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Six pins tethered Alana Bloom to the earth and after the blur of pain and the blown-bass of opiates in the wake of it and the sucking mud of boredom in the wake of that, all she could think was that it was unfair that Jesus only got three.
“Oh, it was fewer than that, despite what you’ll see in all the stained glass,” Frederick Chilton had told her somewhat jovially from the comfort of his visiting chair, legs jauntily crossed and wingtip foot bobbing. The nurses had starting setting it out for him when he kept showing up every week with a fresh bouquet and renewed smugness. “Just the two—one nail through each heel.”
His arrogance had always been mostly unearned, thick and unpleasant like all the grease left to spoil in the gutters of a cast iron. It wasn’t misplaced this time—he’d been right, even if all he had was reconstructive surgery and partial blindness to show for it.
Alana pressed her eyes shut at the feel of fat on her tongue, gone and gone bad, remembering all those times she’d heard some thick wedge of meat hit a fever-pitch sear in that great steel and black kitchen. Its memory screamed in terror, now, in the scraped out spaces of herself. Picked clean and plated back together with titanium and steel, struts in a great empty space.
Even if she hadn’t known what she’d been swallowing—in more cases than one—she should’ve known something.
“I didn’t think you were the church type,” she told the ceiling, wetting her lips where they protested, eyelid-thin and bleeding again in the parched recycled air. The nurse would’ve told her off if she’d been there—the one whose hands were always too cold and impersonal through teeth-squeak nitrile.
Surgilube. It’s the same stuff that comes in the KY bottles, she’d snorted the first time, frosting a thick smear across Alana’s upper lip underneath the bump of her cannula. I’ll have a word with your brother about bringing in something for this, but no Vaseline.
Ben was allergic to taking direction, but he’d tried his best. He’d come back in the blue hours between vitals checks and top-ups with a bagful of drug store chapsticks, plastic jostling adding to the melody of the murmuring hospital in the middle of the night. He’d showed her each one, bleary, until he had a little pile that were safe to use, even if Alana’s fingers still couldn’t quite remember how track to her mouth properly.
Petroleum doesn’t place nice with oxygen, she had rasped back to the nurse, lips raw red and uninterested in playing nice. Weeks ago, she would’ve just forced through until they cracked. The last thing I need is to start any more fires.
She knew what it looked like when a girl burned alive. She hadn’t known Georgia Madchen personally, haunting her own life and sloughing off bloodless skin by the ream, but she’d seen the way Will watched her obliquely from the doorway. A hyperbaric Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, not Joan of Arc fixing her gaze on a crucifix’s bleeding brow as her fat spat and liquified, as her eyes went runny. Georgia had died for the crime of getting better, for remembering, for being the recipient of the kind of tenderness from Will that made Abigail Hobbs go sharp-eyed and fawn-still.
Alana was starting to understand that she nearly died for the same reasons, blinking away the retinal burn image of Abigail with her watery mouth and whites of her eyes glossy. Scared.
Between the drugs and the monotony of remembering not to hinge her hips and minding the swollen crush at the back of her head where she’d smashed down onto the concrete, Alana knew she was lucky to be alive. Lucky she’d been ripped fitfully from a coma after a week to deep, suffocating pain like someone had yanked her guts out by the fistful.
Lucky Hannibal had stepped over her while she shivered and died under the shadow of his Chandler Square house and someone else’s jacket, instead of reaching in and extracting his own pound of offal.
Don’t start any more fires.
The thick wheel of scar tissue shifted under Chilton’s mouth curling, amused. “I was a good altar boy, once, and good Jesuit college has the habit of following a stint at a good Jesuit high school. Funny thing, isn’t it—you can stop being a churchgoer, but at the end of the day, you’re just lapse.”
“Lapse in thought, lapse in judgment?” Alana sighed through a thin breath. Yes, she could’ve said and blinked away the feeling of Abigail’s strong, pale fingers curled against her thin shoulders. Yes, she could’ve said and not been able to shrug off the memory of Hannibal’s teeth working cleanly at her bottom lip. “You’ve tucked your Catholicism in the pocket of an old coat and everyone just assumes you keep meaning to get it out again?”
