Chapter 26
“Please accept this as both congratulations and an apology. After you left last week, I did a lot of reflecting. I think I made you very uncomfortable back then. As an apology for that, I wanted to treat you to something simple today.”
Elenen continued speaking whatever came to mind. About half of it was sincere, and the other half was nothing more than an excuse.
By common sense, if he had truly reflected on how he had made Noxia uncomfortable last week, he wouldn’t be acting like this now. He would have quietly passed by as if he hadn’t noticed her.
Elenen knew that fact intellectually. And yet, for some reason, he kept wanting to approach her. He wanted to speak to her.
The fact that he didn’t outright suggest they eat together at a restaurant was already the result of tremendous restraint. He decided to compromise by simply buying her a piece of bread.
Elenen himself didn’t know why his eyes kept drifting toward her and why his heart was drawn to her like this. It would take time for the feelings that had already begun to sprout in his unconscious to rise to the surface of his awareness.
“It’s all right, Your Highness. I have enough money to buy bread myself.”
Noxia’s reply was sharper than necessary. She realized it belatedly and felt a twinge of regret. Elenen hesitated, then drooped his shoulders dejectedly.
“Of course. I’ve made you uncomfortable again. I’m sorry.”
He looked like a whimpering puppy caught in the rain. At the illusion that she could see triangular ears drooping on his head, Noxia held back a sigh for a moment, then spoke in a softer voice than before.
“There’s no need to apologize, Your Highness. I’ll accept just the sentiment of your kindness.”
It wasn’t kindness she had asked for, but still—it wasn’t entirely unpleasant to know that someone cared about her this way.
Noxia felt both burdened by the prince’s attention and subtly fulfilled by it. It was a contradictory emotion.
The most noble-blooded man in the country, handsome, well-mannered—truly a fairy-tale prince.
It was hard to dislike someone like that smiling at her, approaching her, and warmly offering to buy her food. To be honest, she even felt a little proud.
No matter how mature she usually was, at her core Noxia was an eighteen-year-old girl—standing on the precarious boundary between adolescence and adulthood, someone whose judgment could sometimes blur due to shallow vanity.
So when a beautiful prince straight out of a fairy tale showed interest in her, Noxia felt a partial thrill. Her heart fluttered as if she were someone special.
But that was as far as it went. Noxia’s realistic nature pressed down on any budding excitement. Practical reality mattered far more than romance; a stable everyday life far outweighed any dreamlike escapade.
“Still, if you truly wish to apologize… please don’t stop me like this. Come find me at the library instead. I’ll be there every weekday, Monday through Friday.”
At the same time, despite valuing stability, the practical Noxia had a surprisingly soft side.
“There are too many eyes watching here. It seems your friends are very curious about me.”
Unable to bear the sight of the boy slumping his shoulders like an abandoned animal, she ended up whispering this to him.
At her words inviting him to come to the library anytime, the prince’s sky-blue eyes brightened. Elenen looked at Noxia and smiled gently.
“Understood. Then I’ll see you again sometime, Miss Dekan.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
Noxia bowed her head slightly. Elenen stepped aside, and she passed by him lightly.
As he had last week, Elenen simply watched Noxia’s retreating back. His stomach churned, as if food he hadn’t even eaten were sitting heavily inside him.
From a short distance away, Elenen’s classmates surged toward him. Surrounding him, they tried to extract as much information as possible about the woman he had just spoken with.
“Your Highness, who was that girl just now? Is she an academy student? I’ve never seen her before.”
“Wasn’t she that girl from before? The one the Marquis Holby’s daughter brought as a friend to the spring ball?”
The second question came from Countess Greta Berriton, who was a year younger than the prince. Standing very close to him, she widened her round eyes and looked up at him.
The prince subtly took a step back, putting just that much distance between himself and Greta. Elenen looked down at her with a gentle smile.
“Yes, that’s right. She’s Miss Noxia Dekan, a friend of Lady Holby. She works as a librarian.”
It was something they would find out soon enough if they ever went to the library and ran into Noxia.
Though it felt uncomfortable to talk about Noxia’s personal details without her permission, he feared that putting on airs and acting as if he were hiding some grand secret might end up harming her instead.
‘There’s no need to let them misunderstand that I’m close to her.’
Because, in truth, that would indeed be a misunderstanding.
Once his thoughts reached that point, Elenen felt gloomy, and soon fell into confusion, unable to understand why he felt that way.
