Rae blinked at her a few times. “Okay. I guess I never thought of Wulf as a popsicle and Dieter as a soft pretzel.”
Obviously, Rae hadn’t understood Flicka’s brilliant comparison that she had been crafting for years. More information was necessary.
Flicka explained, “As I said, Wulfie is cold outside and sweet, inside. In the Swiss military, Wulfie was a sniper who could control his heartbeat and breathing, tamp down his natural adrenaline response, and keep his hands steady to the micrometer as he shot a bullet to a target a mile away. As a fifteen-year-old teenager, Wulf convinced the German court system to give him custody of me, a six-year-old in crisis when her mother died, and then he convinced theLe Roseyschool administration that he was mature enough to run his own household and raise me off-campus. It was an insane idea. I’m still surprised he convinced them.”
“Most family courts here would never allow a minor to have custody of a sibling,” Rae said. “Even emancipated minors taking care of just themselves are rare.”
“He is the incarnation ofsangfroid,as cool under pressure as the blue glacier ice of his eyes.” Flicka glanced over at Rae, fully aware that Rae was finishing her bachelor’s in psychology and already taking graduate-level psych classes. She wondered idly whether she should be paying Rae for counseling or insist on being paid as a psychology research study victim.
Flicka said, “But he taught me to ride a bike and kissed my knees when I scraped them. He sat for tea parties and quizzed me on Russian vocabulary. He made us a home. I’ve never been as happy anywhere else in my life.”
Okay, that was a lie, but she did look back on her days with Wulfie with happiness.
She continued, “He was as perfect as anyone could have been in his situation, a teenager raising a child alone while finishing high school. I was awful. I can’t tell you how many nannies I escaped from, running away across a park or hiding in a friend’s house when it was time to go home.”
“And?” Rae asked.
“Of course, you know about Constantin, his twin. Wulf’s childhood was shattered when he lost Constantin. I can see it in his eyes. On the other hand, I guess it’s not surprising that he was able to run a house and raise me. He was already an adult. I can see the pain when he moves his right shoulder, the stiffness and the muscle damage.”
“Yeah.”
Flicka looked up at Rae, balancing Rae’s face over the rim of her wineglass. “I see it less, now. It’s you. It used to be that, when certain black moments came over him, he used to look away through the air, like he was staring into an abyss. Now, he looks at you, and he doesn’t look haunted anymore.”
Rae looked at her hands.
“It’s good,” Flicka told her. “I’m glad to see it. He tried to replace Constantin with me, and it didn’t work. After my mother died, I was a grieving child. He became my father, but that’s what I needed, not whatheneeded. He needed someone to be there forhim.His cousin had his own sorrow and a younger brother to try to help. When Wulf brought Dieter home when I was ten, I thought much later that Dieter might be like Constantin, that Dieter might be the brother whom he missed, but that’s not Dieter. They’re friends. Deep friends. Deep, old friends. Dieter was good enough, but he was not enough. But you,” Flicka looked up again, “you’re his soulmate. You’re the one he was looking for.”
Rae’s dark eyes were wide on her face. “You okay with that?”
“Of course,” Flicka said. “I’m a grown woman. I’m married. When one marries, one leaves one’s birth family behind. That is the natural order of things.”
And Flicka would keep repeating that.
“And Dieter?” Rae asked.
“Dieter is Wulf’s opposite,” Flicka said, watching the sunlight lance through the wine again. “He’s salty outside but runs hot on the inside.”
Oh,the heat that used to blaze from his skin, Flicka remembered. Damp London had chilled her, and she had huddled close to him in bed. His body was a nuclear furnace. His heart must pump molten fire.
“That’s interesting,” Rae said.
“His sarcastic bite on everything makes me laugh, and he sees the dark humor in every joke. He’s sharp.”
Rae laughed. “His sense of humor is razor-sharp.”
Flicka tilted her head, thinking. “In the Swiss military, Dieter was a commando. He was the guy who went over the bunker, ran across the field of fire and leaped, screaming, into the enemy’s machine gun nest to slaughter them all with a knife, emerging streaked with bloody dirt and cleaning his nails.”
Rae’s dark eyes were wide. “Yeah, I can kind of see that.”
Flicka nodded. “It was somewhere in Africa. He and Wulfie had friends from their military days over at our place. I listened at doors when I was supposed to be asleep.” She could have recited their words, but she paraphrased. “They said that the Swiss military wasn’t officially supposed to be in Africa at all, but his ARD-10 unit became pinned down during a civil war. They were there to protect the Swiss embassy, ostensibly. Actually, they were ferreting out drug runners who had kidnapped several Swiss bankers who had been doing business with them. Dieter had great moral ambivalence about ‘just letting those assholes rot in their own corruption.’ In the end, he didn’t get to decide. While rescuing the hostages, the drug runners outmanned and outgunned them. Dieter had to do something to save his fellow operators’ lives, or they would have all died that day.”
“What else?” Rae asked.
This was getting too personal. Flicka didn’t like feeling analyzed. Wulf had insisted that she speak to a counselor after their mother had died when she was six. Flicka had screamed at and kicked the woman until Wulf had let her quit.
It was that Hannoverian privacy thing, probably.
Yet Rae should know who she was married to and who was guarding her, even if Dieter was no longer Wulfram’s head of security and had his own, more diversified security agency.
