Chapter 1: Your Hands Are Cold
A complete list of things König has said to you in six months:
"Hello."
"Thank you."
"It is fine." (About a plate carrier that was, in fact, two sizes too small and had left a bruise across his ribs the shape of a coat hanger.)
"No, it is my fault." (About the same carrier, after you found out and swore at the supply officer in three languages.)
"Your hands are cold." (Once. In March. While you were tightening a cummerbund around a torso roughly the size of a vending machine. He'd said it to the wall above your head, very quietly, like he'd been holding it in for an hour and it had escaped.)
And, last Thursday, when you'd been on your back under the armory's busted dehumidifier with a wrench in your teeth and grease to your elbows, a voice from somewhere very high up: "You are... good. At fixing things."
You'd sat up so fast you hit your head on the pipe. By the time you'd stopped seeing stars he was gone, and on your bench, next to your coffee, someone had left a chocolate bar. Milka. Alpine milk. The purple wrapper with the cow on it.
You ate it in four bites, standing up, and told absolutely no one.
KorTac's Carinthian compound sits in a valley so deep the sun clocks out at three in the afternoon in winter. Six barracks, one mess hall, a range cut into the mountainside, and at the end of the gravel road, past the motor pool, a low concrete building with steel shutters that is yours. Officially it's Armory and Equipment. Unofficially, the operators call it the Shop, and they call you "Quartermaster," or "QM," or, in the case of one cheerful Belgian, "Mum," which you've told him you will not respond to and which you respond to every single time.
You fit plates. You repair optics. You fight procurement for gloves that don't fall apart, and you keep a spreadsheet of every operator's measurements that you guard like the nuclear codes. You've been doing this for nine years, first in uniform, then for contractors, now here. You can tell what a man's been doing on deployment from the wear on his sling. You can tell when he's lying about an injury from how he lifts his rifle. You are, if you say so yourself, extremely good at reading people through their gear.
König's gear says: big. Careful. Hiding.
The hood is the first thing anyone notices, after the height. A sniper veil, sand-colored mesh draped over a balaclava, with a cloth mask beneath that, so that what's left of him is a pair of eyes in shadow, pale blue when the light catches them, looking anywhere but at you. He wears it in the mess hall. He wears it on the range. You're fairly certain he wears it in the shower. He is six feet ten inches tall, and he moves through the compound like a man trying very hard to take up the space of a much smaller man, ducking through doorways that clear him by a foot, folding himself into the corner of every room.
He's also, according to every after-action report you've ever read with your feet up on the bench, the most terrifying human being KorTac has on its books. The other operators talk about him the way you'd talk about weather. König cleared the building. König held the ridge for nine hours. Don't stand behind König when he's angry, you'll lose a limb.
And for six months, every single time he's come into your shop, he's stood in the doorway for a full ten seconds before he works up the nerve to say "hello."
The new carriers arrive on a Tuesday. Custom. You fought for those for three months, wrote a memo so vicious that procurement started calling you die Hexe behind your back, which you've decided to take as a compliment. The box with his name on it is the size of a coffin.
You text him. Your fitting is ready. 1600. Don't be late.
He arrives at 1552. You know because you were watching the door, which is not something you'll be examining today.
"Hello," he says.
"Hi. Come in. Mind your head."
He minds his head. He always does. It's a low door and he has to fold nearly in half, and when he straightens up inside the shop, the fluorescent lights hum somewhere around his shoulder. He's in a gray compression shirt and fatigues, no jacket, sleeves pushed up over forearms you've tried hard not to look at in the past and are now failing to not look at. The hood is, of course, on.
"So," you say, pulling the new carrier out of the box with a flourish. "Ta-da. Built for an actual giant. No more coat hanger."
He looks at the carrier. Then at you, briefly, a flick of pale blue through the mesh, and then quickly at the wall. "You did this."
"Procurement did this. I just made them cry."
A sound comes out from under the mask, short and low. It takes you a moment to realize it's a laugh. You've never heard him laugh. It does something to the backs of your knees, which is deeply inconvenient for a woman who needs to stand up for the next twenty minutes.
"Arms up," you say.
He lifts his arms. You lift the carrier over his head, which involves going up on your toes and him bending forward obligingly, and for a second your face is very close to the mesh, close enough to smell him, gun oil and cold air and something underneath like cedar, and then the carrier drops into place and you step back fast.
"Okay. Let's do the shoulders first."
