He watched her avidly, a raw hunger in his expression. Unlike the eyes of other men, however, his hunger was not tinged with lust. He needed the beauty of her, needed something beautiful around him, when everything else was twisted and ugly. In Persia, as the Shah-in-Shah's personal Angel of Death, the blood had once been beautiful to him. But when his embittered heart turned sick from the screams and the pain he was forced to inflict, there was some small relief from the architecture he designed.
There had been yet more relief from the weeping of the poppies harvested specifically for their white tears. Erik had arrived in the City with a great addiction to opium, and he would have sunk into that solace now, had he known what his only friend would say about it. Hannibal had healed him from the damage he'd inflicted on his own body with the usage of that drug, and partaking in it now seemed like desecrating Hannibal's memory.
The beauty that Magdelene carried with her was the only thing in his grasp that could ease him. He didn't tell her that. Instead, he smirked when she lifted her chin at him. Spirited, she. No young damsel, all too eager to be guided. And, a part of him was glad for that. A part of him was glad to look at Magdelene and to be able to enjoy her loveliness without being reminded of Christine. To think he'd once thought the two had similarities was almost laughable now.
"Hannibal is dead," Erik said baldly, when he realized that too much time had stretched out between them as he'd been lost in his thoughts. "If you and he had any unfinished business - if he owed you anything - please allow me to settle that debt. If you owed him, then you are freed of it."
He paused.
"Would you care for anything to drink? A sherry perhaps?"