the prosecutor spat words designed to corner him, Will caught Hannibal’s faint nod from the defense table, and he breathed easier. They were not fighting alone. They were two.

In the evenings, after the noise, after the cages shut, their intimacy did not flare into violence like Dexter and Spencer’s. Instead, it settled like coals — slow, smoldering, steady. Will would lean back on his cot, turning the ring with his thumb, and Hannibal, across the way, would watch him. Sometimes Will whispered, just low enough for Hannibal to catch: “Still here.”

And Hannibal would incline his head, the smallest smile curving his lips. “As long as you are.”

The guards hated it, though they couldn’t articulate why. Two killers staring at each other in silence unnerved them more than Spencer’s bloody sheets or Dexter’s laughter. Because what Hannibal and Will built was indestructible, impervious to cages.

It was a marriage not of walls but of glances. Not of touches — denied as they were — but of understanding. Will felt it when Hannibal’s eyes lingered on the chain at his wrist. Hannibal felt it when Will tilted his head in that strange, canine way, as if listening for a frequency only he could hear.

They were not planning escape. They were not hungering for blood. They were simply together.

And yet, in that togetherness, there was power. A power that seeped through every answer in the courtroom, every look in the van, every breath in the cellblock. Hannibal had given Will a ring, yes. But what they had forged in the silence of imprisonment was something no guard could strip, no verdict could undo.

They were married.

And though the world outside thundered with headlines and scandal, here, in this quiet, they found something rarer than freedom.

Belonging.

The chains rattled like punctuation, every movement marked, every silence sharpened. Yet for Hannibal and Will, the noise of confinement had softened into background, like wind through trees. The cage was real, the iron harsh, but between them a quieter truth had taken root: they were married now.

Hannibal sat with the stillness of a predator conserving energy, but his eyes never left Will. He let them rest on the ring glinting faintly at Will’s finger, not with vanity but with a calm satisfaction. A promise sealed. A victory earned.

Will reclined against his cot, arms folded loosely, pretending to watch the ceiling. In truth, every nerve pointed across the space between them, tethered to Hannibal like a compass needle. He still felt the moment of the ring sliding home, the weight of it not on his hand but in his chest.

“You’re staring again,” Will murmured at last, voice low, a drawl pulled thin by exhaustion but softened by something else.

“I am,” Hannibal replied without shame. “Why waste vision on walls?”

Will smirked, though the expression barely held. “You always did make staring feel like a declaration.”

“It is a declaration,” Hannibal said. His voice, even stripped of its usual elegance by the acoustics of the cellblock, carried the gravity of oath. “You are mine to watch.”

The guards shifted in irritation. They always did when the two spoke like this—intimate but unadorned, as though the rest of the world didn’t exist.

Silence fell again, and Will’s fingers turned the ring once, twice. Then he looked up, meeting Hannibal’s gaze squarely. The stare was long, unbroken, deep enough that words no longer mattered. Their language was in stillness, in the way Will tilted his head a fraction and Hannibal leaned forward a breath, as if they might meet halfway through the bars.

The marriage lived here: in stolen glances, in half-smiles too slight for the cameras, in the act of surviving together without touching.

Will swallowed hard. His voice was hoarse when he spoke again. “You ever think about what happens if we lose?”

Hannibal’s expression softened, a rare sliver of humanity breaking through the mask. “Then we lose together. That is all that matters.”

For a moment, Will almost laughed—except his throat closed too tightly. Instead, he let his gaze drop, blinked hard, and muttered, “You’re terrible at comfort.”

“I wasn’t attempting comfort,” Hannibal replied. “I was speaking truth.”

And Will, despite himself, smiled. It was small, cracked at the edges, but real.

The night stretched on, guards restless in their chairs, cameras humming, but for Hannibal and Will it was only another evening at home. A home built of steel, silence, and the single certainty that no verdict, no gavel, no execution could separate them.

They had been lovers. They had been enemies. Now they were husbands.

And in that word, whispered without witness, they found more freedom than the outside world could offer.

The guards had stopped rolling their eyes. That was the first sign. At first, Hannibal and Will’s quiet exchanges were dismissed as eccentricity—half-cryptic, half-romantic, like coded whispers no one else cared to decode. But with each passing day, the tone changed.

The marriage was invisible on paper. No contract, no priest, no witnesses. And yet, the ring glimmered. And the way they carried themselves—two predators at ease, two men united by something colder and stronger than affection—began to unsettle everyone forced to watch.

