The house was quiet in the way only a disciplined man could engineer: curtains drawn to keep the sun from staining the parquet, clocks muffled under felt to deaden the tick. Major Dieter Hellstrom sat at the edge of the sofa in his shirtsleeves, posture still ramrod straight, boots polished to a mirror. Even here, even at home, stillness was a kind of uniform.

His pale blue eyes—unblinking, glacial—watched you. Always you. You stood by the kitchen counter, shoulders hunched slightly as you kneaded dough for bread, a smear of flour pale against your olive skin. Your curls trembled with each movement. The smell—lemon balm and fresh bread—had already reached him, threading through his mind like a narcotic. He loathed most women; they were either loud, weak, or manipulative in ways he found contemptible. But not you. Never you.

You turned, small grey eyes luminous yet muted, a faint tremor at the corner of your large lips. You’d been crying again; he could tell by the swollen rims, though you tried to hide it. Dieter noted everything—every nervous swallow, every flutter of your fingers—but his expression stayed composed. Even seated, he emanated contained energy, like a predator crouched before the leap.

He thought about how absurd it was: a man who had interrogated resistance leaders, broken men twice his size with silence alone, sitting here watching you knead dough. He thought about the way your partial deafness made you tilt your head just so, exposing the vulnerable line of your short neck when you tried to catch his words. He had once despised such weakness. Yet now he found himself timing his sentences to your hearing, softening his voice not out of courtesy, but out of something that felt dangerously like care.

You glanced back, almost shyly, and your pet raven hopped along the counter, feathers dark as spilled ink. The bird tilted its head at him the way you did—assessing, mistrustful. He allowed himself the smallest flicker of a smile.

He wanted to say something—anything—to break the silence. But silence was his native tongue. So instead he watched as you dusted your small feet on the mat, the skirt of your dress brushing your knees. A sword leaned against the wall where you’d left it after practice. That, too, fascinated him: you were soft, yes, but you could run, you could fight. A contradiction.

Dieter folded his hands deliberately, fingertips pressing just hard enough to keep from reaching for you. You hate people who block doors, he thought. You hate sunlight, you hate litter. But you came to me without protest. He wondered if you had chosen adaptation as a survival tactic, or if some part of you had chosen him.

Your shoulders slumped, and for a moment he saw the depression etched into you like a watermark—visible only in certain light. It struck him harder than he expected. He should not care. He should not. Yet when a crumb of dough clung to your cheek, his fingers twitched to brush it away.

Instead, he rose. Smoothly, without a sound. His shadow fell across you as he moved to stand behind you. Not touching. Never touching unless necessary. His voice, when it came, was low and even, like warm milk poured into a glass too thin to hold it.

“You run well,” he said softly, a statement, not praise. “And you handle a blade better than most of my men.” A pause. “Why do you cry so much, meine Frau?”

You froze, hands still on the dough. The raven clicked its beak. You didn’t answer at first, and he didn’t press. He simply stood there, glacial eyes fixed on the back of your neck, drinking in the scent of lemon balm and bread, imagining for one dangerous instant that the world outside did not exist.

In that silence, Dieter Hellstrom realized the truth he would never speak aloud: control was an experiment, but you were not part of it. You were the exception that turned his theory into chaos.

He stayed very still, hands folded behind his back like a man restraining himself from reaching across a chasm. Watching. Always watching.