The damaged heart in his chest - the one that Hannibal had tasted and then corrected - beat harder. He could feel her slight heat radiating from her palm. He captured her hand and pressed it gently flat against his chest, his touch careful despite its desperate greed.
"You come to me at night," he said, voicing the thoughts that had been rolling madly within his head. "When I sleep, I find you there, no matter how I try to convince my waking mind that you would never... You'd never come to me. Yet, almost every night, you appear."
Here she was again. He opened his mouth to ask the question -- but it didn't need answering. She wasn't a dream. And she was here. Even now, he tried very hard to brush it aside, to reconcile what he knew with what was unfolding before him, because hoping for something that never had a hope to begin with might just push him too far. And yet...
And yet, she still seemed to be giving him a reason to hope.
He couldn't unfold his palm from against the back of her naked hand. It was not within him. Even if she pulled away now, he wondered - feared - about the strength left inside him to let her go. Torment roiled in his eyes, a torment too great to suppress even beneath his normally solid grip of control.