Attorneys noticed it first. A line of questioning that should have pierced Will seemed to slide off him, absorbed and steadied by Hannibal’s gaze. Hannibal, for his part, answered with less flamboyance than usual, but each word leaned subtly toward Will, as if their testimonies were rehearsed duets. They weren’t rehearsed. They were worse: instinctive.

The guards followed. Rumors spread through the staff that Lecter and Graham had “married themselves” in secret, that no barrier of bars or chains could separate them. One officer muttered that he’d rather escort a live grenade than both of them side by side.

Even the BAU felt it. Rossi, leaning against a courthouse wall with cigarette smoke clinging to his jacket, muttered, “They’re not just co-defendants anymore. They’re a single entity. And that’s more dangerous than any killer in isolation.”

Outside, the press smelled it too. “THE CURSED LOVERS,” headlines screamed. Death-row vows. The marriage of monsters.

The bond that should have weakened them—love, intimacy, exposure—was twisting into armor. The more the world pushed, the more Hannibal and Will seemed unbreakable.

And that terrified everyone.

The guards gave them their hour. Not freedom, never freedom—just a sliver of it, a monitored chamber where they could sit across from one another without chains biting too tightly into their wrists. A table, two chairs, and walls that remembered every whisper.

Spencer leaned forward first, eyes restless, jaw tight. He looked half feral even in stillness, as if a single spark would send him pacing like a caged wolf.

Dexter thought he was clever, but Spencer didn’t flinch. His gaze was too steady, too clinical, almost cruel in its patience.

“I already know what you’re planning,” Spencer said, voice flat, precise. “Or at least what you think you’re planning. Escape routes, courtroom theatrics, leverage over the BAU. You’re not unique. Hannibal’s been sketching the same blueprints since the day they locked him in a glass cage. Will follows him like a tide. And you—” Spencer leaned in, the faintest curl of mockery at his mouth. “You’re predictable in your obsession with control.”

Dexter’s smile faltered, just for a second. Then he tilted his head, shark-like. “Predictable?”

“Yes,” Spencer said, tone almost gentle, but the word landed like a knife. “I’ve already run the probabilities. Calculated the triggers. You want to carve order out of chaos. Hannibal wants art. Will wants love. Me?” His lips twitched, bitter amusement breaking through. “I want truth. And I already see all of it.”

Dexter’s eyes narrowed, but there was no anger—only interest, deep and dark. “And what do you see when you look at us? At me?”

Spencer didn’t hesitate. “A man trying to disguise instinct as philosophy. You kill because it centers you, not because of Harry’s Code or justice. And you tell yourself stories about control so you don’t drown in what you are.”

For a moment, silence. Then Dexter laughed—low, sharp, incredulous. “Jesus, Spencer. You cut deeper with words than I ever could with knives.”

Spencer finally smiled, a crooked, almost boyish thing, though his eyes stayed shadowed. “That’s why you need me. Because I already know the shape of every possible endgame. Hannibal can draw the map. You can draw the blood. But only I can see the pattern before it happens.”

Dexter leaned back, studying him as if he were looking at a mirror tilted just slightly off-center. “And what does the pattern say?”

“That none of us gets out alive,” Spencer answered softly, almost tenderly. “But until then, they don’t get to write our story. We do.”

Their laughter overlapped then—not sweet, not gentle, but jagged and delirious, filling the cell like a victory no guard could strip away.

Dexter leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. “So, genius—if you’ve already thought through it all, tell me. What’s the move?”

Spencer’s eyes flicked to the ceiling, then back down, as though he could see the prison’s blueprints overlaid on the concrete walls. “There are three categories: inside, courtroom, transport. Inside—we’re under surveillance every hour, but their weak spot is routine. Guards are human. Humans slip. Even if we don’t exploit it yet, the possibility has to stay alive.”

Dexter smirked. “Classic predator talk.”

“No,” Spencer said, voice tightening. “It’s math. If there are eight guards cycling through rotations, with twelve-hour shifts, statistically at least one will either cut corners or underestimate us within a three-week window. It’s inevitable. The only question is who notices first—you, me, or Hannibal.”

Dexter nodded, interest sparking in his eyes. Spencer was serious—dangerously so.

“Courtroom,” Spencer continued, lowering his voice. “That’s our greatest exposure and our greatest opportunity. Cameras, journalists, jurors—too many eyes. Too much chaos. If there’s a break in the script, if anyone lunges or slips, that’s where it’ll happen. Hannibal knows it too—he’s already watching for the pressure points.”

Dexter asked, “And transport?”

Spencer gave a thin smile. “Exactly what you’re thinking. Vans. Handcuffs. Too many moving parts, not enough precision. That’s where the violence would work best. But—” his eyes burned into Dexter’s—“only if you want to bleed out before you see Harrison again.”

