Major Dieter Hellstrom had always believed himself immune to distraction. He had trained his mind into a razor: disciplined, analytical, cold. The world was a grand design of moving parts, a chessboard in perpetual motion, and he—by right of intellect—its master of strategy. That belief held firm through years of study, through bloodied streets and smoky interrogation rooms. It began to fracture only when he found himself married to you.

“Rea.” He said your name with the deliberate precision of a verdict. Every syllable lingered, not carelessly dropped but placed. He could never simply think your name; it had to be spoken, given air, made real, because only then could the room feel inhabited. Without it, silence seemed suddenly hollow. With it, the silence bent to his will.

You were not a distraction in the careless sense. No, you unsettled him precisely because you did not attempt to. Short, slightly rounded in frame, your presence did not scream for attention—but it demanded it all the same. Your eyes—those dazzling, slanted pools of French grey—unraveled him more efficiently than any adversary ever had. They glittered with something resistant, something that did not yield. Even when hostile, even when unsympathetic, your gaze enthralled him, sharp as a knife cloaked in velvet.

You smelled of welding fumes, red grapes, and apricot danish—an unlikely trinity of scents that branded themselves onto his consciousness. He sought them in the folds of his uniform, in the stale air of his study, in the faintest traces on his gloves. It was an obsession bordering on mania, this compulsion to catalogue, to hold fast to proof that you existed under his roof, under his name.

He admired the contradictions in you. Likeable, yet hostile. Collaborative, yet unsympathetic. Traditional, yet sharp with self-assurance. It was a puzzle worthy of his mind, and Dieter lived for puzzles. He lingered at doorways to watch you reading, collecting small objects as if they were relics of a private religion only you understood. The sight of your fingers smudged with graphite or ink, of your shoulders bending over some small creation, made him still in ways the Reich never could. You excelled at art—quiet, unassuming, but to him, each piece was a cipher. He wanted to interpret them, to understand what hidden superstition or stubborn belief drove the stroke of each line.

He spoke your name even when you were not in the room. Rea. Over papers. In empty corridors. Into the rim of his glass. It steadied him, though it was not steadiness he sought. It was possession. To tether you by sound, to make sure the world never mistook you for anything but his.

Hellstrom’s devotion was not gentle. It was the devotion of a man who knew control, who adored through surveillance, who could transform his love into scrutiny without missing a beat. His pale blue eyes followed you with the same intensity with which they dissected prisoners. The difference was subtle but essential: when he looked at you, there was warmth underneath the ice, though it burned like a flame locked in glass.

You—short, fair-skinned, superstitious, endlessly certain of yourself—were the one element he could not reduce to order. You complicated the geometry of his mind. And he adored you for it.

“Rea,” he murmured again, seated in his immaculate uniform, fingers laced together as though in prayer. In truth, it was less prayer than confession. For all his precision, his cold intellect, his trained cruelty—Major Dieter Hellstrom was no longer a man immune. He was a man conquered.

And the conqueror did not hate the chains. He kissed them.

Trepidation, exuberance and a deep sated desperation with relief filled Dieter as the Eastern Front was finally secured. Families of military men allowed to move into the secured area. Dieter watched eagerly as jeeps rolled into the secured city of Helsinki, Finland. His eyes searched for yours amidst the jeeps filled with women and children, eager to see you.