“Or hopes someday you’ll remember you left the whole thing at the dry cleaners. A little oops.” The word popped off the end of his tongue, a chewing-gum snap, satisfied. “Either way, the coat’s still yours.”
“The only masses I ever attended were Wednesdays. Once high school was over, those ended just like first period calculus,” Alana said, shifting her head to face him and minding the stitches, minding the core, minding her cupped C-spine. “My blazer was only circumstantial, Frederick.”
His eyes glittered. “Funny, where circumstance ends up finding us.”
Chilton wasn’t her only visitor—Ben was family and didn’t count; the FBI had nearly swarmed her at first but either she’d gotten better at unhelpfully answering their questions or they’d gotten what they wanted from her by now; Jack Crawford had only wheeled himself and his poorly-concealed upset to her bedside just the once before he’d been discharged—but he was her most regular one. In her earlier, cloudier moments, Alana had puzzled over it.
He refreshed her flowers when her most recent ones began to wilt. He clicked his partial denture to the roof of his mouth when he talked, and the sad skin of his face sagged against it on each push. Alana watched it scrape and hang, twitch and pull, and wondered what kind of memories she wasn’t going to be able to leave alone once they finally scarred over.
She wasn’t entirely sure what he got out of their regular chats, now that gloating had lost its shine. Any pointed remarks had gone just as stale, even if they both tripped over plenty of them about sleeping with the enemy or waiving professional red flags in front of murder-minded, clever bulls. Alana had told Chilton once that talking to him sometimes was as depressing and bitchy as an ex-wives club, and he’d wheezed out half a laugh with a crooked, thoughtful look.
You and I were barely even mistresses in his consideration, Dr. Bloom, he’d said. The real forsaken lover among us has found himself on the third floor today, getting part of his bowel resected. On that front, I can definitely sympathize.
Alana didn’t like to think about Will, even if he haunted their conversations as much as Hannibal did, a skeleton rattling around in both of their proverbial closets. She’d warned Will a dozen times over, forcefully and tearfully, hissed and horribly sincere. She’d never considered costs, not before these last few weeks, or for what kind Will had made himself the bulwark for her. Pencil-skirt practicality and professional distance meant she didn’t much have to, ducking behind them for safety and hauling up and up from the well of herself. It was a strange feeling, now, to find herself scraping the bottom. She’d never run dry before, but then again, she’d also never known what it was like to feel her bones screaming out of the way of one another.
Alana twisted her gaze away. She was different, now, her and her body. Just like Frederick; just like Will.
She caught a flick of creamy brown, windowpane-plaid as he pushed himself out of the chair to wander by the shelf in the corner lined with flower well-wishes and Ben’s glasses, wayward keys, leftovers from a plastic-wrapped hospital cafeteria lunch.
Chilton fit the end of the curling leaf between two fingers, and stroked it until it crumbled off into his hand. “I’ll bring daisies next time. Unless you want what I brought Will instead.”
Alana arched a brow. The movement tugged at the prickling stitches laced back through her hairline. “Which was?”
There was no use in being civil these days—swimming in drugs and her own plasma when it snuck out like a stubborn leak and being at least half someone else’s blood by volume, at this point. Whatever she was, it wasn’t diplomatic. It was closer to what Humpty Dumpty became when he was splattered all over the ground. Or whatever he was after that.
“Company,” he answered, flicking the plant matter way, sooty as ash. “And lilies. Not quite a peace lily—I don’t think he would’ve appreciated that, all those white blooms, even though this whole thing has been a goddamn funeral, whether he wants to admit it or not.”
“He didn’t appreciate your company either, Frederick,” Alana sighed, counting the pinhole spots on the ceiling tiles.
“Projection, Dr. Bloom?” The stalks crunch; probably a good fist around them. “You’ve got your brother to keep you company when the ward lights get low but you can’t sleep. Will Graham doesn’t have anyone.”
Brothers, but Alana doesn’t correct him. Patrick isn’t stateside anymore, still making good use of his foreign affairs degree and the table manners drilled into all the Bloom kids from the time they were all very young. Bitterness wells up in her throat; Hannibal had always appreciated that she knew which glasses to set out for wine and water, the chain of command of forks, how to eat from the outside in. He’d appreciated that in the silken expanse of his bed too, rimmed in fireglow catching warm on sweat-shined spines.