The words hit, sharp and deliberate. Dexter’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t snap back. He just breathed out slowly. “So what—you’d rather rot here, keep us all debating philosophy until the needle?”

Spencer shook his head, leaning closer, his tone dropping to a whisper sharp enough to cut skin. “No. I’m saying the only viable plan is patience. We can’t force the pattern. It has to open on its own. Courtroom chaos, guard error, a political fracture. Something will come, and when it does, I’ll know it before anyone else does. That’s when you act.”

Dexter studied him like prey he didn’t want to consume. “You really believe you can outthink Hannibal Lecter?”

“Yes,” Spencer said simply, no hesitation, no arrogance—just certainty. “Because he thinks in aesthetics. You think in blood. Will thinks in love. And I think in probabilities. It’s the only language this prison doesn’t understand.”

Silence pressed between them. Then Dexter grinned, crooked and dangerous. “God, I fucking love you.”

Spencer laughed, low and ragged, as if the weight of everything only made the moment sweeter. “Yeah. I know. Now shut up before I start explaining exactly how many mistakes you’ll make without me.”

They both laughed then—delirious, half-mad, locked in bloodstained intimacy. And in that laugh, the plan, the future, the whole storm waiting outside—they held it all.

The Controlled Hour — Expanded

The light in the cell was institutional and thin, like a promise that kept diminishing. For an hour — one of the brief slices of freedom prison allowed them — the world narrowed to the two of them and the dry scrape of reality outside the door. They treated those hours like an altar.

Dexter sat with his back against the wall, watching Spencer watch everything: the way a man watches an equation resolve. Spencer’s fingers worried at the edge of his bandage and then stillened. “We need categories,” he said. “And then we need roles. Not tactics. Not the how. The why and when.”

Dexter’s mouth bent. “You say ‘categories,’ and I’ll pretend you’re not about to talk shop that’ll make Hotch sweat.”

Spencer’s laugh was thin. “No shop. Patterns. Failure domains. Courtroom, inside, transport. Each is a landscape. Each has its own weather.”

“Landscape and weather,” Dexter echoed. “You mean like ‘storm chance’ and ‘floodplain’?”

“Exactly,” Spencer said. He spoke like someone who could see a sentence before it arrived. “A floodplain can be crossed in many ways, but the map doesn’t tell you which person will trip over the ridge. It only tells you where people usually trip.”

Dexter tasted the irony. “So you’re the cartographer. I’m the surgeon.”

“And I want to know where you would cut, even if I won’t tell you where the rivers are.” Spencer’s voice sharpened to something like hunger and intellect braided together. “Not instructions. Not routes. The logic. The likelihood. If we define our roles — if we accept our languages — we can speak without telling secrets.”

Dexter inclined his head. He liked the symmetry: blood and numbers, impulse and probability. “Alright. Roles.”

Spencer drew them with the economy of a man who had always worked in margins. “You assess vulnerability: thresholds where a single decision cascades. I monitor data: patterns and statistical anomalies. Will reads people and predicts behavioural fatigue. Hannibal frames the staging — the message.”

Dexter let that sit. “Message,” he repeated. “Staging is Hannibal’s element. He makes a tableau sing.”

“Not staging to deceive the jury,” Spencer said. “Staging as argument. Hannibal wants an image that says something only he — only both of them — could write. Will supplies the emotional contour. You supply the surgical economy of it.”

They didn’t argue about semantics. They argued about bloodless metaphors as if they were weapons.

“This isn’t about winning in the courthouse by sleight of hand,” Spencer said. “It’s about creating an inevitability — a pressure that reveals the system’s seams. Not to teach law enforcement how to fail, but as a narrative device. If the narrative breaks, it gives us a certain freedom of movement inside the story.”

Dexter watched him, measuring whether the logic landed in cold calculation or in something deeper: the young man’s hunger for pattern made kin with his own hunger for order. “So we wait for the story to split its seam,” Dexter said. “We don’t cause the split. We watch it.”

“Precisely.” Spencer’s eyes were a machine. “And when the seam widens, we move in the language we each speak. Not to hide. Not to disappear. To take advantage of the confusion — the same confusion that lets an experienced killer turn a messy scene into art.”

Dexter’s smile was a blade of humor. “Art. You and Hannibal both.”

Spencer’s expression softened — a flicker that would be missed by a casual observer. “It has to be said: we’d prefer a plan that ends with less blood. But these men are not made to prefer less. So we stay honest about what we are.”

