Chapter 196: For Agnes
Irene was just around the corner from Felix when she heard his utterance of: "My heart was yours already. Now the mountain is yours. My life is yours. I will kill every one of those monsters, knowing what they took from me."
It struck her enough that she had to stop for a few moments and breathe in and out calmly as she tried to control the lump that was forming in her throat.
In the life she saw, she didn’t know a love like that. The man she was married to was an arrangement of convenience. She was fortunate that he at least respected her for who she was and didn’t force her too far out of her comfort zone.
For some reason, seeing Felix crumble because he lost his love was making her equally long for as much as resist a love so incredibly pure. Few must have been lucky enough to experience that feeling. The thought made her heart race.
She wasn’t someone who would likely receive love like that. If she was meant to pretend to be a man until the day she died, she was going to do it, after all.
What Felix likely didn’t need at that moment was a crying baby who couldn’t get herself together. She was meant to be a tough apprentice, and she knew she ought to act like it.
As she rounded the corner, seeing Felix with a dead body sitting on top of him wasn’t easy to handle, and she had to force herself to keep walking. She had never witnessed anything so mortifying in her life.
That was her friend under there. Agnes was her close confidant in a sea of men. She was the only girl whom Irene could remotely relate to, the only other person there who knew Irene’s real name.
Felix’s eyes, red from crying, made Irene internally grimace.