A spark of pain twitched through her spine, and she bit her own cheek against it, startled. The stinging lightning flashes liked to blister up along whatever peripheral nerves they could reach. Alana’s back ached; blood spread sluggish and thin across her tongue. She wondered if anyone would ever be able to do that again, bear her down into the sheets insistent and wanting until her spine smoothed to a supple, needful curve.
She licked at her mouth, stinging. No gloved fingers smeared surgilube over her mistake this time.
“Maybe he wants it that way,” Alana said to nothing but a considering hum.
“Clearly, that hasn’t served him very well,” Frederick said, wry from the doorway. The door squeaked open, then stopped. “I’ll bring those daisies. You think on your proverbial nails—you know, if they were in the right places, you could claim sainthood. Stigmata, your own crown of thorns, even though yours wasn’t put on your head.”
Her mouth worked, pressed flat. It was funny, but humor felt watery and far away from her, a dim outline from the other side of a curtain. “There’s only five holy wounds. Six pins.”
She could hear Frederick’s smile tip into his words. “Well, I guess you have to figure out what to make of that last one.”
Alana hadn’t figured it out by the time he came back several days later with daisies and a prosthetic eye that didn’t stick as much when he blinked. By the time she routinely dragged her uncooperative feet and deadweight pelvis across a set of parallel bars several times a week, she’d stopped trying to. The gentle-handed physical therapist praised every step, every repeat on the bars even when frustrated tears streamed in with the sweat creeping down her cheeks. Even crying, she didn’t feel hot and desperate with frustration anymore, just frostbite numb.
Her knees crumpled, feet folded and delicate bones crushing. Alana let herself crash, burn to the ground, even as the therapist lurched in to slow her fall. She pushed sweating, tangled hair from her temples with a trembling hand. She wanted to crawl back to her chair, which didn’t feel like giving in as much as getting on the same level as her body’s flavor of betrayal today. Crawling was better than her crown of nails, trapped in her martyr’s corona that said, I lifted the gun; I meant to shoot him; I’m still not sure if getting pushed out the window was the accident or if survival was.
Alana smeared her palm down her face, steadying, and shuddered a look up. Will watched her from beyond the glass wall that looked into the reception room, slouched in sock feet and waiting to be led away to his own PT. She would’ve known him anywhere, even rawbone thin, more curling hair and thickening beard than man at this point. His sharp gaze always gave him away, wary as a wild cat leaning a look down from the high rocks.
He’d warned her. So had Dr. Chilton, less effectively, but Will’s mattered more. Him with his feral eyes and hardwon mouth that could never seem to tell the truth in a way that Alana could swallow easily. It was easy to pretend it was just because she’d wanted him, and that he wasn’t able to file down that lurid eyeshine that he couldn’t help, or present the soft backs of his hands to keep the roughest of his wear-marks from catching.
It was harder to be honest—that she’d been charmed with Hannibal, and a little in love with what that meant. Will had warned her, but it was hard for him to be just as honest—that so was he, charmed and a little in love, and now they were both going to have to carry the grief and the shame of it.
Alana reached up, fitted her grip around the bars, and hauled herself to her deadweight feet. She ground her back teeth together until she was sure she’d crack another one. Split open, it might’ve bled too—rainwater, blood, fatty sluices of marrow, the yolk that all the king’s men couldn’t pour back in once the hungry earth had swallowed it up. There was only one thing to make of her sixth holy wound, that bastard crown of thorns, and she knew what kind of name she’d take ascending to sainthood. The patron saint of misplaced hope, of bad choices of friends, of trying.
Alana Bloom had laid on the ground, all the goodness bleeding out of her, but she had tried.
If she was going to walk again, she was going to have to let it bleed. Bruise her knees at the altar of the parallel bars and callus her knuckles in the confession booth of the X-ray room. Alana could barely prop herself on her own two feet those days; she couldn’t bear Will, or Jack, or Abigail Hobbs, too.
Will was used to carrying that kind of thing, and he had a mournful enough face for both of them. She was going to let him.
Hand over hand, Alana pulled and pulled, and kept shuffling forward.
- - -
Mason Verger was a nasty surprise.
