Chapter 360: Chapter 359 – The Food for Him to Feast On

The smell hit first.

Before the sound, before the visible evidence—the smell reached the receiving room and pulled people toward the kitchen the way current pulls things downstream.

Garlic and butter going dark in a pan. Something savory and deep underneath, meat and herbs, the kind of layered smell that meant someone who actually understood what they were doing was working in there.

Then something sweeter beneath it—roasting vegetables, caramelizing edges, the slight edge of char that separated ’cooked’ from ’good’.

Vivian found herself on her feet without having decided to stand.

She wasn’t alone.

Gwen had straightened. Even Kaida’s nose had twitched. Bella had materialized at the kitchen doorway like she’d teleported.

They filed in by degrees.

Viktor stood at the stove, a pan handle in one hand, his back to them. He’d rolled his sleeves to the elbows, the motion businesslike. He didn’t look up when people drifted in.

“Sit,” he said, in the direction of the kitchen table. “Don’t crowd the stove.”

What he produced over the next forty minutes was unreasonable.

A main dish of slow-braised meat falling apart at the touch of a fork, swimming in a reduction that had no business existing in this kitchen given what Vivian had seen in the stores.

Roasted root vegetables with herbs she didn’t recognize but that tasted like they’d been grown for the exact purpose of complementing this specific dish.

Fresh bread—’fresh, hot bread’—that he’d apparently had rising since before he left.

A light salad dressed in something acidic and bright that cut through the richness and woke the palate back up.

He plated it without ceremony and set it on the table and sat down.

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then Bella picked up her fork with both ears perked straight up and ate, and the dam broke.

The silence that followed was the particular silence of people eating food that demands full attention. Mira ate with her eyes closed for the first three bites.

Helena made a sound that was essentially private.

Kaida cleaned her plate with focused efficiency and then looked at the pan still on the stove in a way that communicated she was considering her options.

Gwen ate with the controlled restraint of someone who didn’t want to admit how hungry she was and how extraordinary the food was, her pointed ears slightly red.

Vivian ate and felt something in her spine unknot that had been tensed for weeks.

Viktor watched all of this with the expression of a man entirely unbothered, eating at moderate pace, occasionally offering more bread.

“How,” Vivian finally said, when her plate was mostly empty and she’d run out of reasons not to ask. “How does a man of your apparent… ’station’—” she gestured vaguely at the manor, at him, at the priestess who was sitting beside Mira and looking serene about it “—how do you ’cook’ like this?”

Viktor looked at her. The corner of his mouth twitched.

“Practice,” he said.

Mira made a sound that was technically a cough.

“He has abilities,” Kaida said, across the table. Blunt. Factual.

“’Kaida’—”

“She’d find out anyway.”

Gwen set down her fork. “What kind of abilities?”

“The kind that make everything he does unreasonably good,” Elara said mildly, her pink eyes flicking to Viktor. “Don’t read too much into it. It’s annoying to be around constantly.”

She said it with the tone of someone who was extremely used to it and had decided to be irritated as a coping mechanism.

Olivia, beside Mira, had been quiet—eating with the focused attention of someone who needed the calories—but Vivian watched the priestess throughout the meal. Watched the way she occasionally caught the subtle looks from the other women—Mira’s knowing gaze, Helena’s gentle smile—and the way Olivia’s color would rise and she would very deliberately find somewhere else to look.

Flustered.

The kind of flustered that has a specific cause and that cause is sitting at the head of the table eating braised meat like he hasn’t turned multiple women inside out in the past twelve hours.

Vivian filed this too.

She also filed the way the women talked. The way they moved around each other in the kitchen, around the table, the particular ease of people who’ve been through something together. The way Helena automatically topped up cups. The way Kaida handed Bella the last of the bread before Bella asked for it. The way Mira kept the conversation flowing with the practiced competence of someone who runs things from the inside.

These were not prisoners.

Or—not ’only’ prisoners.

’What is this place,’ Vivian thought. ’What are we walking into.’

’’’

The meal dissolved into aftermath. Chairs pushed back, conversations splitting and reforming. Gwen ended up at the table’s far end with Kaida, who had apparently decided she was going to teach Gwen an elbow-hold relevant to close combat, using the water cup as a prop. Bella draped herself across the chair beside them, narrating.

Mira had managed to steer the conversation with Helena and Elara and Olivia into something that required being right in the middle of the room, which—Vivian noticed with the half-second delay of someone who has lived around clever people—left her alone.

She looked at the kitchen.

It felt wrong, leaving the mess.

