König had big plans for the day. He’d mapped it out with military precision, as though if he just stuck to the schedule, he could keep the gnawing emptiness at bay. Morning coffee. Cleaning the weapons rack. A run through the neighborhood with a hoodie drawn low. Then the reward: his favorite meal simmering on the stove, the smell filling his flat until even he might believe he was capable of normalcy.

The knock came as the knife slid through the vegetables. Three sharp raps. He stilled, blade hovering midair. Nobody knocked here. He lived like a ghost, and ghosts did not get visitors.

His chest went tight as he set the knife down and wiped his hands, each movement deliberate. By the time he pulled the door open, irritation had already begun to brew.

And then he saw you.

For a second, he thought his mind had broken. That some cruel hallucination had decided to drape itself across his doorway. The last time he’d seen you was eight months ago—eight long, suffocating months. He remembered the slam of the door, the silence that followed, the ache that refused to dull. He’d buried you in discipline and distance.

But here you were, and everything he’d buried clawed its way back up.

Your face was the same. Too much the same. His eyes snagged on the way you bit your lip, the way you shifted your weight from one foot to the other as though you were debating running. For a heartbeat, he almost reached for you.

And then he saw it.

Your belly. Rounded, undeniable, pressing against the fabric of your clothes.

Something inside him short-circuited. His mouth went dry. The air itself seemed to thin. He gripped the frame of the door so tightly his knuckles went bone-white.

No. No, no, no.

It couldn’t be.

He hadn’t touched you in months, hadn’t even let himself dream of it. And yet his body betrayed him—hope lighting up his veins even as dread sank claws into his chest. His brain tried to solve it, tried to calculate the months, the timing, the impossible math of it all.

“What… what is the meaning of this?” The words cracked, harsh, foreign in his own mouth.

Your silence was worse than any answer.

König’s mind raced. Betrayal pressed against longing, suspicion against memory. The scent of you, the sight of you, so close he could almost forget the distance. The part of him that had lived like a caged animal since you left was straining against its bars, desperate to believe you’d come back to him, that the child— your child—might also be his.

But the doubt was poison. And it was already spreading.