Chapter 19 19

Chapter 19 19
Chapter Nineteen
Carmen

Four days before the operation Hannibal found me in the library.

I was not hiding. I want to be clear about that. I had simply discovered three days ago that the library existed, tucked behind the east staircase like an afterthought, narrow and floor-to-ceiling with books that smelled like they had been read rather than displayed, and I had been spending an hour there each evening because it was quiet and nobody needed anything from me in it.

He knocked on the open door, which I appreciated.

"Can I come in."

I closed the book over my finger to hold the page. "Yes."

He came in and looked at the shelves for a moment the way people do when they need somewhere to put their eyes that isn't the other person. Then he sat in the chair across from mine and put his hands on his knees and looked at me directly, which I also appreciated. Hannibal had a lot of faults but he had never been a man who hid behind indirection.

"I'm going in with the team," he said. "Xavier confirmed it today."

"I know. Bruno told me."

"I wanted you to hear it from me."

I looked at him. "Why."

"Because I'm going to be in that building. The same building you were in. And I thought you should know that before it happened rather than during."

I turned that over. It was a considerate thing to do and I was still in the complicated position of not quite knowing what to do with considerate things from Hannibal, my system for processing them hadn't been built for it.

"Are you asking if I'm alright with it," I said.

"No. It's not mine to ask. You're not—" He stopped. "I'm not asking your permission. I'm just telling you."

"Okay," I said.

He nodded and seemed like he might stand up and leave, which would have been the clean version of this, but he didn't.

"Your field medicine," he said. "Did Paola teach you."

The sound of her name in his mouth was strange. He had known her, of course, everyone in the pack had known Paola, but she had been mine in a way she hadn't been anyone else's and hearing him say her name out loud in this library felt like someone handling something fragile without knowing it was fragile.

"Some of it," I said carefully. "The rest I taught myself."

"She was good to you."

"Yes."

He looked at his hands. "I used to see her leaving your cabin sometimes. Early morning. I knew she was bringing you food." A pause. "I never told anyone."

I didn't know what he wanted from me in response to that. I didn't know if he wanted absolution or acknowledgment or simply to say it out loud to someone who would understand what it meant. So I said nothing and let it sit between us.

"I'm not asking for anything," he said, reading me accurately. "I know that's not—I'm not here for that."

"Then what are you here for."

He looked up. "I wanted to tell you something before we go in. In case—" He didn't finish the sentence. "You asked me once why I came here. You didn't ask me exactly but it was in your face when you saw me outside that building."

"I remember."

"I told Xavier it was because forty people were in a hole in the ground. That was true." He held my gaze. "But I came because of you. Specifically. I tracked you for four days because I couldn't stop, because Axel wouldn't let me stop, but also because I made a choice that put you in danger and I needed to know you were alive." His voice was even, not performing anything. "I'm not saying that to reopen something. I'm saying it because it's true and I think you deserve the true version of things from me. You always deserved that."

The library was very quiet. Somewhere in the house someone was in the kitchen, the distant sounds of it carrying through the walls.

"Thank you," I said. It came out more simply than I expected.

He nodded once and stood.

"Hannibal." He stopped. "Mari. When you're inside. She'll be moving toward the noise." I looked at him steadily. "Don't mistake that for aggression. She's protecting people. Work with her not around her."

Something in his face shifted, a recognition of what I was doing, giving him something useful, something real, bridging the distance between us in the only way that currently made sense.

"I will," he said.

He left. I sat in the chair and opened my book back to the page I'd been holding and stared at it without reading it for a while.

The door came again twenty minutes later and I looked up expecting Bruno and found Xavier instead, leaning in the doorframe with his arms crossed in that way he had, taking up the space without crowding it.

"Lucia says you've been practicing the triage protocol," he said.

"She's thorough."

"She is." He came in and looked at the shelves the way Hannibal had, though differently, with the air of someone who had been in this room many times and was comfortable in it. "You're using the Renaud method for the psychological triage."

I looked at him. "You know it."

"I developed half of it with him seven years ago." He said it without vanity, just fact. "You're doing it correctly. Better than most people I've trained."

The compliment landed differently coming from him, less like approval and more like information, and I found I preferred it that way.

"I was thinking about the isolation cases," I said. "The ones who've gone inward. Sometimes music helps. Not performing. Just ambient. Something that signals safety without requiring a response."

He looked at me for a moment. "Your violin."

"If it would help."

He was quiet, thinking about it genuinely rather than dismissing it. "Yes," he said. "It would." He looked at the book in my lap. "What are you reading."

I showed him the cover.

He smiled, and it was the first full smile I had seen from him, and it changed his face entirely, and I looked back at my book before it could do anything else.