She stood before she’d consciously decided to, picking up her plate and Gwen’s and carrying them to the kitchen doorway.

Viktor was already at the counter, sleeves still rolled, running water into the basin. His back was to her. He moved around the kitchen with an ease that didn’t quite match—the assured economy of someone who never fumbled, who always found what he reached for.

Vivian set the plates at the edge of the basin.

“I can help.”

Viktor didn’t look up.

“You’re a guest.”

“You just fed us,” Vivian said. “And I’ve been sitting for two hours. I’m not going to watch you clean up alone.”

A beat.

He stepped marginally sideways, not quite making room, but not occupying it any more aggressively either.

Vivian moved to the basin and picked up a cloth.

They washed in silence for a moment. The water was warm. The kitchen smelled like the residue of good cooking, herbs and butter and something faintly smoky from the stove.

“The food was extraordinary,” Vivian said. “I mean that genuinely. I haven’t eaten like that in—” she stopped, recalibrated. “In a long time.”

Viktor glanced at her sideways. “How long?”

“Months.” She scrubbed at a pan edge. “Since before we left the highland borders.”

“How long have you been running?”

Something about the directness of the question—no softening around it, no pretense that he hadn’t noticed exactly what she and Gwen were—made it easier to answer than a gentler approach might have.

“Three months,” Vivian said. “Give or take.”

Viktor was quiet. He took a bowl from her hands without being asked, turned it in his, checked it, set it aside.

“So,” Vivian said, after a moment. “The lord of Millbrook.”

Viktor’s hand stilled on the next dish.

“What about him,” he said.

“As you said, his name is Viktor as well.” Vivian kept her voice neutral, conversational. “Interesting coincidence. Is he local? What kind of man is he—the sort who’d cause problems for people passing through, or—”

Viktor made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff.

“That man,” he said, with comfortable disdain, “is an evil pervert.”

Vivian blinked.

“…sorry?”

“You heard me.” Viktor’s expression was perfectly straight. “Notorious for it, actually. Takes women, breeds them—I’d keep your distance if you run into him.”

Vivian had gone completely still.

She stared at the side of his face.

“What did you say?” Her voice was quiet. Careful.

“I said,” Viktor continued, picking up another dish with total calm, “you already know how people are, don’t you? ’They believe what they see.’”

He set the dish down. And then, very gently, he placed his hand over hers.

His palm covered her fingers completely, warm and dry. The touch was calm. Something that could have been mistaken for simple comfort, the kind you extend to a person who has been carrying something heavy for too long.

Vivian stared at his hand on hers.

Her chest did something she didn’t have a name for.

“People talk,” Viktor said. His voice had changed—not dramatically, but enough. Quieter. Less the flat tone he used for observation and more something under it. “It doesn’t mean everything they say is true.”

Vivian made herself breathe.

“Right,” she said, after a pause. “Right.”

She turned back to the basin, picking up the next thing to wash.

Her heart was doing something irregular that she wished it would stop.

“Here,” she said, finding something to occupy her hands with. “You’re—you’re washing these wrong, you’ll leave residue.”

Viktor looked at her.

“’I’m’ washing them wrong.”

“The angle.” She demonstrated, tilting the plate. “Like this, you get the edge clean first, then the center—”

“I have been washing dishes—”

“’Like this’,” Vivian repeated firmly.

Viktor looked at the plate in her hands. He looked at her face. He looked back at the plate.

“Fine,” he said.

He stepped behind her.

Not beside. ’Behind.’

The heat of him registered first—his body close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off his chest before he’d touched her. He reached around, hands coming to the basin at either side of her, effectively enclosing her in the bracket of his arms.

His hands found the dish she was holding. His fingers covered hers on the rim.

Vivian’s breath caught.

“Like this?” Viktor’s voice came from directly beside her ear, low enough that no one from the next room would hear.

“Y-yes,” Vivian managed.

Her back was an inch from his chest. One inch. She was acutely aware of every single point of potential contact, the way you become aware of edges in the dark.

Then that inch closed.

His pelvis pressed against her ass.

Not accidental. Not incidental. ’Pressed’—a firm, deliberate contact that put the ridge of him right against the cleft of her thick rear, the fabric of both their clothes doing nothing meaningful to mediate the warmth of it.

And she felt—

’Oh.’

He was hardening.

Slowly. Inevitably. Like a tide coming in, the pressure building where he was pressed against her, the heat of it seeping through her dress.

Vivian’s fingers went rigid on the dish.

Her eyes widened at the basin, staring at the water. Her cheeks went from warm to ’hot.’

’What—what is—why is my—’

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