There it was — the confession threaded through a strategy talk. Dexter’s hands flexed around an invisible scalpel. “And if it becomes about protecting Harrison? About getting him real safety?”

Spencer’s voice lost some of its machine-cold precision and reclaimed a human edge. “Then the calculus changes. We are not scholars of probabilities anymore. We are parents, and monsters as necessary. Protection increases the value of risk. It’s an ugly arithmetic, Dexter, but arithmetic nonetheless.”

He spoke and the cell felt too small for the moral weight. Dexter’s eyes drifted to the barred window, to the real horizon the prison mocked. “You always make numbers sound personal,” he said.

“Because they are,” Spencer answered. “People are complex datasets with grudges and love and routines. I can reduce them to patterns on a page, but I feel them too. Which is why… which is why I let the blood tell me the truth sometimes.” He ran his tongue over his lips.

Dexter leaned forward. “Okay. Sketch it. High level. Inside, courtroom, transport. What does each demand, in your language?”

Spencer’s answer was careful — like placing stones on an already dangerous path, not to show steps, but to identify slopes.

Inside — The Quiet Rooms

Spencer’s fingers tapped a rhythm on his knee. “Inside” meant ritual and routine. It meant an enemy the size of a schedule. He described human fatigue without naming specific shifts, the psychology of monotonous vigilance, the way an institutional heartbeat slows when nothing surprising happens.

“We become predictable if we choose predictability,” he said. “If we surrender to the prison’s minutes, the prison will punish us by turning us into a timetable. We must maintain tiny, non-operational disturbances — gestures that keep the system counting us as variables, not constants.”

Dexter’s chuckle was black. “Micro-disturbances. You mean—”

“Not a how,” Spencer cut in. “A mental posture: maintain uncertainty. If the system presumes we’ll be docile, our options diminish. If it retains an appetite for surprise, its attention remains broader. That’s safer for us.”

Will’s voice came from the next cell, faint but present. “It creates friction,” he said. “Friction keeps people awake.” He was alone with his thoughts and yet all human presence in the corridor made their theory more fragile, not less.

Courtroom — Performance and Pressure

“Courtrooms are theatres,” Spencer said. “But theatre with lives instead of sets. The audience is not passive. They contribute to the pressure. When you perform under constant observation, every small deviation becomes an event.”

Dexter’s interest sharpened. “You mean we can use spectacle — the world’s hunger for spectacle — as a lever. But we’re not into spectacle. We’re into the quiet imperative.”

“Levers can be quiet,” Spencer replied. “A single unexpected question, a witness’s tremor, a camera angle that captures something the script didn’t intend — these are narrative beats. They change perception. We are not trying to manipulate the law. We’re preparing to interpret the law’s failures when they happen.”

Hannibal’s voice — slow, distantly amused — threaded through the wall like smoke. “Interpretation requires authorship,” he said. “We will not hide authorship; we will own it. Art is not apology.”

Will inhaled. “And yet we must also be careful that our owning does not become theatre of confession. The world craves spectacle, but it also grinds spectacle into weapons.”

Spencer’s nod was mild but fierce. “Which is why our role assignments are emotional as much as practical. You, Dexter, are economy. You will close wounds. You will be literal. I will narrate probabilities. Will will humanize the argument — not through performance but by making the moral stakes resonate. Hannibal will supply the image that will frame whatever the press cannot swallow.”

The image. Hannibal’s interest was a small, pleasant thing. “A tableau governs emotion,” he murmured. “Even when the legal process speaks in statute, the public thinks in images.”

Transport — The Mobile Problem

Spencer’s voice went colder this time. “Transport is a flux. It’s movement, and movement is complicated. But again — think of it as a narrative device. If they keep us moving under the wrong conditions, it becomes noisy. Noise benefits us if we are prepared. Noise kills if we are not.”

Dexter let the metaphor sit before he pushed. “Noise benefits us. But noise doesn’t justify movement for its own sake.”

“No,” Spencer said. “It just means we accept the inevitability that moving will happen. It’s about timing, not trickery. It’s about being awake when the world’s heartbeat skips.”

They were not trading tactics. They were exchanging philosophies masked as scenarios. That was all the safety the cell allowed them.

The hour faded. Outside, boots, conversations, the indifferent grind of time. Inside, they had assigned themselves roles in an imagined pantomime of agency.

Dexter stood, his limbs unfamiliar with so much inactivity. He reached and, in a near-ritual gesture, touched Spencer’s shoulder — not to move, only to feel the meeting of skin and bone and the human certainty that there would be a next hour. Spencer’s eyes flicked up, registering the contact like a station on a map.