Here's the thing about fitting a plate carrier. It's intimate in a way nobody warns you about when you take the job. You have to touch people. Hands flat on a sternum to check plate height. Fingers under a strap to check tension. Arms around a waist to fasten a cummerbund. You've done it a thousand times, on a thousand operators, and it's no more charged than a tailor measuring an inseam.
With him, it's been different from the start. Not because of you. Because of how he goes still.
You reach up to adjust the left shoulder strap, and he stops breathing. You can feel it. His chest under your hands just stops moving, like you've pressed pause.
"Breathe," you say. "I need you breathing or the fit's wrong."
He breathes. It shakes a little on the way out.
You work in silence for a while. Shoulder straps. Front plate, two fingers above the sternum notch, which on him means reaching. You set your palm flat on the center of the plate to check it's riding right, and through the armor you swear you can feel his heart going like a rabbit's. You move around behind him, check the back plate, pull the cummerbund around and start feeding the elastic through.
"Too tight?"
"No."
"You'd tell me if it was too tight."
A pause. "No," he admits.
"I know. That's why I asked." You tug the strap. "This time, if it hurts, you say it hurts. I'm not making you another bruise just because you're too polite to complain."
"It did not hurt very much."
"König. It looked like you'd been hit by a coat rack."
That laugh again, softer, and his shoulders drop half an inch under the straps, and you realize, with a slow warm swoop in your stomach, that he's relaxing. With you. Your hands are on him and he's relaxing.
You come back around the front for the last check, the one where you slide your hand between plate and chest to make sure there's room for a deep breath. Your fingers go under the edge of the armor, flat against the compression shirt. He's warm. Much warmer than you expected, the heat coming off him like a radiator. You feel his ribs expand under your palm.
"Deep breath," you say, and your voice has gone low without permission.
He takes the breath. His chest rises into your hand. When he lets it out, you look up, and for once he isn't looking at the wall.
He's looking down at you. Through the mesh, through the shadow, pale eyes fixed on your face, and there's something in them so open and so starved that you forget what you were going to say.
Six months. Six months of chocolate bars on your bench. Of him always being the one to carry the ammo crates in from the truck, even when it wasn't his job. Of finding the broken stool in the corner fixed one morning, legs glued and clamped, no note. Of the time you'd sliced your palm on a sharp plate edge and he'd appeared at your elbow with a first-aid kit before you'd finished swearing, and bandaged it with hands so careful and so large that you'd had to look at the ceiling. Of him saying "hello" from the doorway and never once saying anything else.
You've known. Of course you've known. You read people through their gear for a living, and his gear has been saying it in capital letters since spring.
You've just been waiting for him to say it out loud.
"All done," you say. You don't take your hand out from under the plate. "Fits perfect."
"Thank you." Barely a whisper.
"You can go." You still don't move your hand. "If you want."
He doesn't move either. For a long moment there's no sound but the shop's ventilation and the buzz of the lights. Then his hand comes up. Slowly, like he's approaching a skittish animal, or like he's the skittish animal, and it hovers in the air beside your face. His hands are enormous. His hands could crush a walnut. You watch it shake, very slightly, an inch from your cheek.
"May I," he says. His voice is wrecked. "Only... your face. May I touch your face."
"Yes," you say. "God, yes. Please."
His knuckles brush your cheekbone. Barely. Like he's afraid you'll break. Then, when you lean into it, when you turn your face into his hand and let your eyes close, his whole palm settles against your jaw, warm and rough, his thumb resting at the corner of your mouth, and a sound comes out of him that you will hear in your head every night for the rest of your life.
"I have wanted this," he says, "for six months. Every day, I come here and I want to... and I cannot. I think, she is busy. She is too clever for me. I am too big, I will frighten her. I think, I will say something wrong." His thumb moves, just slightly, over your bottom lip. "I am sorry. I do not know how to do this slowly."
You open your eyes. You slide your hand out from under his plate, up over his chest, up to the edge of the mesh where it drapes across his throat, and you hold it there.
"Who asked you to go slowly?"
His breath catches. His other hand finds your waist, and the span of it covers most of your back, and he pulls you in, gently, like there's all the time in the world. You're up against the plates you just fitted, his heartbeat banging under your hand.
"You should know something," he says, very low, his head bowed so the mesh brushes your forehead. "I am very careful, always. In every room. With everything. Because I am this size and I must be." His fingers spread across the small of your back. "But if I start touching you, Liebling, I do not think I will be able to stop."
Out in the yard, somebody slams a truck door. Neither of you moves.
"Good," you say. "Lock the door."