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'I HOPE YOU CHOKE ON EVERY FUCKING WORD YOU SAID'
There was something strange about the silence that followed the night, it wasn't truly silence. It was a slow, steady breath, as if the house itself were holding it in, waiting for the two inside to wake.
Sloane was the first to stir, a small shift among the still-rumpled sheets. She rolled onto her side, and the first thing she saw wasn't the light filtering through the windows, but him. Hannibal. Still, disheveled from the night before, his chest bare, but his eyes sharp, fixed on her.
Sloane didn't need to touch her hand to remember what had happened the night before: the ring glittered enough to speak for itself. That band of metal on her finger wasn't a fever dream or a passing whim. It was a commitment. Or, at least, something terrifyingly close to one.
"Good morning, future Mrs. Lecter," he smiled, watching her.
The words reached her like both a caress and a twist in her stomach. Mrs. Lecter. Sloane had never been one for romantic fantasies or castles in the air. And yet, here she was. Awake in a bed she knew by heart, with a ring on her finger and the man she would marry beside her.
Sloane stared at him for a second, then let out a quiet laugh, still half-asleep. "Do you have any idea how strange that sounds?"
Hannibal tilted his head, his mouth curving into a rare, lazy smile that perfectly matched the slow morning. "It's just a matter of habit. Soon enough, it won't sound strange at all."
He leaned over to grab a cup of tea from the nightstand, of course already prepared, and handed it to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Sloane raised an eyebrow as she took the steaming cup.
"So now you read minds, too?"
"No," he replied with a smile. "I know you. And you're surprisingly predictable right after waking up."
She laughed, took a sip, then let herself fall back against the pillow after setting the cup on her nightstand. She felt light and at the same time trapped in a feeling she couldn't quite name. The ring was perfect, Hannibal even more so, and everything seemed perfect. They were perfect. The perfect couple. But it was precisely that perfection that sent a shiver through her, one that was hard to ignore.
"You need to know, ever since you came here, this house feels different," he said, almost as if thinking out loud. "More alive."
Sloane looked up, caught off guard.
"I'd like to imagine it that way for a long time. Maybe... share this happiness of ours."
The sentence hung in the air like smoke, intoxicating all her senses. She understood immediately what he meant. Children. He hadn't said it outright, but he didn't need to. The subtext was clearer than any explicit statement.