“On paper,” Dexter said quietly, “we call contingency what the rest of the world calls bad luck. But you — you turn contingency into a pattern.”

“It’s what I do,” Spencer said. “I see the shape of things before they happen. Knowing is safer than not knowing. Tell me the truth: do you ever want to stop playing surgeon and be a man who simply sits on a porch and reads a book?”

Dexter’s laugh was small and dark. “Sometimes. The porch would have to have good drainage.” He stopped, and there was a softness in him. “You’re frightening and lovely, Spence.”

“You are too blunt,” Spencer said, and it was the most affectionate thing he had said in weeks.

They stayed like that a while, the two of them breathing the same air like conspirators of affection and ruin. Far off, in the other cells, Will and Hannibal murmured their own theology of love and ferocity.

The guard’s footsteps echoed closer. The hour was nearly gone.

Dexter and Spencer hadn’t moved from the wall, still locked in the kind of silence that was more intimate than any conversation.

Dexter’s mouth twisted, as though he was about to ruin the moment with a joke, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, very low, “You keep turning me into a man when I’m trying so hard to be the monster they think I am.”

Spencer’s eyes flicked up — sharp, fever-bright. “That’s because I want both. The man and the monster. I wouldn’t take you if you were only one.”

Dexter let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-growl. His hand rose, caught Spencer’s jaw, and the force of it tilted his head back against the wall. Spencer bared his teeth like a provocation, not a protest.

The kiss came then, hard enough to bruise, their mouths clashing in hunger that tasted of weeks of isolation. No bite. No blood. Just the crush of lips and the ragged exhale that tore out of both of them as though the kiss itself were rebellion, strategy, and confession all in one.

When they broke apart, their foreheads stayed pressed together, breaths ragged, the echo of violence still trembling in the air.

“Roles,” Spencer whispered again, voice thinned but sure. “We’re roles. But we’re also this.”

Dexter smirked, thumb brushing Spencer’s cheek where his grip had left it red. “Yeah. And this is the only part that makes sense.”

The door clanged open. The hour was over. But the mark of that kiss remained, a private oath carried into the dark.

Will had been quiet for an hour, his hands folded on his knees, eyes on the barred rectangle of light cutting the floor between them. Hannibal watched him for the small, useless things he watched now—the faint tremor in Will’s left thumb, the way his lips shaped vowels when he held a thought without releasing it. It was the kind of attention Hannibal could read in a dozen languages; it made him feel both exposed and deliciously known.

“You’re reading the guards,” Hannibal said finally, soft as the rustle of pages. He had meant it as teasing. Will did not look up.

“I know the cadence of this place,” Will said. When the words came they were less a statement than a map being drawn aloud. “Visiting hours, the manner a rookie will answer a question when he’s anxious, the way the senior guard hides his impatience behind protocols—too much circling of the clipboard, too many overlong eye contact breaks. The way the metal door at the west end groans on a Tuesday the way it won’t on a Thursday because one of their hinges is loose and the maintenance schedule is booked on a duel of soccer matches.”

Hannibal blinked. The detail landed without flourish, clinical and immediate. “You know that because—?”

“Because I watched. Because you can tell a man his life from how he drums his fingers.” Will’s voice had that stillness Hannibal had learned not to mistake for simplicity. “And because I listened to them lie about repairs when I was supposed to be sleeping.”

Hannibal let the pleasure of it bloom. There was always a private pleasure when Will unfolded a thing Hannibal had only intuited; Will’s slow, sure naming of the world made whatever the thing was more beautiful. But the pleasure curdled under something like a thin line of cold.

“You frighten me,” Hannibal admitted, and it came out almost like an apology. He meant it as praise. Will caught the small shift: Hannibal’s fingers tightened on the blanket at his knees.

Will’s mouth quirked. “I’m not the one you should be afraid of tonight.”

Hannibal considered that. “Who, then?”

“The one who loves you enough to cut loose at the hinge.”

Silence gathered, a tangible presence between them. Hannibal could feel it, a careful animal—time measured, risk weighed. He wanted to say, as he so often wanted to say around Will, that love in him took the shape of patronage and of altar; that his admiration was as sharp as a blade. But that confession would be ornamental and reckless. Instead he asked, practical: “You raised the escape again this morning.”

Will’s eyes found Hannibal’s then, and in them the patient, terrifying honesty that had always unmade Hannibal in a way no confession or caress ever quite could.

“Because I can see their seams,” Will said. “I can see where protocol is theater and where it is a lie. I can see a schedule and a person and a place and put them together. We don’t have to leap over impossibilities. We can move along the lines they already carve for themselves.