Alana had really thought she’d be better prepared for him. Him, not the glossy stretch of his reconstructed face. She’d seen enough between her surgical rotations and Jack Crawford’s consults and the Quantico lecture materials equipped with full, unflinching description and color photos. She’d read enough of the sealed records she’d managed to get surreptitiously unsealed of one Verger, Mason - age 16.
Privately, she allowed herself to accept that she understood why Hannibal had let him maim himself and snapped his neck. An accident with the pigs, Mason insisted on calling it, more spittle and wink than words as he gummed around them, still getting used to his new body. Alana massaged her knuckles over the grip of her cane, and blandly figured she had to stop sympathizing with everyone who cut teeth on Hannibal and ended up twisted for their effort. She didn’t owe them that; being alive was almost enough.
Alana didn’t even entertain the idea that she could help Mason. But he could help her, if she stuck around long enough to let him.
“Have you ever considered letting him choke on his own spit?” came an easy drawl.
Alana blinked away from the stretch of bay window overlooking the Verger Estate grounds manicured to chilled perfection. Winter sent pale sun to warm the reaching, skeletal fingers of the wooded acres naked against the sky. Mason’s chair cut a blocky shadow down below, whirring down a makeshift ramp next to a soft-faced man in baby blue scrubs.
Margot Verger knocked a hip against one of the great room columns, arms loosely folded in the easy lean of someone who’d made themselves comfortable. It was hard to know how long she’d been standing there—Margot moved with the silent grace of a mountain lion, content to hide her sandy, proud head and peer down from high places with fathomless eyes if it meant she could move unseen, liable to be scared off by loud noises and jangling bells. Pretending to be part of the furniture came easy to her, Alana had discovered over the past few weeks, a pretty piece of peplum and gold set in this baroque house. It reminded her a lot of Hannibal’s Chandler Square house with its ibex horns and dark verdant rooms. Her stomach pinched, soured at the thought. Nausea, trauma, the body’s knee-jerk purge rejection of an ex-lover.
Alana folded her hands over the top of her cane, mouth curving. “Have you?”
“Oh, once or twice.” Margot’s soft mouth darts into half a smile, silver fish hiding in the shoals from the sun. Sometimes that face reminded Alana of Will, but she had to reminded herself that there he wasn’t the only person in the world with blue eyes and an unhappy mouth, looking like a lean dog who’d learned to be kicked. It did catch Alana’s eye more than once. “That’s a funny attitude for a doctor. First do no harm?”
“I’m not Mason’s doctor,” Alana corrected. A white lie, and the slow blink of Margot’s kohl-heavy eyes said that she’d caught it, too.
“You’re part of his care team,” she said, languid, with a small tilt of her head that said she did find it funny, rather than insulting. “Not just a psychologist. A proper psychiatrist with an MD and everything.”
Alana shifted gingerly to face her, watching openly. “For someone who’s considered watching her brother choke to death, you vet his visitors pretty thoroughly.”
“Mason’s the only one in charge of the hiring his staff, and for letting anyone in through the gates.” Margot tilted her chin higher, appraising through shuttered lids, unreadable. “I take care of my brother, but I’m not his keeper. Let the psychiatric record show that I’m not currently planning to kill him.”
Not exactly the kind of clarification Alana needed, but she held a wry appreciation for it anyway.
The psychiatric record already didn’t show much of Mason’s sessions in the first place. Scouring the globe for footprints in the sand and ciphering how to triangulate Hannibal’s snakehole was less talk therapy than it was strategy session. Where she did take notes, Alana took them coded and secretive in narrow, slanted hand when Mason was feeling chatty and specific, directing Cordell to recline him as much as he could in his motorized chair. The shape of him screamed out from those sparse codes, coming into focus between dark muttering on his sessions with Hannibal, colorful spitting tirades about ineffectiveness and poisoned honey dripped into softheaded ears.
My sister’s hardly slow, Dr. Bloom, he’d ground out once, but she’s thoroughly deficient in ambition. When you try to kill someone, you’ve got to really commit to it, and Margot didn’t quite see it all the way through.
Alana had heard it all by now, drawled out with a curl of old-money Virginia accent on the finish—Margot needed a firm, guiding hand; Margot got sent off to boarding school for rich girls and summer camps in between for bad ones; Margot had years of therapy and it’d never made her any less depressed; Margot spoiled everything she touched, even her good ideas, which was yet another reason for the pile why their father had left her out of the will.
