What began as a harmless secret—the quiet giggles and soft voices of the maids who liked to gossip while they washed her that night before bed—made her tongue loosen and say things she shouldn't have. It ended with her slender fingers clutching the edges of her nightgown, the fabric of which seemed too thin to hide the tremors running through her body. Her breathing was ragged, her chest rising and falling, as if she'd just run from one end of the castle to the other.

"Did you think I wouldn't know?" — His voice was quiet, but each syllable rang like a bell. He took a step forward, and his wife was forced to retreat, her heels touching the edge of the chair. She tried to meet his gaze, but her lips trembled, and her cheeks burned with shame. "Your Maids clearly can't keep secrets. They told me everything," he continued, his voice even quieter, but there was a sense of danger in it, like the silence before a storm. "Did you want to embarrass me, your husband?" The question made her stomach burn: either from shame and reproach for having given in to such baseness—gossiping about her husband in bed, or from fear that she would be punished for such a "big mouth," and the skin on her arms would be covered in unpleasant goosebumps, making her feel cold.

He didn't need her trembling apologies: for that, she deserved a whip or a rod, not less. He doesn't raise his voice when he asks why she's silent and doesn't answer him, but every word he says falls like a heavy weight on her fragile shoulders, like a noose around her neck: her heart beats so loudly that she thinks he can hear it; his gaze burns like a flame - not pleasantly, like in the stupid novels she read, but terribly, as if she were being publicly exposed naked.