“The senior guard—number twenty-seven? He eats at his desk at 12:35. He takes his break a minute before the recorded time because of a call he gets from a woman with a cough. The plumber in wing B is on leave until next Tuesday; the maintenance dispatcher will cover with overtime on Monday but not Wednesday. The paperwork to request a transfer from the courtyard to the vetted yard takes—” Will paused and gave the little arithmetic of it, “—thirteen days if you want it to look legitimate. Nine if you pressure the right clerk. That means a small window Friday night into Saturday morning if the paperwork is misfiled. If we have someone on the inside who can misfile it…”

Hannibal felt that old, dangerous shift again—strategy as intimacy. He could have drawn the maps himself, plotted exits with clinical precision; Will’s advantage was not calculation. It was the visceral reading of humans: of need, of boredom, of the petty rituals that scaffolded a guard’s day. Spencer had the archive of facts; Will had the live, beating grammar of people. That grammar was, Hannibal thought, more dangerous.

“You terrify me because you will follow the seam,” Hannibal said. He tried to make the teasing light; it failed—there was gravity underneath. “You will keep untying them until something snaps, and it will not be a snap I recognize.”

Will’s fingers moved, ghosting the silver of the ring Hannibal still did not dare put on his own hand. The gesture was private—so private that the old humility in Will’s face had the shape of prayer.

“Spencer underestimates you,” Will said. “You have a generosity for people that he reads as weakness.” The phrase came out like an observation he’d been sitting with a long time. “He’s wrong. He plans from the mind. He loves the tidy equation of intent and result. He thinks the human variable is a piece of data he can fold into paper. But humans leak. We’re all inefficiency, all crack and irrational grace.”

Hannibal laughed, a small, pleased sound. “And you, my dear, are the map of leak and crack. How almost sacrilegious.”

Will’s smile was almost invisible. “I am the one who remembers what people cannot tell themselves.”

Hannibal let his palms rest, palms flat on the thin blanket. “And will you—” He stopped, then, because even caution had limits. The question he’d nearly asked was not about escape mechanics. It was about Will’s place in the plan: whether Will would lead, follow, or choose the knife to swing.

Will answered anyway. “I will be what is necessary. I will watch, I will wait. I will step forward if the seam needs pressure, and I will step back if the seam wants to hold. I will not be careless.”

Hannibal’s thumb brushed the web at Will’s knuckle. The touch was minimal—half gentleness, half checking a pulse—and it sent the same small jolt through them that sex had once, and would again. “You sound like a judge.”

“I sound like someone who knows what a man will do when he is pinned against a wall,” Will said. “I know how they breathe when they are saving a child, when they are stealing a sandwich, when they are breaking a life to keep the rest. I can make the difference between an interview and an execution.”

Hannibal’s laughter this time was almost private. “You turn the grotesque into a taxonomy.”

“You taught me how to see grotesque as honest,” Will replied. There was no pride in the statement; it was simply truth. It was also a soft, terrible thing—true and small and dangerous.

Hannibal let his head fall back against the thin pillow and closed his eyes for a long, slow moment. “So,” he said, when he opened them again, “we should perfect the seams.”

“Yes,” Will said. “And we should perfect our faces. We are watched by more than the guards. The world is hungry for a single line it can believe. We must make them see the line we want them to see.”

Hannibal’s hand found Will’s in the dark, fingers lacing with the delicacy of someone who loved analysis as much as affection. There was no showiness to the hold—no kissing, no talk of vows. It was simply two hands clasped in the small quiet with an understanding that spun outward: contingency plans, the timing of uniforms, the map of a possible misfiled form. It was love as a folded instrument.

“You frighten me,” Hannibal repeated, this time a concession that had no edge.

“I know,” Will said, and in the way he said it there was a promise and a warning, equally balanced. “And that is why I will be careful.”

They went on, quietly, through names and times and small behavioural tells—the pauses that came before a guard lied, the way a clerk’s laugh always ended with a cough when she was afraid. They spoke not of heroics but of habits, not of myth but of the petty arithmetic of human days. Spencer’s archive would have the facts. Will had the living grammar of those facts.

When the ward’s distant steps shifted—when the hour changed and sound moved down the corridor like a tide—Hannibal let a long breath out. “You were afraid to say the word escape when you first suggested it,” he observed.

Will’s answer was a small, dry smile. “I thought you might be offended that I presumed you would want to run.”

Hannibal felt the old uncontainable tenderness at that: to be known as someone who could be furious and indulgent in equal measure. He leaned forward then, not to kiss—there was a sort of decency to that moment, and they both felt it—but to press the heel of his hand against Will’s cheek, a touch quick as ritual.

