Married To The Mad Vampire Lord-Chapter 118: The boy in the painting

"What are you doing here?" came Rohan’s displeased, detached voice.

It took Belle a moment to steady her disoriented mind and return to reality. When she finally looked up, her eyes met Rohan’s hardened, handsome face, drawn tight with displeasure. He was scowling, his thick, fine brows knitted together and his pink lips pressed into a firm line.

For a foolish second, her heart skipped a beat when her gaze fell on those familiar dark eyes of his.

She couldn’t wrap her mind around what she had seen in that painting, and she was tempted to turn and look at it again to see if she would understand it now that she had seen flashes of memories, but the look in Rohan’s eyes made her gulp anxiously and freeze in place.

"You are here..." she managed to say through lips that seemed to suddenly go dry, and she subconsciously moistened them with her tongue. His eyes trailed to her lips with that action, and to her relief, his hardened face softened a little, and his tight grip around her upper arm loosened to almost a caress.

"Where else should I be?" he said in a deep, smooth voice that made her ache in ways that had nothing to do with her heart.

With your whores. Belle turned crimson at that thought, which she dared not voice for fear of admitting her jealousy over him being with other women. It wasn’t in her place to voice her displeasure. She had been taught that much. Women have no right.

She had come to find his whores’ quarters with Kuhn’s help, but instead, the creature had led her to his art chamber—filled with strange paintings that, judging from Rohan’s expression, was not a place he welcomed visitors.

Kuhn. She realized, with a sinking feeling, that the creature had actually deserted her. He was nowhere to be seen in the room when she glanced around subtly.

He had brought her to the lion’s den... and then escaped!

"What are you doing in here, touching things you shouldn’t, Isa?" he repeated the question, watching her and studying her with that scowl on his face. He wasn’t smiling nor smirking, and Belle felt her insides melting into a helpless puddle of yearning that surged within her. She rather preferred him smiling.

She had missed him, she realized. He had been away for just a week, but it felt like an endless lifetime. She wanted to move forward and rest her head against his chest—but she fought that urge, especially when she saw the way his brows arched, as if he were still waiting for her answer.

From his looks, it did not seem like he felt the same way she did. He looked like his usual self with no signs of longing like she was probably giving away now. She composed herself and cleared her throat. She wouldn’t make a fool of herself in front of him. She thought firmly.

"Nothing, I was touring the castle when I found this room," she lied, and before he could ask how she had opened the locked door—which she suspected he was about to, with his parting lips—she quickly pulled her arm away from him and turned to the dark painting behind her.

She had touched it, and it had taken her to a dark memory that still lingered in the back of her mind—the sounds of whimpering and silent sobs, and the hoarse voice of the boy—it tugged a string in her heart.

Staring at it, she realized she still couldn’t figure out what was painted in the canvas and she asked, "Did you paint all this?" She gestured towards the many covered canvases.

She heard his nonchalant reply from behind, "Yes."

Belle turned to him with surprised eyes. She had suspected he had painted the uncovered ones, but then—all of them? It was astonishing, as the room was spacious, yet the canvases covered almost every corner.

She could never have known he was this skilled, that behind those dead eyes and that unbothered air was an artist. But thinking about it now, she realized that only someone like Rohan could paint something so dark and unsettling—only he could draw his muse from the shadows and bring it to life in a way that only he could understand.

"I never knew you were an artist..." she voiced her thoughts, looking at him with admiration in her hazel eyes. Rohan chuckled softly.

"It’s something I enjoyed doing in the past, and I recently found another inspiration to go back to it."

You became my muse and inspiration, he added in his mind, watching her, liking the admiration he glimpsed on her face.

Had it been anyone else who had come into his special art room, Rohan would have had their head on a platter and used the blood to paint the image of the head on one of his canvases.

He hated anyone invading the things he held dear, like his treasure room. He had done it before, and if his bunny had gone around uncovering many of the canvases, she would have seen the paintings of many unfortunate idiots who had wandered where they shouldn’t have.

But it was just her, and though he had felt a flicker of annoyance, it was quickly disarmed by the longing he glimpsed in those hazel, beautiful eyes.

It seemed his time away from her, and his decision to avoid her to cultivate her feelings for him, had paid off. She had come looking for him.

Days ago, he had been against Cordelia training her and had considered getting someone else to do it. But then he realized his cousin wasn’t dense enough to do anything improper in his castle with his wife. He had allowed the training, and, wanting to see his wife molded into someone stronger, he hadn’t interfered with the harsh regimen.

She had been annoyed, but she didn’t know it was for her own good. The exercises were good for her slender body, and when she had told him not to bother her, he realized and remembered her words about the feeling of love.

