Bruno sat alone before the map as midnight bled into something paler.

The war room around him had been cleared; the officers who'd kept the projectors and relays warm had long since gone to their bunks or their vices.

He liked the silence. It let him hear the things that were never printed in intelligence summaries, the small adjustments of policy, the quiet arithmetic of lives traded for objectives.

Across the table, the world was a smear of names and lines and shaded spheres of influence.

Europe glittered with familiar constellations: ports, railheads, the neat black lines of supply corridors Bruno had designed himself.

But his eyes rode south, past the predictable geography of empires, until they settled on the new calculus: the Americas.

South America was no longer a place for polite diplomacy. It had become, under his pen, a crucible.

Brazil, a continent-sized stage. Argentina,the old corpse of empires, easy to provoke.

Mexico and Ecuador, were fault lines in the making.

Each marker on the map was not a prize to be possessed in the old sense, but a node on a network; each insurgent camp a stray current he could bend.

The reports lay in tidy stacks: communications, satellite overlays, photographs from reconnaissance planes, pay ledgers for men whose faces he now recognized.

The men were not his sons, not his kin. They were instruments, precise, replaceable, efficient.

The Werwolf Group, a shadowed label on the page, an organization that didn't officially exist. But had a lasting global effect over the course of the twenty years since their initial founding.

In this life, Bruno had turned mercenary work into an art form. Inspired by the infamous Wagner Group from his past life. And other notorious mentions like Eexecutive Outcomes.

Bruno had gathered the greatest killers from the Great War, those who had no ability to reintegrate back into civilized society. And gave them a place to truly belong.

An order of mercenaries, a band of brothers, a pack of wolves.

These men taught others how to make war, how to live and breathe in places where formal armies struggled to maintain a heartbeat.

And as Bruno reflected on all of this, he read the line written on the dossier once again:

Training cadres embedded; counter-insurgency advisory withdrawn; local cells now capable of independent irregular operations.

No manuals were attached. No moral footnotes added.

For each land the Wolves entered, a new pack was born in their wake.

It was deliberate, orchestrated… systemic even.

A philosophy in direct contrast to that which he had learned during his years as a Kampfschwimmer in his past life.

In Afghanistan, he had watched a different lesson unfold and curdle. As part of a small attache to the ISAF, he'd helped instruct the Afghan National Army.

Not in how to fight, but in how to behave.

For over a decade they drilled rules of engagement instead of ambush tactics, memorized codes of conduct instead of fieldcraft.

The mission had been dressed as civilization in an uncivilized place, and he had despised every minute of it.

The Ameicans had called their vain pursuit "Nation Building" and "Wining Hearts and Minds." Bruno had a better term for the wasted effort…. And that was teaching men to die politely.

He had scorned that work then, and still did. It had been time wasted and blood spilled on the altar of illusions.

The Americans had attempted to graft civics onto combat, to teach a population whose worldview was based on ancient tribal loyalties how to conduct themselves as soldiers defending a liberal democracy rather than how to make an enemy stop moving.

It was wasteful, inefficient, and utter madness.

The Werwolf approach was far simpler, and twice as effective.

They did not waste time teaching men how to march in formation or salute like proper grunts.

No… the Werwolf Group drilled into their proxies, often at the butt of a rifle, how to move unseen, how to suppress an enemy's advance, and how to repair a mangled limb once the bullets stopped flying.

Shoot, maneuver, medical.

Shoot, maneuver, medical.

Shoot, maneuver, medical.

It was their litany, their doctrine, their creed.

Small-unit tactics honed to a brutal efficiency, nothing else mattered.

It didn't matter to him what banner their proxies flew, what god they worshipped, or what ideology they claimed to die for.

Only the amount of chaos and destruction they could unleash upon the Reich's enemies.

This was the curse he had set upon the Americas. And now he witnessed the fruits of its labors unfold.

There were no illusions in his calculations.

If the victor refused to accept the new order he offered, then Bruno would fund their opposition, and the same cycle would continue as it had before.

He had no interest in the moral fantasy that victory owned permanence.

All authority in this world was derived from force and from the monopoly over it.

And unfortunately for Bruno's enemies, whoever they may be at any given time, that monopoly had his name stamped on its packaging.

Night deepened, and Bruno could tell by the angle of the moonlight that it was getting dreadfully late.

A flight to Tyrol would take an hour at most from Berlin's airfield. And he knew that foolish woman he had married all those years ago would be up sitting on their sofa waiting for his return, no matter how late into the night he made her wait.

A heavy sigh escaped his lips as Bruno made one last adjustment to the files on his table, signing his name onto the documents approving further aid to the Werwolf efforts in Latin America.

The New World was already set ablaze with the flames of revolution. But it was not enough.

It was not until they waved the white flag and withdrew their support in totality from the Allied powers that Bruno would cease supplying and training proxies within their borders.

He placed the pen down, and the ink still glistened wetly under the lamp.

For a long moment, Bruno watched it dry, as if mesmerized by the permanence of his own decision.

Then he turned off the light, shut the door behind him, and made for the airfield.

The corridors of the Reich Chancellery fell silent again.

Somewhere deep in the night, far beyond Berlin, a convoy of mercenaries received orders they would never know the author of.

The fire he had lit would spread

And Bruno knew that fire had potential to burn the hand that lit the match, if one did not have the will to contain it.

The flight to Tyrol took just under an hour. Exactly as Bruno had predicted.

From the window, Bruno watched the Alps pass beneath him, dark ridges lined with snow and shadow, ancient and unmoved by the age of fire and steel.

The lights of the valley came into view like a scatter of embers on velvet.

When the plane touched down, he felt the stillness settle over him, a different kind of silence than Berlin's, not the silence of command, but of belonging.

The car ride from the airfield to the estate was short. The palace was asleep, save for a few sentries and the faint orange glow of the hearth that burned night and day in the great hall.

He let himself in quietly. His boots made no sound on the marble floors he had once crossed in triumph, in fury, in grief. Now, only weariness.

There she was, curled on the sofa, a blanket half-fallen from her shoulder, her hair loose and silvered in the firelight.

A book lay open on her lap, unread for hours. The hearth had begun to fade, throwing more shadow than light.

Bruno lingered in the doorway, his hand resting on the frame. For all his mastery over nations and armies, this sight undid him in ways no enemy ever could.

"I knew you would be here," he said softly, his voice carrying the faintest trace of amusement. "Stubborn as ever… waiting for me to come home."

Heidi stirred, blinking her eyes open just enough to find him through the haze of half-sleep.

A tired smile touched her lips.

"Because you said you would be home tonight…"

Her voice trailed into a whisper before she could finish the thought.

Bruno's sternness melted away. He shook his head, smiling, the kind of smile no one but her had ever truly seen, or ever would.

He bent and lifted her into his arms as though she were weightless. She murmured something faint and content against his chest but soon drifted again.

Through the corridors he carried her, past portraits, marble busts, until he reached their chamber.

The fire there was still burning low, as if it, too, had waited.

He laid her gently on the bed, brushed a stray strand of hair from her forehead, and kissed the spot where his hand lingered.

For a long moment he stood beside her, the great marshal of the Reich, silent, still, and entirely human.

Then he undressed, slipped beneath the covers beside her, and drew her close.

The night beyond the mountains was cold, but in that room, the fire kept its promise.

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