Chapter 613: Chapter-613
His eyes caught the spine of a beautifully bound text. He reached out, his long, elegant fingers sliding the book from the shelf.
Suddenly, a blur of movement eclipsed his peripheral vision.
A woman, her face completely obscured behind a massive, towering stack of heavy scrolls and thick books, came rushing around the corner of the aisle. She was walking far too fast, completely blinded by her own burden, and she didn’t see the Prime Minister standing in her path until it was entirely too late.
Thud!
She slammed directly into him.
The sheer momentum, combined with the heavy weight of the books, threw the Prime Minister completely off balance. For a man who had just survived a political massacre at the hands of the Vanguard Madam, being physically knocked to the floor by a walking library was simply unbelievable.
He hit the polished wooden floorboards with a heavy crash, his pristine silver silk robes tangling around his legs as a violent rain of parchment and heavy books cascaded down on top of him.
The woman fell hard right beside him, a loud "Ouch!" escaping her lips as her towering stack of literature scattered in every direction across the aisle.
The Prime Minister gritted his teeth, suppressing the immediate, dark urge to have her thrown into the imperial dungeons for touching him. He took a breath, forcing his flawless, gentlemanly mask back into place. He gracefully pushed himself up onto one elbow, looking over at the disheveled woman on the floor.
"Oh, my lady," the Prime Minister said, his voice dripping with smooth, practiced concern, fully expecting her to gasp in awe at his handsome face and beg for his forgiveness. "Are you okay?"
Instead, the woman aggressively rubbed her forehead, wincing in pain. She turned her head, her eyes flashing as she glared daggers directly into the Prime Minister’s flawless, celestial face.
"Are you blind, my lord?!" the woman snapped, her voice loud, annoyed, and entirely devoid of respect. "Why in the world are you standing right there in the middle of the aisle?!"
The Prime Minister completely froze.
His perfectly crafted, gentle smile shattered. He stared at her, utterly flabbergasted, his brain struggling to process the interaction. She had been sprinting blindly. She had run into him. And yet, she was yelling at him?
In all of his thirty-three years of life, no woman had ever spoken to him with such blatant, unapologetic disrespect. He simply sat there on the floor amidst the scattered books, staring at her in sheer shock.
For a long, agonizing moment, the Prime Minister simply sat on the polished floorboards, completely paralyzed by the sheer audacity of the woman in front of him.
He was the Prime Minister of the Empire. Even after his catastrophic humiliation at morning court, his mere glance had just sent a crowd of peasants running for their lives outside. Women threw themselves at his feet, desperate for a single look from his devastatingly handsome face. His own wives trembled at the very sound of his footsteps.
Yet this strange woman, sitting in a pile of spilled books with her hair half-falling out of its hairpin, was glaring at him as if he were the most irritating inconvenience she had ever encountered.
"I... beg your pardon?" the Prime Minister finally managed to say, his voice losing a fraction of its perfectly controlled smoothness.
"I said, why were you standing like a stone pillar right in the middle of a blind corner?" the woman huffed, reaching out to frantically gather the scattered scrolls. She didn’t even give his legendary face a second glance. "Are your legs just for decoration? Move!"
The Prime Minister’s personal knight, who had been standing at the end of the aisle, immediately drew his sword with a furious metallic shing. "You insolent wretch! Do you know who you are speaking to—"
"Stand down!" the Prime Minister suddenly snapped, raising a hand.
The knight froze, immediately sheathing his blade and stepping back.
The Prime Minister slowly turned his attention back to the woman. For the first time, he actually looked at her.
She wasn’t a delicate, heavily powdered noblewoman hiding behind a silk fan. Her sleeves were rolled up, revealing pale wrists. Her fingers were heavily stained with dark pine ink, a clear sign of someone who spent entirely too much time writing. And there was a small, frantic smudge of black ink right on the tip of her nose.
Instead of being terrified by the knight’s drawn sword, she had merely rolled her eyes at the interruption and continued violently shoving books back into her arms.
A strange, entirely unfamiliar sensation rippled through the Prime Minister’s chest.
For the past ten years, he had been surrounded by yes-men, terrified servants, and political rivals who hid behind fake smiles. The only person who had ever truly defied him to his face was Heena Vanguard—and that had been a humiliating, lethal checkmate.
But this woman? She wasn’t plotting his downfall. She wasn’t playing a 5D political chess game. She was just genuinely, unapologetically annoyed that he was in her way.
Slowly, the Prime Minister reached out. His long, elegant fingers picked up one of the heavy, leather-bound books that had fallen near his knee. He glanced at the cover.
Advanced Hydrology and River Dam Construction.
His eyebrows shot up in genuine surprise. It was a highly complex, incredibly dry engineering manual usually reserved for the Ministry of Works.
"You read this?" the Prime Minister asked, his voice softening into a tone of genuine curiosity rather than his usual manipulative charm.
The woman snatched the book right out of his hands, clutching it to her chest. "I am trying to, if people would stop knocking me over. Now, unless you plan on helping me pick up the rest of this structural engineering encyclopedia, please take your very expensive robes and step aside."
The Prime Minister stared at his empty hands. Then, entirely against his own volition, a sound escaped his lips.
It wasn’t a sneer. It wasn’t a dark, mocking scoff.
It was a genuine, breathy laugh.
The sound of his own laughter actually startled him. He hadn’t laughed a real, unfiltered laugh in years. The crushing, suffocating weight of his political defeat, the paranoia, the anger—for a brief, fleeting second, all of it vanished, entirely eclipsed by the fiery, ink-stained woman scowling at him from the floor.
He didn’t stand up and dust himself off. Instead, the highest-ranking civil official in the empire shifted onto his knees and began gathering the fallen scrolls for her.
"I apologize, Miss," the Prime Minister said. And for the first time that day, the gentle, charming smile on his face wasn’t a mask. It reached his dark, melancholic eyes. "I admit, I was completely lost in my own thoughts. I did not mean to become a hazard to your structural engineering research."
The woman paused, a stack of books pressed against her chin. She finally stopped scrambling and actually looked at him.
She took in his flawless, perfectly sculpted face, the expensive silver silk of his robes, and the deep, captivating warmth in his dark eyes. Any normal woman in the capital would have instantly fainted.
She just blinked, let out a small, unimpressed sigh, and accepted the scrolls he handed her.
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