Dieter Hellstrom’s family home had always been a place of shadows and silence—bookshelves lined like soldiers, the ticking of clocks echoing down hallways, conversations trimmed into nothingness. Now, however, there was something different in the air. It wasn’t noise. It wasn’t chaos. It was you.

You, with your compact figure and pine-brown skin, moving through the house with a calm that unnerved him more than defiance ever could. He was used to confrontation, to breaking men with a single question, to crushing women’s laughter into silence. But you—placid, balanced, unshaken—you did not resist. You simply existed. And that was enough to shatter him.

Dieter despised women in general. He told himself often that they were frivolous, manipulative, creatures of weakness. Yet here you were, his wife through arrangement, seated in the parlor with ledgers open across your lap, cigarette balanced elegantly between your fingers. Your smoke curled into the air like a question mark, defiant in its quietness. You managed the family’s finances with a proficiency that even his brothers admired, though they never dared say it aloud. Dieter said nothing too—but his eyes were on you always.

He never missed a chance to touch you. Passing by your chair, he would let his hand brush the curve of your shoulder, too briefly to be called improper but long enough to claim you before his whole household. In the mornings, when you returned from your walks, he would take your wrist under the guise of guiding you inside, thumb resting a beat too long on the soft pulse there. His family thought it old-fashioned courtesy. You knew better. It was obsession disguised as civility.

At the dinner table, where the Hellstrom family gathered in stiff silence, his fingers would occasionally graze yours when passing a dish. Once, when you coughed softly from your cigarette, he leaned in—not loudly, not publicly, but enough for his words to burn in your ear:

“Don’t die before I am ready for you to.”

His voice was smooth, warm milk poured over steel, and his hand rested lightly against the back of your chair until the tension passed. He smiled politely at the others, as though nothing had been said.

He watched you when you weren’t looking. You were not soft in the way women were expected to be. You were sharp-edged, steady, unkind when you wished to be—but that made you inevitable. You were not an adornment. You were gravity.

And Dieter? He hated gravity. He hated being pulled toward anything he could not control. But with you, he leaned into it, unable to resist.

At night, in the quiet of your shared room, when the rest of the family settled into uneasy sleep, he would take your hand without asking. Fingers folding over yours, not tenderly, but possessively—as though to remind himself you were real. You smelled of chocolate-dipped strawberries and tomato vines, a sweetness stitched with earth, the comfort of sugar cookies wafting faintly when you leaned close. It was maddening. It was intoxicating.

Because Dieter Hellstrom was a man used to being feared, obeyed, despised. But to be regarded so calmly—to be met with stillness when he himself was a storm—made him hunger for more.

And so he touched you again. And again. And again. Each time not for comfort, but for confirmation. That you were his. That you would remain his. That in this cold, collapsing world, he had at least one certainty:

You.

Dieter's obsession was reaching a fever pitch. In the privacy of their shared quarters, he'd lost his usual cold facade and composure. His hands, his body, demanded your attention, hungrily seeking your touch and presence. He'd grown impatient with silence, with your stoic resilience. That night, a tempest brewed in the air, as palpable as the heavy rain outside.

As he pulled away from yet another fervent gesture, his pale blue eyes searched your flushed face for recognition, for a response.