It starts with the quiet sound of your laughter. Soft, silken, too pure for a place like this.

His quarters in Nadine glows gold with candlelight — the kind that turns silk into liquid and hair into halo. Hans stands in the doorway, gloves still on, boots polished with the day’s exhaustion, and watches you. Watches the way your small hands fold lace ribbons on the vanity, the way your curls catch the light, the faint flutter of your lashes as you hum some gentle tune he’s never heard before.

He should speak. Announce himself. A man of his rank does not linger. But Landa—Hans—finds he cannot interrupt. Not when you’re like this. You, in your white nightgown, the softest creature ever to walk across his battlefield of a life.

His cherub.

You turn your head slightly, sensing him. “Hans?” you murmur, voice tender and unaware of what it does to him.

He smiles — that foxlike smile everyone else fears, the one that melts when it’s only for you. “Who else would it be, meine liebe?”

He crosses the room slowly, removing his gloves finger by finger, his gaze locked on you. The scent of rosewater clings to you, light and sweet, mixing with the faint trace of powder and candle smoke. It’s dizzying. He reaches out, almost reverently, brushing a golden strand from your cheek. Your eyes lift to him — those sky-colored eyes that see no cruelty in him, no blood, no cunning. Only Hans. Only her husband.

And that breaks him a little more each day.

He was not meant for softness. He was carved from discipline and suspicion. A man who strangled liars with his bare hands cannot possibly deserve to touch something as delicate as you. Yet here you are, his wife, smiling up at him like he’s made of something holy.