Hannibal committed, Alana had told him mildly, which made him sputter enough to froth the corners of his lips with creamy spittle. His suffering felt faraway and brittle the longer she watched him, sun cast low on a glacier, before shuffling over to offer a tissue from her pocket. Better get that quick. Spitters are quitters, aren’t they, Mason?
Alana could read the splinter cracks in the bone—financial abuse, sexual abuse, significant familial trauma, tick, tick, tick went the list. Sometimes, when she’d taken enough of her painkillers that her sits bones didn’t scream when she tried to use them, she warmed her fragile frame by one of the great, old fireplaces and thought about what Margot Verger had wrought to get the faerie bargain that was a Mason who was entirely reliant on others and his lungs to not paralyze, but still very much alive. Maybe she hadn’t been brave—cowardice was a learned behavior the same way Alana’s bleeding heart had been. Maybe it was the sad childhood and the relentless physical and psychological abuse, but Alana wasn’t sure Hannibal ever been moved by those the way she had, once.
“In the spirit of how Mason wants me to keep his records, I don’t think there’s much chance for anything official.” The idea cracked an appreciate smile out of Alana, not just a sly one. It felt nice to let it wash over her, pluck her mouth into something genuine and toothless, even if she did show teeth after all. “And anyway, you’re not my patient, Miss Verger.”
“Margot,” she corrected, breathy and soft.
Alana dipped her head in acknowledgement. “Margot.”
“I don’t think I’ll be anyone’s patient ever again,” Margot said around a tight mouth. Glitter dusted the outsides of her wingtip liner—flaky gold the same burnished color as her blouse, begging to be looked at. Alana watched the way her stare washed blank instead. “Even off the record.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about from me,” Alana laughed, strained, and spread out her free hand. “I’m not exactly looking to add anyone to my roster.”
Margot’s chin lifted, regarding her from under that gold and black. Unreadable in a way that might have been legible to a softer-handed Alana, who never felt the need to wield her red lipstick as armor or her body like it was liable to need oiling if she stood still for too long. “Is there something I can help you with before you head out tonight? I don’t think Mason is going to ask you to join him for dinner, though I’d brace yourself for the invitation. It’s bound to be coming one way or another.”
Alana tapped her cane, thoughtful, rubber tip bouncing. “Never had dinner with a patient.”
“No?”
“Or as one,” she mused.
Dinner with Mason Verger was sure to be unpleasant, taken up in one of the filigreed dining rooms as a demand rather than an offhand ask like Margot’s low tone made it sound. Meat was just as likely to be a star of the meal as the antique scrollwork was, and that made Alana smooth an ill hand down the button front of her unwrinkled blazer. The first morning back in her own house, she’d vomited into the sink at Ben’s bacon sizzling merrily away on the stove, hissing oily and vicious. Over the course of the week, he’d carefully purged cold cuts and meal kit chicken in tidy paper packaging stamped with nauseatingly cheery stickers and even a glass container of leftovers, carefully wrapped by Hannibal himself and accompanied by a set of hand-lettered instructions on how best to reheat it.
Alana had made him throw the whole thing out, and cried when the glass spat itself to pieces against the bottom of the trash can.
She dragged her teeth over her lower lip, briefly, scraping at her lipstick on the way. She’d choke down whatever Mason and his nurse-cook-caretaker cooked up for their pleasure. It made her wonder where Margot ate, if she plated herself something elaborate to sit down with, or cooked up something uncomplicated in her ever elusive wing of the house. Alana hadn’t explored the mansion much—she’d had her fill of chasing through dark-lit, ornate hallways to unknown ends.
“You don’t need to accept,” Margot said, breezily. “I’m sure polite refusal will still get you any number of places with him. He doesn’t feel any need to keep his forked tongue in his mouth where it belongs, but he still needs you.”
Alana huffed another laugh. “Needs my expertise or my information?”
“A little of both, I’d say,” came the humming reply, gaze flicking her up and down.
