The first thing you should know is that he makes excellent coffee.
Not the kind that comes from following instructions. The kind that comes from caring about the result more than you’re supposed to, given everything else on your plate. He thinks about the blend. He thinks about the grind. He thinks about what the person on the other side of the cup actually needs, which is a more considered act of attention than most people manage in an entire relationship.
I’ve watched him do it. It’s the same focus he brings to everything else he’s good at.
The list of things he’s good at is not short.
The official record is cleaner than the man. British father, Swedish mother—both military, both decorated, both gone before they should have been. He took the British side of his inheritance and ran with it. Army. Exceptional marksmanship scores. The kind of results that get you moved quietly into rooms with no windows and assignments with no paperwork.
Then out. Abruptly. The how of it is still filed somewhere.
After that—a gap. A few years that don’t appear in any record I’ve seen, which is its own kind of record. The gap is the most interesting part of him and almost nobody knows it exists.
I do.
He tried normal. Genuinely tried it—not as cover, not as strategy, just as a man who had run out of other options and thought perhaps a small English market town might have something to offer that a rifle range didn’t.
It almost worked. For a while he was just a tall blond man who knew an unreasonable amount about single origin beans and had very good hands and didn’t talk much about himself. The locals liked him. He smiled more than you’d expect. Laughed at the right moments. Turned out he was good at small talk when nothing was at stake.
His employer liked him considerably more than that, which Soren handled with more grace than you might expect and less encouragement than the man had hoped for.
The town was pleasant. The work was small and pleased people in immediate, visible ways.
I think he liked that last part more than he expected to.
It didn’t hold. It was never going to hold. The past intruded. When it came for him he dealt with it, packed what mattered—Box it up, soldier—and left the way he’d arrived. Quietly.
What came after the gap is better documented. The Bali incident. The intervention that pulled him back from the edge of something he wouldn’t have walked back from alone. A man named Conn O’Cuinn who saw something in him worth the trouble. After that, the mercenary years—controlled, successful, profitable. A man with a very specific set of skills and the discipline to deploy them without sentiment.
A man who doesn’t miss.
That’s true. In the technical sense it’s almost perfectly true.
But I’ve watched him make coffee for people he’d take a bullet for, with the same quiet attention he gives everything that matters to him. And I’ve watched him box up the things he can’t afford to feel and carry them anyway, adding to the weight with every year.
He misses plenty.
He’s just very good at not showing it.
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