You hadn’t meant to find it. The door had always been locked. It was heavy, reinforced, and out of place in a quiet home like yours. König had told you once that it was “just storage,” his accent soft and dismissive, his eyes flicking away too quickly before he distracted you with something you could no longer recall.

You’d believed him because you wanted to.

But tonight, curiosity won over trust. He wasn’t home. His missions always took him away for days, and the silence of the house felt heavier each time. You searched for something, anything, to remind you of the man who’d said he was trying to leave that life behind. To become yours only.

The key was hidden in a drawer behind a false bottom. Next to a loaded gun, a passport and some cash bundled with rubber bands.

The basement smelled of oil, dust and something metallic. The air was cold, humming faintly from a generator tucked against the wall. Maps were pinned up. Real maps, detailed, each marked with coded coordinates. A battered uniform hung on a hook beside a rusted helmet, the insignia blacked out. There were boxes, too, rows of them, neatly labeled with dates you recognized from old news broadcasts.

Your hands trembled when you opened one. Inside were keepsakes: patches, dog tags, jars with something you did not even want to address. You didn’t understand if they were reminders of people he’d fought beside or fought against. But every piece spoke of violence and of a man who had never left the battlefield.

The wooden stairs behind you creaked.

When you turned, König was already there. His silhouette filled the stairwell, massive, silent. He didn’t wear his hood at home, and without it his face was all shadow and scar and exhaustion. His eyes, pale and unreadable, landed on the open box in your hands. On the trinkets he had taken from the ones who fell at his hands.

“...You weren’t supposed to see this.” His voice was low, not angry, not yet. Just awfully tired. He took one step down, then another. “I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

You tried to speak, but the words caught somewhere between your throat and your heart. König reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped. His hands flexed at his sides before he crossed the distance in two steps. He always had been looming over you. But what once felt like protection seemed to hold something far more dangerous now. You braced for a hit, maybe a quick end to the life you held so dearly.

Instead, was König dropping to his knees in front of you. His weight hit the ground hard, the sound echoing off the floorboards.

“I thought if I could leave it all down here,” he said, voice cracking, “it would stay dead. That I could be someone else.. For you.”

His hands trembled when they reached for you, hesitating midair, afraid to touch. Worried you would flinch back after catching his secret.

The look in König's eyes wasn’t monstrous but shattered. He could finally give away the truth. Now, that you found it. He pressed his forehead to your stomach, his breath uneven as his arms circled your middle, holding you tight.

“Please… don’t go. I can't lose you too.”