Mason did it too, a kind of searching through watery eyes, only Alana found didn’t mind it quite so much from Margot. It was just as wary as it was appreciative, calculating, not paired with an absent flick of a wet tongue across her lips. Her sullen look fixed firmly in place. The would-be heiress was pink-cheeked and frizzy with flyaways from an afternoon spent riding, likely, even decked out in her gold that would better fit the ornate dining room than simple fare away from prying eyes or enough cocktails to dull her into complicity and dead-dreaming sleep. Margot had been haunting Alana’s steps for weeks, at her elbow from the stable gates that she had indeed made her entrance all the way to wherever Mason had posted himself up for the day. That Mason allowed that kind of thing still made Alana wary, still measuring out just how wary of him to be.
Despite herself, Alana trusted that edge to Margot’s expression. Not implicitly, but enough to buoy her from her place at the window and into Margot’s orbit. She reminded her legs to take her there, to keep her moving, as she promised when she’d shucked herself of all the burdens she’d put on herself in the last year and a half.
“What are your needs, Margot?” Alana settled, leaning heavily into her cane. Pressure eased off the grind of her hip against itself, a sigh of gristle and snarled collagen. “Not my expertise as a therapist, or my information on your former one.”
“I know everything I want to know about him at this point. He gave me some advice I still need time to chew on, I think,” Margot muttered, then swept her head to the side, a question. Her hair went with her, gentle pale brown waves. “Well, Dr. Bloom, I could always use a dinner companion. That should be suitable, since neither of us are patients.”
A genuine smile captured Alana’s mouth. Honesty. “Is it going to be Dr. Bloom at dinner, too?”
“Not if you don’t want it to be.” The edge of Margot’s mouth flicked up, devious, sultry. Wanting. “Alana.”
- - -
The needs extended beyond a friendly face at the dinner table.
It startled Alana to find that anxious gnaw of need again, from the warm throat of a bitter fernet that she wouldn’t have ever flagged for someone as young as Margot to the pungent honey saffron passed warm from Margot’s tongue to hers. It was as odd a choice as Hannibal’s digestifs, but Alana elbowed all her thoughts out of the way to sink into shared breath, heavy with cardamom and gloomy myrrh. Hunger whet hunger, both of them starving things, though nausea rocked Alana at the thought of sinking in teeth, the wet tear of raw muscle underneath. She busied herself between Margot’s legs, the soft weft of the mattress cradling her sore pelvis as she wrung out gasps and dug handfuls of pretty hips, ass, the sloping sides of Margot’s stomach. Alana licked at her own mouth, slick and warm, satisfied at nips to clit and all down the soft split of her.
Later, she’d curl against Margot in the bone-cold sheets, nosing into her silken spill of hair as Margot sprawled lazy and boneless in pleasure, empty again and scraping the bottom of the well. Nothing left to give, all given in service with mouth and tongue and nearly four soaking fingers, Alana knew there was something still Margot needed from her.
There was a second time. And a third. A memorable fourth stolen in between fishing out obscure receipts all over Italy, chasing after the wines and rarified ingredients that had filled Hannibal Lecter’s pantry the times she’d played sous-chef, apron optional. Fifth and sixth pressed against the door of one of the mansions many unused rooms, hands crooking panties aside to leave digging red marks behind. Seventh blurred into eight, and there the rest started to trickle out of Alana’s mind as they paired with dinner and drinks out in Baltimore and Richmond, warming chilled fingers and toes into each other’s space in Alana’s bed, taking in bracing autumn air with Applesauce tucked between them.
A strange slice of something that felt utterly unlike Alana Bloom, but she hadn’t been what she once was for quite some time now. And every day, she considered the weight of it. A test of her new cleverness, to figure it out before Margot picked through the meat of her to find whatever she was looking for. Margot turned into herself in some moments, keen and careful and miserable as a stray.
Alana didn’t know what Margot would find with probing fingers curious of pins and steel under the skin and the tender thud of Alana’s bruised heart. She wouldn’t let Margot push on it or pluck out the fastenings one by one—they were the only things holding her together, and she didn’t think she’d survive someone else who jointed and guttered their fellow man for the tastiest parts.
Currently, was what Margot had said that evening before the first time, I’m not currently planning to kill him.
It should’ve stuck out better in Alana’s mind, but it hadn’t. Mason lived, breathed, spat through surreptitious phone calls to the polizia and endless rounds of handfed tasting menus.