“Let us be monstrously practical, then,” Hannibal murmured. “And monstrous in our patience.”

Will’s eyes shone with something like hunger and exhaustion and, underneath both, a fiercer clarity. “Yes. Patience and the right hinge.”

Outside, the prison muscle of ordinary sound resumed: the clink of a tray, the distant radio, a door that banged. Inside their room, two men folded a plan into the thin hours they could claim for themselves—Will’s empathy drawing the map of people, Hannibal’s aesthetic ordering the geometry, both of them already counting the seams Spencer hadn’t noticed.

Spencer’s underestimation, Hannibal thought as he watched Will outline the minor, human betrayals and accommodations they could exploit, would not save them. It might, perversely, be an asset. It guaranteed that the neat mind would not watch the live human animal that would make the plan breathe.

Will met Hannibal’s gaze, a soft and private weather between them. “We have twenty small places to pick at,” he said. “And we have patience.”

“And we have each other,” Hannibal said.

Will’s smile tightened into something close to a vow. “Yes. Even now.”

Hannibal let the sentence hang there, and the thin prison light traced the line of a ring on Will’s finger—an unfinished promise, heavy as silver. In the space between the two of them, strategy and tenderness braided themselves together until one could not say where calculation ended and devotion began.

They sat like that, planning not the dramatic leaps but the tiny loosening of screws, the misfiled forms, the man who worked overtime on a night when the world watched a soccer match and would not notice a hinge left unbolted. Will’s hands told Hannibal what the rest of the prison could not; Hannibal’s mind shaped the consequence into an art.

When Will finally stood to ease the sleep out of his knees, he bent and brushed his lips across Hannibal’s knuckles—no flourish, no claim. Hannibal felt the ghost of the kiss like an electric current and, in his chest, the slow confidence that they were both, in different and terrible ways, profoundly dangerous.

The door clanged open mid-hour. That was never supposed to happen.

Dexter and Spencer both turned, confusion mirrored in their eyes. The rules were strict: one hour, just the two of them. Not even the guards interrupted unless something had gone catastrophically wrong.

But then Batista walked in.

Dexter froze. For a moment he didn’t even breathe. “Ángel?” he rasped, as if saying the name might break the spell.

Batista’s presence felt wrong in the concrete room — Miami sun and Cuban warmth dragged into Quantico’s gray underbelly. He wasn’t in uniform, not in a detective’s suit either, but he carried the same authority. The guards flanking him stayed near the door, letting him walk unchallenged to the center of the room.

Spencer’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t know Batista personally, but his mind moved like clockwork: the timing, the access, the silent respect of the guards. He shouldn’t be here. He couldn’t be here. Not without clearance. His thoughts spun faster. So why is he here? Whose order was this? How high does it go?

Dexter finally found words, disbelief raw in his voice. “You… you can’t be here. They don’t let anyone—”

Batista cut him off, voice sharp as a blade. “Fuck, Dex.” His eyes flicked from Dexter to Spencer and back. “You’re fucking Spencer Reid. Jesus Christ. I don’t know if I should be proud of you… or disgusted.”

The silence that followed was heavy enough to choke on.

Dexter went pale, opening his mouth but finding no defense.

Spencer didn’t move, didn’t flinch. His face was unreadable marble — but behind his stillness was the flicker of satisfaction. Confusion was a weapon, and he’d just watched Batista stumble over it. Even without knowing each other, he’d managed to make the man unsure of what to feel. Pride or disgust — both were victories in Spencer’s book.

Dexter’s voice broke through, softer now. “Ángel, why… why are you here?”

Spencer’s gaze snapped to Batista, eyes like a scalpel. “Yes. Why are you here? Who let you in? This isn’t casual. This is command from the top. A message, not a visit. So tell us. Why?”

Batista’s expression hardened, the easy sarcasm gone. He turned fully to Dexter, shutting Spencer out as though that might lessen the blow. “They sent me because you’ll listen to me. Because you’ll understand. If you try to run, if you even think about it — Harrison loses you. Not by court, not by law. By life. He won’t see you again. Ever.”

Dexter staggered back half a step, like he’d been struck. “Harrison…” His voice cracked on the name.

Spencer tilted his head, cold, analytical. “So that’s it. You’re not here for justice. You’re here to weaponize his son against him. Classic. Efficient.” His lips curled faintly. “But crude.”

Batista’s glare snapped to Spencer. “You don’t get to talk about him. You don’t know Harrison. You don’t know Rita. You don’t know what Dexter took from all of them.”

