NOVEL WEB Chapter 289: The Queen's Rage (II)
She pointed the dagger straight at him. "Do you have any idea how badly it would hurt my husband if you let that bastard kill me?!"
When Leofric had nowhere left to run, he suddenly leapt onto the top of a bookshelf. He chuckled slightly, knowing full well Primrose wouldn't be able to chase him up there.
"Calm down, Primrose!" Leofric called down, crouching easily on the narrow wooden beam as if it were solid ground. "If I wanted you dead, you'd already be lying in a pool of your own blood right now."
"That's not helping your case! And don't you dare call my name like that!" Primrose snapped, still aiming the dagger at him. Her rage hadn't cooled in the slightest. "Get down here and explain yourself before I throw something sharp at your smug face!"
Leofric took a deep breath, then brushed his hair back. Not long after, his appearance slowly shifted into his true form, making Primrose pause for a moment, feeling impressed since even Edmund couldn't completely change his face like that.
"Alright," he said, "I'll explain everything to you. But before that, I want to ask you something."
Without thinking twice, Primrose snapped, "What?!"
"How did you know I was the one who helped that poor dead man sneak in here?" Leofric tilted his head slightly, his eyes narrowing with curiosity. "As far as I remember, he never once said someone helped him. Oh, and another thing … how did you know I was Leofric?"
Primrose froze where she stood, her grip on the dagger tightening until her knuckles turned white. She swallowed hard, scrambling for a reasonable excuse, anything to throw him off.
But before she could speak, Leofric cut her off. "You can hear people's minds, can't you?"
His smile widened, the kind of smile that said he'd been waiting to say those words. "I've gathered quite a bit of information on your mind-control ability, and every source I've found clearly states it always comes with another ability, like mind reading, for example."
[Don't pretend anymore, Your Majesty,] Leofric's voice spoke directly in her mind. [It would be better if you told me the truth, so I can help you more effectively.]
Primrose gritted her teeth, cursing herself for speaking before thinking. But honestly, how was she supposed to think clearly when her husband's best friend had just acted like he'd betrayed them?
"You …" She let the word hang in the air, hoping she'd come up with a good excuse. After a few seconds of silence, she sighed and gave up. "You already knew from the start, didn't you?"
The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. She hadn't heard a single thought from Leofric when the man in black attacked her.
That could only mean one thing: he'd been blocking his mind with magic.
Then, at the perfect moment, he had lowered that barrier on purpose, baiting her into revealing her ability.
This man was truly as cunning as a fox.
More than that, he was a magic expert who had lived in the Holy Temple for over thirty years, so it was unlikely Primrose could hide her ability from him forever.
"But I still needed your confirmation." Leofric shrugged. "I only became certain after digging through more than fifty books in the Holy Temple's library. And trust me, the priests weren't too happy watching me tear through their precious shelves."
Primrose stared at him, completely confused. If he'd worked that hard to dig up information for her, why on earth would he then let someone sneak in here and try to kill her?
"I don't understand," she said. "Why did you do all this? Do you hate me because I made you lose so much sleep for days?"
She couldn't help but notice the dark bags under his eyes, a solid proof that he'd been skipping sleep just to find all this information for her.
"Oh, Primrose … why do you think so badly of me?" Leofric said casually. "I have no ill intentions toward you."
Primrose replied flatly, "The dead man and the blood all over me say otherwise."
Leofric chuckled softly, as if her accusation actually amused him. "That wasn't to hurt you, it was to test you."
"Test me?" Primrose's voice rose, her grip on the dagger tightening. "You call letting an armed assassin into the same room as me a test?"
"Yes," he said without hesitation. "After I found so much information about your ability, I discovered there are several ways to use it. For an expert, they can control people's minds with ease. But for a beginner like you, that ability usually only appears when you're under pressure or when you feel very strong emotions inside you."
"Take the tiger beast that attacked you, for example." Leofric finally jumped down from the bookshelf but kept his distance. "You were able to make him smash his own head into a rock when you were cornered, to be exact when rage was boiling in your chest."
He went on, "Then again, in the torture room, you made him end his own life for good because you were consumed with anger."
Leofric then gestured toward the crimson blood covering her body, as if to point out that she had made the man in black kill himself because, once again, she had been filled with so much rage in her heart.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Primrose glared at him. "Are you telling me that the only way for me to control this ability is through rage?"
Leofric tilted his head and clapped loudly. "Congratulations, you've already figured it out." He continued, "Honestly, I didn't expect your short body to be able to hold so much anger."
Primrose ground her teeth so hard she could hear them clatter. Not only had Leofric called her short-tempered, he'd also insulted her height.
"Sir Leofric," she said in a low, eerie voice, "even if you wanted to test my ability, weren't you being way too careless by letting an assassin try to kill me? What if I couldn't stop him and he ended up killing me instead?"
Leofric waved his hand casually. "Don't worry about something so trivial. I could have killed him easily anyway."
"Trivial? Trivial, you said?" The last thread of Primrose's sanity snapped. She hurled the dagger to the floor and lunged forward, wrapping her hands around his neck. "You bastard! This is my first day learning again, but how dare you ruin it?!"