When you love someone, you want to be around them all the time, and your heart beats faster in their presence. That was when the idea came to him—to taste her feelings for him. And now here she was, with loud heartbeats.

Rohan thought this with a small smile, but the smile didn’t last as he saw her eyes turn back to a painting he had created many years ago. He had brought it out to add a few touches when it had been stained by drops of rain splashing in from the cracks in the window.

"When I touched this painting, I saw something..." she said quietly, staring at the painting like she would understand it more the longer she stared.

"What did you see?"

"I saw a boy," she said, still looking at the painting and missing the look that crossed Rohan’s expression. His eyes narrowed, and his fingers fisted at his side.

"Only that?" he asked, staring at her from behind with slightly harsh breathing.

"No. He was sobbing and shaking with a pool of something like blood around him. It couldn’t be his blood, of course, or he wouldn’t be alive because it was too much. I don’t know, it was dark, and he said something like..." she repeated the words of the boy to him, "but you pulled me back before I focused on what he was trying to show."

Belle swirled around to look at him with a frown now on her face. "I think this isn’t the first time I see something that wasn’t there. That day in the library, I experienced something too vivid to be a dream. It was..." She narrated what she experienced and the chained person and the cloaked figures, and the more she spoke, the more Rohan’s fists were clenching and unclenching and his eyes turning unfocused, but she missed those details as she was in distress herself by everything.

"Could it all be my mind playing tricks or that it’s part of what I am?" she asked him, and Rohan reached his hands up to gently cup her cheeks.

"Why didn’t you tell me about the library experience before?"

Belle bit her lower lip and lowered her gaze guiltily. "I thought it was a dream until now. I thought it was just my mind making things up, but now that I’ve touched this, I think it must be part of who I am. What did you paint on this canvas? Perhaps if you explain it, I’ll understand better whether what I see has anything to do with what you painted. Do you know the boy I saw? And did you find your muse in someone’s story and painted it? Are you—"

Belle was getting worked up over the experience, forgetting to breathe between her words. She babbled on, wanting him to explain things that, to Rohan, were the remnants of his worst nightmares—things that haunted him for years until he had learned to live with them.

They were memories he hated to speak about, things he avoided thinking about. Having her see them was like an invasion of his deepest privacy.

Not ready to share those painful parts of himself, and unwilling to answer the questions she kept pressing him with, Rohan did the only thing he knew would stop her from probing further.

He leaned in and crashed his mouth onto hers.

Her gasp was instant, but he swallowed it, kissing her like it was the only thing that could shut out the chaos inside him that was rising with her questions.

His hand curled around the back of her neck, the other flattening against her waist, dragging her into the heat of him. She went rigid for half a second—but then she melted, her lips parting for him as if she had no defense left to give.

It was hard. Raw. A kiss that stole the breath from her lips and silenced every word she hadn’t yet spoken. Her fingers gripped his shirt, knuckles whitening as sensation took over her entire body, blurring away the questions and making her weak in the knees. A thread of heat burst into molten bliss, and her mouth parted for him when he probed with his warm tongue, invading her mouth.

Rohan could feel the way her breath caught in her chest, the way her body leaned in, arching, craving for his. She kissed him back like she was falling—and he was the only thing left to catch her.

God, she tasted like fire and something too soft to name. She had improved so much in kissing he forgot just where he was and deepened the kiss, pressing his mouth harder, his tongue teasing hers just enough to make her body tremble.

Her mouth was soft, warm, unguarded—and he devoured it like a man starved. She moaned into his kiss, then boldly nipped his lower lip and drew it into the heat of hers, suckling with a teasing slowness that made his lower abdomen clench. He groaned, deep and guttural, pressing into her like it was the only way to stay sane.

His wife would be the death of him. A burst of molten heat unfurled low in his loins, sharp and consuming, and it struck him so hard he abruptly tore his mouth away, his fragile control hanging by a thread.

Her lips followed him, eyes closed, mouth parted, shamelessly chasing his, and for a second he forgot how to breathe as he stared at that adorable, reddened face.

A smile tugged at his lips, and then he leaned back in and pressed a single, slow kiss to her shameless lips, nothing like the first, just a lingering touch of possession.

"Silly little wife," he whispered against her mouth, voice thick, rough. "How were your days without your husband?" He moved back when her eyes suddenly flew open. "I hope it was miserable."

Belle, whose brain had momentarily seemed to desert her, began to slowly return to her senses after the kiss that seemed to not last longer than her depraved body yearned for. It took a moment for her to understand his words and his meaning, and she frowned.

"You are wicked," she accused, glaring at him. He had left and not come to her because he wanted her to be miserable? Heartless devil!

He chuckled at her words and then replied, "And you still want me like that, don’t you, my silly naughty little wife?" He pinched her nose playfully.