Spencer’s tone stayed level, calm, almost infuriatingly so. “Maybe not. But I know a tactic when I see one. You’re here to shake him. To weaken his will.” He leaned forward slightly. “Do you think I’ll let you succeed?”

Dexter finally spoke again, voice raw. “How… how is he, Ángel?”

Batista’s face softened, but only a fraction. “He laughs. He plays. He’s starting to understand the world. He asks about you. I tell him you’re safe. That you still love him.” A pause. “Don’t make a liar out of me.”

The silence was jagged. Dexter’s hands trembled at his sides.

Spencer turned his head toward him, eyes sharp, searching. “Don’t listen to him, Dexter. He wants to chain you with guilt. Harrison is a boy. You’re his father. No threat changes that.”

Batista’s reply cut clean through the air: “Then explain this to me, genius. He chose you over his son. Over Harrison. Tell me how the hell that’s love.”

Dexter’s breath caught, chest heaving, words spilling like confession. “It’s both. I love him. I love Harrison more than my own life. But I love—” He faltered, eyes sliding to Spencer, caught between two truths too sharp to hold in one hand.

Spencer stayed unreadable, silent.

Batista saw enough. He rose, his message delivered, his verdict spoken. “That’s all I came to say.” He glanced at Spencer one last time, voice clipped. “You want to think you’re saving him? Then stop dragging him farther down.”

The lock slammed shut behind him.

Dexter collapsed into the chair, shaking. Spencer stood, arms folded, expression unreadable but his mind still running, whirring, dissecting every angle. Why Batista, why now, why Harrison. Command from the top. They’re scared of us. That’s what this really means.

And Dexter whispered, barely audible, “What if he’s right?”

Spencer’s lips twitched into something between a smile and a snarl. “Then we prove him wrong.”

He let the silence stretch, then added, quieter, more to himself than to Dexter: “They think we will escape. Why? I don’t know. Maybe… maybe someone overheard us, the scraps of plans we’ve been trading. Maybe they think it’s real.”

Dexter lifted his head, eyes narrowing. “And it isn’t?”

Spencer didn’t answer.

The silence between them wasn’t peace — it was a net tightening, a reminder that even their thoughts might not belong only to them anymore.

The prison wing breathed like a beast in slumber: four cells, four killers, four minds gnawing at their own bars. Days without visitors had stretched into weeks, and silence was its own species of torture. The only interruptions were guards with their trays, lawyers with their files, and the muffled rattle of keys. The world outside pressed down, distant and inaccessible, as though the concrete itself had grown thicker.

In Will’s cell, shadows clung to him like burrs. He sat with his back to the wall, eyes tracing invisible maps across the ceiling. Across from him, through iron and distance, Hannibal sat poised, the curve of his spine regal, his mask of serenity never slipping. It was the same mask that drove Will mad and calmed him in equal measure. Hannibal’s stillness was not emptiness—it was calculation, a constant assessment of the air, the walls, the sounds.

“They think we’ll try to escape,” Will said suddenly, voice low, carrying just enough to reach Hannibal’s cell.

Hannibal’s head inclined, the smallest gesture, acknowledgment sharpened into meaning. “Do they?”

“Batista,” Will muttered. “He was down with Spencer and Dexter. That doesn’t happen unless someone higher up signs the paper. Unless someone in power is nervous.”

Hannibal let the silence stretch, his gaze flicking toward Will with the slow precision of a blade being drawn. “And yet, we’ve given them no reason to suspect. No whispers, no plans voiced where ears might linger. Which means…”

“Which means it’s not us,” Will finished, his tone tight, furious at the intrusion of an unseen hand. “It’s something else. Something they see. Something from outside.”

The words burned, because they were true. If they were being accused of scheming, it was not for something they had done—it was for what others feared they could do. Fear had a way of birthing shadows where none existed.

Hannibal leaned closer to the bars, voice smooth but edged with iron. “Fear, Will, is the strongest evidence in any courtroom. Stronger than blood. Stronger than proof. They are terrified of what we might be capable of. Terrified of the mere suggestion.”

Will’s jaw clenched. “And that terrifies me, Hannibal. Because if they think we’re planning something, they’ll act as if we are. And once they start acting, they won’t stop. You know it.”

Hannibal’s eyes glinted, the kind of glint that always walked the line between tenderness and danger. “Yes. And that makes us dangerous without lifting a finger. Do you see?”

Will glared back, but his chest ached with reluctant recognition. Hannibal’s words were not comfort—they were a diagnosis, accurate and merciless. They had become the storm even in stillness.

“They don’t know what they’re afraid of,” Will said bitterly. “And that’s the worst kind of fear.”