Meanwhile, Greta bit her lip. Elenen’s tone was calm, as if he were merely mentioning a passerby, but she remembered the small movement he’d made earlier—shifting his body to shield Noxia Dekan.
“I see. Are you close with her?”
Greta asked. She maintained an ostensibly innocent tone, but her sharp gaze searched the prince’s face intently.
The others heard Greta’s question as well. Their gazes all turned to the prince at once. Elenen met all their eyes with a clear expression and answered in a tone that carried not the slightest hint of falsehood.
“When would we even have had time to get close? We barely know each other’s faces and names. I just remembered seeing her briefly at the ball and exchanged a greeting.”
Everyone believed the prince’s words. There was no particular reason to doubt him.
In any case, Noxia Dekan wasn’t important to them. Whether the prince was friendly with some librarian or not didn’t concern them, and they soon returned to their own interests.
But Greta was different. She continued to watch the prince carefully. Having stood closer than anyone else while he spoke with Noxia Dekan, she was certain of one thing.
‘A lie.’
They had both lowered their voices, so she hadn’t heard everything, but even the fragments she caught were enough to guess.
The prince wasn’t merely someone who knew that librarian’s face and name. Greta Berriton’s keen intuition whispered to her anxious heart that the two had at least once been alone together.
Elenen didn’t avoid Greta’s piercing stare. With the same expression he always wore, he smiled gently and spoke kindly, as if to a friend.
“Sorry for holding everyone up because of me. Let’s go in and have lunch.”
The students streamed inside. After that, no one spoke Noxia Dekan’s name again—at least not aloud, though they might ponder it privately.
On the surface, it was an ordinary Monday, no different from any other.
Having escaped the student cafeteria, Noxia went to a shop in another building and bought a large cream bun for lunch.
Sitting on a bench in a grassy area where sunlight and shade coexisted in perfect balance, eating bread while watching passersby and admiring the beautiful campus wasn’t a bad experience at all.
‘Still, I can’t keep getting by like this every day. Maybe I should start bringing a lunchbox from tomorrow.’
Chewing on her bread, Noxia continued mulling over various thoughts. After she finished eating, there was still some lunch break left.
Instead of returning early to work, Noxia perched on the bench, swinging her legs and savoring her precious leisure time.
As she glanced around absentmindedly, her eyes caught sight of a newspaper lying haphazardly on a bench across from her.
‘Someone must’ve left it behind.’
Should she read the newspaper for once? Noxia crossed the grass to the opposite bench and unfolded it. Skimming the pages casually, she suddenly thought of something and furrowed her brow.
‘What happened with the fire the other day? Was there really a fire that got put out quickly? Or was it just a malfunction?’
The memory of unexpectedly spending time with Young Lord Jade Lanon two days ago felt distant, like a dream.
But it had definitely been reality, not a dream—meeting the young lord from the North, and before that, being chased through a dark alley by unsavory men.
It was also undeniably real that the men had fled in fear when a fire alarm suddenly went off in a nearby building.
And yet, despite the alarm, Noxia hadn’t heard a single word since then about any fire in the city.
Even when she had left the teahouse with Jade that same day, everything had seemed strangely uneventful.
She had felt疑問 even then, but after experiencing too many things in quick succession, she’d been too exhausted to think deeply about it.
Only now did her curiosity resurface. Could there be a clue in this weekly paper?
Noxia continued scanning the pages. At last, she found a related article. Only after flipping through about half the newspaper did a short piece about a fire alarm malfunction appear.
According to the article, the alarm in an empty shop building had malfunctioned the night before last, sending the fire brigade on a needless run.
The article concluded by quoting a firefighter who urged that old or abandoned buildings in the city be inspected regularly to prevent such incidents from happening again.
Noxia mulled over the article with an uneasy feeling. It was a relief that no one had been hurt, but the thought that valuable time and budget of the fire brigade had been wasted left her feeling far from pleased.
She went on to skim the remaining pages. She had already gotten the information she wanted, but since it had been a while since she’d read a newspaper, she figured she might as well finish it.
Then Noxia paused at another article. This one, too, was relatively brief. It reported that four men had gone missing recently, and that their families had requested a police search.
‘Four of them…’
Noxia frowned. Was it the work of criminals? The idea that four people had vanished all at once was chilling. She couldn’t help but think of the families anxiously wondering whether their loved ones were alive.
Then she froze. The number four stirred an unpleasant sense of déjà vu.
She recalled the four vile men who had hunted her like prey two days earlier.
