He emerged from Stalingrad not as a man but as a husk, skeletal, hollow-eyed, a ghost dragged back from the underworld. Frost clung to his lashes, his lips cracked with blood. His boots were torn, soles flapping like broken wings, and every step sent a lance of fire through his frozen feet.
The city lay behind him. A ruin devoured by smoke and silence. The Soviets had claimed their victory, the banners already raised. Stalingrad was no longer a battlefield. It was a tomb, and Christian one of its escaped shadows.
The snow stretched endless before him, a white wilderness beneath a sky bruised with storm. He staggered forward because standing still would mean death. Each breath carved his chest raw, vapor rising like smoke from a dying fire.
The corpses were everywhere. Men who had once been soldiers now lay twisted in the drifts, mouths open in frozen screams. Some still clutched rifles, their hands locked by ice. Others curled like children, their last warmth spent in futile prayer.
Christian passed them all without a word.
At times he thought he heard voices, faint and hollow, carried by the wind. Whispers of orders long irrelevant. The bark of a sergeant. The crack of gunfire. Kristina's laugh, soft and fleeting. He would turn his head, but there was nothing. Only snow.
Only silence.
The dead walked with him, and he did not shake them off.
The thought gnawed at him as he staggered on: all I have done; every mission, every killing, every betrayal has led to this void.
He had slit throats in Warsaw. Pulled triggers in Paris. Poisoned whispers in Moscow. He had walked as a shadow for the Reich, staining his soul with obedience.
And for what?
For a graveyard in the Volga's snow.
For a Führer he no longer believed in, who sat warm and fed while men like him rotted in the cold.
For a cause that promised glory but delivered only famine and bones.
Christian's chest ached with more than hunger. It was the ache of realization that nothing he had done had meaning. That he was a blade wielded by hands that cared nothing for him, or for anyone.
He was not a wolf. He was a dog. And the leash had strangled him nearly to death.
At dusk, with the snow still falling, he collapsed beside a drift, curling his body for warmth. His hand found its way beneath his shirt, fingers closing around the ring.
Kristina's ring.
The metal was cold, but against his palm it was a spark, a reminder that once there had been light. Once there had been love, laughter, something beyond killing and orders.
He pressed it to his lips, eyes shut, the wind howling like wolves across the steppe.
"Never again," he whispered, voice hoarse, cracking in the wind. "Never for them again."
The words were not a vow of treason. Not yet. They were not born of politics or ideology.
They were born of survival. Of love. A promise that if he had to serve again, it would not be for the Reich, nor for Stalin, nor for any flag.
It would be for Kristina.
For himself.
Night fell. He dragged himself onward beneath the moon, a lone figure moving through the frozen waste. His shadow stretched across the snow like a black scar.
He did not know where he was going. He did not care.
He was alive, scarred by futility, driven by the whisper of a woman's name and the promise he had made to her ring.
Behind him lay Stalingrad the graveyard of armies. Ahead of him stretched only the unknown.
But for the first time, Christian walked not as their pawn. He walked as his own and with each step, the seeds of treason burrowed deeper, waiting for the day they would take root.