They agree on one thing tonight. The splash of crimson across his skin is a thing of beauty, much like the image of his president, hovering, bloody-lipped, conveying nothing but coldness in his glacial gaze.

"Not with me," he asserts. His fingers find the wrist of that hand in his hair. They swerve and find a nerve to press into, firm and deft and practiced, until Rufus's fingers slacken. The rest Tseng will let him have, for now. There's nothing that people who love power hate more than to watch it be chipped away—he knows that to be so very true.

"Am I so unfamiliar to you that you would question me?" He has half a mind to stress the tendons in Rufus's hand until they snap. He won't, but the thought worries at his mind, compelled by all those by now rote instincts invoked by Rufus's pin. He cannot stop himself from snarling when he speaks, though. "What the hell did you think I would do?"