Even the kitchen girl snorted, her hand flying to her mouth.
Naro's face went from flushed to crimson.
She pulled the fork from her mouth.
She coughed.
"Oh my bad," she said. Her voice was rough, embarrassed, completely unlike her usual command. "I should have composed myself."
The laughter grew.
Naro looked at the three women—her own staff, her own girl, a stranger maid—all laughing at her, and she felt something crack in her chest. Not a wound. A release. The sudden, unexpected, almost-painful release of a woman who had been holding herself rigid for years and had just been made ridiculous by a bite of meat.
She laughed too.
It was a rough, rusty, genuine sound—the laugh of a woman who had forgotten how to do it and was surprised to find the mechanism still worked.
"Alright," she said, wiping her eye with the back of her hand. "Alright, you devil. You can cook."
Viktor smiled.