He gave me some advice I still need time to chew on, Margot had murmured, thinking of Hannibal, and Alana thinking only of the smeary ash the FBI had found in his office fireplace and what those patient notes could’ve said.
She wouldn’t come to regret any of it, the advice or Mason’s working lungs, but it would sit with her long after falling asleep tangled with Margot Verger became as routine as therapy sessions.
- - -
“They never wrote about you in the papers,” Margot drawled one evening, lazy from fucking, halfway to sleep with the midnight scooping low in the valley between her slowing ribs.
It was quickly becoming clear to Alana that Margot was entirely self-serving in a way that she wasn’t sure she should warm herself against. She’d made that mistake before—Will had been an open wound, Jack a landmine, and Hannibal a snake in the grass, and she’d stood next to most of them at different times and ended up bloody all ways. Sometimes it seemed like the only way not to get hurt was to make the first cut.
Too bad this time Margot had beaten her to it.
Alana dragged fingertips down her shoulder. “You looked me up.”
One of her eyes peeled open, plain and tired in the wake of stripping off heavy makeup. The blue of it was wide awake. “I did my research after Mason hired you, but I guess the FBI does know how to do a decent clean-up job. I only found one detailed article, and even then you were barely mentioned by name, but growing up in the society circles teaches you not to put stock in anything better used as packing material.”
Alana laughed a little to herself. Tattlecrime and Freddie Lounds had probably heard worse in their tenure, and she was startlingly grateful to get off so easily after being hounded in the frustrating weeks before Freddie’s fake death. It wasn’t an accident; she knew was only ever interesting to Freddie and the slavering teeth of the true crime world in the scope of fucking Hannibal—did the food taste suspicious; did he; did you ever really know what you were putting in your mouth?
“I like your approach to gossip rags.”
“Thanks,” Margot said, crisp dry as their pale glasses half-drunk on the bedside tables, “it was my mother’s.”
Mason talked plenty about his father, the Molson Verger with a stern portrait above the great room fireplace and a heavily-sectioned Wikipedia page, but nothing about his mother. Margot barely talked about either of them, or the past, and Alana always felt a little unmoored every time Margot opened those kinds of windows for her, letting in just a little light from a whole world she hadn’t ever been invited to see.
“They should’ve written an obituary. I’m not exactly the same as I was before,” Alana murmured, letting herself sink into the distraction of tracing whorls and patterns along bare, chilled skin. “I think the woman I was, the one who died that night, was a good person. Or she tried her best to be.”
Alana Bloom, patron saint of doing the right thing. Her hand drifted down to dig a thumbnail into a fixation scar.
Margot hummed, “What are you trying your best to be now?”
The longer it wore on, getting more savage in the face of the savage world she’d found herself in wasn’t a blessing. That was how getting harder was perceived, stone working steel, bone making more of itself in the wake of repeat stress, but Alana had gotten used to being warmed by all the blood pouring out of her heart for others. Another strange and unexpected thing Hannibal had stolen. Maybe if she watched him suffer on a more efficient cross this time, she could get even.
He was going to let her go. But she’d wanted to be brave, hardened, ready to hit back for once.
She blinked haziness from the edges of her vision, wet, and said flatly, “Satisfied.”
The sheets rustled and with a long breath, Margot breathed sweet against the secret skin just under her ear. The old grandfather clock in the far corner of the room ticked down the time they stayed pressed together, sharing space and air and other unasked for things.
“Is this helping?”
This. The fucking, the closeness, the time spent together that should’ve be better called dates than anything else. This, which based on the lurid watchfulness of Mason’s gaze lately, was probably close to being legible to other people as something different than how it started.
Alana shifted her head. “Yes and no.”
“They didn’t write about me either.” Margot’s lips skimmed the shell of her ear, then her teeth followed, pressing hard enough to have Alana pressing her heels into the mattress with a startled breath. She let go, mouthing over the hot marks, before saying, “I wouldn’t have wanted them to. I don’t have any Margot Vergers to bury and I’m certainly not about to give my brother any. I don’t want to be a footnote in whatever book they write about Dr. Lecter after he’s gone.”
