Chapter 246. Three People, Three Secrets, and a Kitchen Full of Wrong Assumptions
Catherine’s piercing gaze didn’t stay fixed on William for long. Like a predator tracking a second scent, her eyes slid toward Lia.
She noticed it immediately, the telltale sign that Lia couldn’t escape: the tips of those delicate elven ears had flushed a deep, unmistakable pink. Those ears were notoriously sensitive, betraying every flicker of emotion, every spike in blood pressure, and every shameful secret.
For a moment, the kitchen fell into a different kind of silence, one charged with a new, terrifying recognition. A memory flickered behind Catherine’s own eyes, sharp and unbidden.
She remembered the late hours of the night before. She remembered the way her own body had betrayed her, the primal, desperate hunger that had taken hold.
She remembered the sounds: the guttural moans, the wet slap of skin against skin, the raw, animalistic sounds of two people losing themselves in a frenzy of lust.
’Shit,’ Catherine thought, a cold spike of panic driving through her chest. ’D-Did Lia hear...?’
’Did she hear me screaming like some common whore upstairs while William was making me feel all sorts of pleasure!?’ She had been so consumed by the ecstasy, so lost in the throes of William’s touch, that the existence of a guest in the house had slipped from her mind entirely.
The thought of composed, dignified Lia lying awake behind thin walls while Catherine surrendered to her most debauched instincts made her stomach twist with mortification.
She looked at Lia’s pink ears, then at William’s guilty posture, and suddenly, the puzzle pieces clicked together with devastating accuracy.
The tension between William and Lia wasn’t just awkwardness; it was the aftermath of a shared secret, layered over the echo of Catherine’s own unrestrained climax.
William watched Catherine closely, his pulse hammering in his throat. He saw the shift in her expression. He saw the moment her pupils dilated and her mouth parted.
A sense of dawning horror washed over him.
’Here it comes,’ he thought grimly. ’She’s going to call us out...’
’She’s going to ask what exactly happened during that ’massage,’ and she’s going to connect the dots between our silence and her own noise.’ He braced himself for the interrogation, for the blunt, knightly question that would shatter what little dignity they had left.
But then, something strange happened. The fire of accusation in Catherine’s eyes died down, replaced by something resembling pragmatic survival instinct.
The idea of confrontation suddenly became intolerable when she realized that she was just as complicit in the night’s debauchery as they were.
"I don’t... want to know," Catherine said abruptly, cutting off the unspoken question before it could even form.
She held up both hands in a defensive gesture, like a seasoned commander deciding, wisely and swiftly, to retreat from a battlefield where the enemy and the allies were both compromised. "I genuinely, completely, and utterly do not want to know."
She took a breath, steadying her own flustered composure. "Whatever happened last night... or whatever noise was made, whatever... activities took place, it stays between the two of you."
"I am going to go finish the dishes, I am going to stare intensely at the soap bubbles, and I am going to pretend this conversation, and this entire morning, never occurred."
The relief that flooded the room was almost tangible.
"Thank you," William and Lia said in perfect, desperate unison.
The synchronized outburst caught Catherine off guard, breaking her stern facade. A genuine laugh escaped her as she turned away, shaking her head at their shared desperation.
"Honestly, you two are hopeless," she called back over her shoulder as she retreated toward the sink, leaving them to wallow in their own private, charged silence.
As Catherine retreated to the kitchen sink, the clatter of dishes provided a necessary barrier, but the psychic noise between the three of them remained deafening. Each of them was trapped in their own private prison of memory, constructing entirely different and wildly incorrect narratives about what had transpired under the cover of darkness.
Catherine scrubbed a plate with unnecessary vigor, her mind racing.
’Gods above, let her have been asleep,’ she prayed silently.
Her skin still felt hypersensitive, still tingled from the memory of William’s hands claiming her. She remembered the way she had begged, the way she had lost all sense of propriety, her voice cracking as she called his name.
She was certain she had been loud and debauched, even, and the thought that Lia, the poised and cold swordswoman, might have been lying awake listening to Catherine unravel like a common tavern wench made her want to sink into the floorboards.
’If she heard anything, she must think I’m some primal beast,’ Catherine thought, a flush of shame warring with the lingering heat of satisfaction.
Across the table, William was drowning in a different kind of guilt. His mind kept rewinding to the moment his fingers had slipped from professional massage into something far more intimate.
He remembered the heat of Lia’s skin, the way her body had betrayed her composure, and the terrifyingly beautiful moment she had come, the way her hips had bucked and her breath had shattered. He felt like a predator who had accidentally revealed his teeth.
’I crossed a line,’ he thought bitterly, staring at his own hands. ’I touched her in a way that can’t be unseen...’
’I took something from her... her control, that is... and her dignity as well... so I don’t even know if she can forgive me for it.’ He assumed Lia was furious, or perhaps frightened by the sudden escalation of his touch.
And then there was Lia. Her hearing, usually a gift, had become her curse last night.
While she had been reeling from the aftermath of her own climax, her body still feeling strangely hollow and sensitive from the way William had made her squirt, leaving her breathless and overwhelmed, she had been forced to listen to the house come alive with a different kind of violence.
The walls had seemed to pulse with the sounds coming from Catherine’s room. The rhythmic thudding, the guttural, unrestrained moans, the unmistakable sounds of two bodies colliding with desperate hunger.
’It was like listening to animals mating,’ Lia thought, her chest tightening.
The contrast had been devastating: first, the intimate, almost tender violation of her own body by William, and then the raw, unbridled cacophony of Catherine and William losing themselves in each other.
She had lain there in the dark, her own skin still flushed, feeling like an intruder in a house of sin. She wasn’t just embarrassed about what William had done to her; she was mortified by the sheer nakedness of the sounds she had been forced to witness.
She assumed William thought she was angry about the massage, unaware that she was also carrying the weight of having heard his every moan.
The three of them sat in a triangle of miscommunication, each believing they were the only ones holding a shameful secret, each assuming the others were judging them for something entirely different.
The air was thick with the unspoken: William’s guilt over his touch, Lia’s shame over her reaction and what she heard, and Catherine’s terror of being perceived as shameless.
Minutes passed, measured only by the steady drip of the faucet and the distant chirp of birds outside. The morning sun climbed higher, burning away the shadows but doing nothing to dispel the emotional fog.
Slowly, the frantic energy began to drain from the room, replaced by a weary, heavy acceptance of the new reality.
The tension in the kitchen finally eased once Catherine had disappeared into the rhythmic sounds of her chores, and Lia sat quietly for a moment, turning her cup slowly between her hands before looking up at William with an expression that had shifted entirely away from embarrassment into something softer, more vulnerable.