100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids

Chapter 581 - 580- Viktor’s Cooking

"Better than this," Helviana said.The voice came from the fireside. Warm. Mild. Carrying the particular, deliberate provocation of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.

Naro turned.

Helviana sat with her hands folded in her lap, her face composed, her eyes on the pot.

"But my lord cooks much better than this," she continued.

Naro’s eyebrows rose.

The expression of a woman who had just been told her life’s work was second-rate by a maid who had spent the evening being fucked in a garden.

"Is that so?" Naro said. Her voice had gone dry, tight, the voice of a woman whose pride had been pricked and was deciding how to respond.

"Of course," Viktor said. He set the spoon down. "Wanna challenge?"

Naro looked at him.

The young man. The slender shoulders. The violet eyes that looked up at her with the patient, unblinking confidence of someone who had never lost a bet he cared about.

"You can’t cook," she said. "Really?"

"I can cook," Viktor said. "If you have the ingredients."

Naro stared at him for a long moment.

Then she laughed.

It was a short, rough, genuinely amused sound—the laugh of a woman who had spent twenty years being underestimated and had learned to find it funny rather than insulting.

"Fine," she said. She crossed her arms under her heavy tits, lifting them slightly, the motion unconscious and entirely present. "Show me. The kitchen’s yours. Let’s see this famous cooking."

There comes Viktor’s Turn

He moved differently than she expected.

Not the hesitant, searching movements of a man who claimed skill he did not have. The fluid, economical, entirely certain movements of a man who had done this so many times that his body remembered the work before his mind needed to instruct it.

He found the knife.

The long, heavy cleaver she used for splitting joints. He tested its weight, rolled his wrist once, and set to the cutting board with a rhythm that was almost musical.

Onion. Garlic. The last of the pork belly, cold and firm. Carrots. A handful of the wild mushrooms she had foraged three days ago and hung to dry.

Naro watched from the doorway.

Her arms still crossed, her hip leaned against the frame, her heavy body blocking the light from the common room. She watched his hands—the long, precise fingers, the unhurried confidence, the way the knife moved through the onion without crushing it, producing translucent sheets that fell away like petals.

Then he reached for the hearth.

Not the embers—the main fire, the one she had banked for the night. He stirred it. He added wood. He worked the bellows with a steady, knowing hand, and the flames rose, orange and clean, licking the blackened underside of the cauldron.

He added fat.

The sizzle was immediate, sharp, the sound of a pan that had reached exactly the right heat. The pork belly went in, and the aroma that rose was not the heavy, rendered smell of her own stew. It was something else—caramelized, deep, the sweet-savory edge of meat meeting high heat at precisely the right moment.

Naro’s nostrils flared.

She inhaled.

The scent was complex. Layered. It carried the promise of something that had not yet arrived but was building toward an inevitable, overwhelming conclusion.

Viktor added the onions.

The garlic.

The mushrooms, rehydrated in a splash of the wine she kept for cooking.

The steam that rose from his pan was thick, golden, almost visible in its density. It curled toward the ceiling and then descended, filling the kitchen with a warmth that was not merely physical. It was the warmth of memory, of childhood kitchens, of a mother’s hand on a fevered brow—scents that bypassed thought and went directly to the body.

Naro felt it in her chest.

A tightness. An opening. The particular, involuntary softening of a woman who had built walls out of necessity and was now smelling something that walked around them rather than through them.

Helviana stood beside her.

The maid’s eyes were closed. Her face was tilted slightly upward, her lips parted, her expression one of complete, unguarded surrender to the smell.

Dara, on the bench, had wrapped her arms around her knees and was breathing deeply, her tear-streaked face finally peaceful.

Even the kitchen girl—who had crept back downstairs and was hovering at the edge of the common room—stood still, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open.

Viktor worked.

He did not look at them. His attention was on the pan, on the fire, on the precise, unhurried turning of ingredients that were becoming something more than ingredients. He added stock—her stock, the bone broth she had simmered for two days—and the sound changed, deepened, became the slow, bubbling, patient whisper of a meal that was arriving at its truth.

He plated it.

Not in the rough, heavy bowls she used for guests. In the shallow, wide dish she reserved for herself, the one she had not touched in months. He laid the meat across the center, spooned the reduced sauce over it, scattered the mushrooms like dark jewels, and added a twist of the bitter greens she grew in the window box.

He turned.

He held the dish out to her.

"Try," he said.

Naro looked at it.

Then at him.

She took the dish. She took the fork he offered—her own fork, the small, worn one she used for tasting. She cut a piece of the meat.

It yielded without resistance.

She lifted it.

The steam curled around her face, carrying the scent directly into her mouth before the food arrived. She closed her lips around the fork.

The moment the flavor touched her tongue, her eyes went wide.

It was not merely good.

It was transcendent.

The meat dissolved—literally, completely, melting into a texture that was neither solid nor liquid but some perfect, impossible intermediate. The fat had rendered into the muscle fibers, carrying the sweetness of the onion and the earth of the mushroom and the deep, resonant umami of the broth into every cell of the meat. The sauce coated her mouth, warm, complex, layered with flavors that revealed themselves one after another like doors opening into rooms she had not known existed.

And underneath it all—something else.

A warmth that began in her mouth and traveled down her throat and spread through her chest and then lower.

Much lower.

Her body heated.

Not the heat of the kitchen. Not the heat of the fire. The heat of a woman whose blood was suddenly moving faster, whose skin was suddenly more sensitive, whose nipples—already stiff—ached with a sudden, urgent, completely inappropriate awareness.

"Oh my god," she said.

The words came out without her permission. Hoarse. Breathless. The involuntary, completely honest exclamation of a woman who had just encountered something that had destroyed her composure.

She stood in her own kitchen with a fork in her mouth and her eyes wide and her body flushing—chest, neck, cheeks, all of it warming under the influence of a bite of pork.

The room was silent.

Then Dara giggled.

The sound was small, nervous, the giggle of a woman who had been through too much and was now watching her formidable employer reduced to a breathless, wide-eyed, red-faced mess by food.

Helviana laughed too.

The warm, genuine, unguarded laugh of a woman who had seen this before and found it charming.