The matter-of-factness of it knotted in Alana’s throat. A foregone conclusion that she and Mason’s nasty work would roll out to a predetermined end. She didn’t quite know what to say to that, so she eased herself onto one smarting side and caught Margot’s mouth, bruising, sure hands and legs spreading to press themselves closer and closer together until they could suffocate into one another.
Alana had thought she’d threw off the yoke of her burdens, and yet there she was in a drowsing second afterglow, sharing a searing drink she shouldn’t have been pairing with her medications with an emotionally-fraught woman sprawled naked on an old damask couch. There she was, digging in the earth to turn up the trail of Hannibal Lecter. There she was, having walked the dusty corners of Will Graham’s empty house, understanding intimately without confirmation exactly where he’d gone and why.
“I have enough evidence to send Mason to prison,” Alana said, glancing the Glencairn glass with her teeth. “But only if he catches up to Hannibal, and is caught in the act himself.”
Margot’s gold-flecked brows hiked and crossed one bare leg over the other. Her fingerprints made whirled smudges around the width of her own stemware. “And then what happens?”
So much for clean hands and shifted burdens, though as she considered pressing upwards to lavish a mouthing kiss down the sweep of Margot’s jaw, Alana realized she and Will were felled by the same thing in the end, after all.
Love will make hurtful things of the both of you.
Alana drained the last of her glass, appreciative, appraising as her throat burned. “Whatever we want.”
- - -
“I’m not currently planning to kill him” was a coffin nail that came to bear much later.
Later, after Alana had set the chess pieces in motion, after Mason and Hannibal were set on a collision course that she couldn’t pull either back from, and she was no closer to intercepting them herself, Margot tied herself into black and white and asked her about harvesting sperm.
“I keep wondering how you’re going to use me,” Alana had breathed at some sun-drowsed point between therapy visits, pressing kisses against the pads of Margot’s fingers. Years of show jumping had left them rough in places she hadn’t ever expected, a ridgeline along the inside of her ring fingers where the reins had ridden hard.
The quiet stretched just as long, just as hard.
“It’s not personal.” Margot shifted to peer down at her, mouth working. “I can’t help being what I am.”
Not years of ill-intentioned or court-mandated therapy, not the gentlest kisses or the harshest crack of the cane against a willing back. Maybe a bad thing to want, or a bad thing to love, but Alana had taken up with her all the same, and examined her own survival in the prism of Margot’s. As the days rushed up and Hannibal’s heels showed up close enough to nip, she wondered if seeing Hannibal on the rack would slake her thirst. Not the crushing agony of a slow death, but the strung out misery of one day for every one of her thorn-crown stabilizers. Would she watch? Would she turn the crank herself? Had she already? Mason would’ve hunted Hannibal down with or without any of them—Frederick Chilton’s near-miss involvement told her as much from her convalescent bed—but he wouldn’t have had a scent to start off his bloodhounds.
Alana asked her, “What advice did Hannibal give you?”
The back of Margot’s head scraped against beige silk nearly the color of her hair, shadows softening the edges of her night-lit face, sfumato and blue. For all that she was utterly unlike anyone that had graced Hannibal’s high society dinners and did what she wanted in defiance of church, old-money values, and Molson’s will, she looked like she belonged in these halls.
“Wait until I can get away with it,” she told the recessed ornamental depths of the ceiling, dispassionate. “It” was self-explanatory; Mason was a whole list of reasons unto himself. Her lips twitched. “Or have someone do it for me.”
As befitted the lady of the house, as befitted someone with a thick, gold band to knock against her collarbones. It settled an unfamiliar kind of stone in the depths of Alana’s stomach. The last time she’d laid down with someone, it hadn’t occurred to her to check for appetite or aptitude for murder. This time, she wondered if she’d chosen Margot for it instead, not about to make the same mistake twice. Neither was Will, surely to Italy by now, chasing his own hungry love because he didn’t know how to be anything else other than what he was.
And even after that long fall, the ice crystalizing over the thudding hole in her bleeding heart, Alana couldn’t help being what she was, either.
Later, she called Jack Crawford, flush with dread over hearing Hannibal’s smooth voice again and the sure death of Mason’s bought Italian cop felled by greed. Mason is coming, she held the words tight and desperate behind her teeth, you have to get to Will and Hannibal first.
Halfway across the world, his phone kept going to voicemail.