Married To The Mad Vampire Lord-Chapter 117: The painting

They walked to the end of the corridor, and finally, the creature came to a halt in front of a door. It must have been locked, because Belle watched, wide-eyed, as he raised his hand—and to her astonishment, his index finger morphed into a key. Without a word, he inserted it into the keyhole and turned. A clicking sound followed, and the door creaked open.

"What else can you do?" Belle asked, her voice laced with curiosity, as the creature turned his head to glance at her.

He grunted in response and stepped inside, not bothering to wait for her to recover from her surprise.

Belle pulled herself together and followed him into the room. For some reason, she had expected to see the so-called "mini theater" Cordelia mentioned, imagining a place where Rohan’s women might have performed for his entertainment. But what she found instead stopped her in her tracks.

"I think you brought me to the wrong chamber, Kuhn," Belle murmured softly.

She looked around the wide, spacious room—and to her surprise, there was no bed, no stage, no lavish setup for indulgence. Instead, it was filled with canvases, painting equipment, and brushes arranged on a long tray on the ground.

Two big windows let in the twilight light, with no drapes to block it. The light poured into the room, casting a soft glow on the many covered canvases. The ones that weren’t covered were turned toward the windows, almost as though they were works in progress, and Belle’s curiosity was piqued about what was being painted on them, even though she didn’t know whose art chamber Kuhn had brought her to.

She walked towards the first canvas closer to her and gently pulled up the cover to peek at the painting. She gasped and then pulled away the covers completely to admire the work of art captured on the canvas.

It was a painting of a beautiful lake, its water blue and clear—clear enough that the fishes swimming underneath it were captured on the canvas.

However, while the lake in the painting was clear and beautiful, the trees around it were dead and dark and the sky gloomy, making it look mismatched with the beautiful lake. It was like the painter was trying to express something only he could understand.

Belle stroked her fingers around the work, feeling the coarse roughness of the painting.

"Who painted this?" she asked Kuhn, who stood behind her, but the creature grunted as expected.

Belle moved to another canvas and opened the cover, and in this, she found an image that needed one to study before understanding it because it was painted in darker colors—strokes of grays and black and a bit of brown.

When she finally understood it, she couldn’t unsee what was painted. It was a little kid—whether girl or boy—standing on a tower, looking down as if about to jump from it. It gave off a melancholic air, and she brought her fingers up to stroke it. Only when she touched this canvas, her mind and head were invaded with sudden flashes of memories.

A boy standing on a tower, looking down at it, and then before she knew it, the boy had jumped. Belle quickly withdrew her hand with a startled cry and turned to Kuhn, who had now walked away from behind her to stand before another canvas.

Belle couldn’t put a finger on what had just happened. It seemed like she had been inside the painting for a moment and then back out again, and the experience almost seemed unreal, like she had imagined it.

"Loo..."

She heard Kuhn make the sound like he was about to tell her to come and look at another painting. Turning away from the previous canvas with the strange painting, she walked to where Kuhn stood in front of one of the opened canvases facing the window.

But the moment her eyes fell on one of the paintings on the open canvases before the window, a deep, crimson-hot color rushed to her face, and she clasped her hands to her mouth in disbelief.

She did not have to look deeply to understand this painting. In fact, she needn’t have looked a second time—she saw it vividly at first glance. In the canvas where a painting had been made and left to dry, she watched the hazel, hooded eyes of a woman that stared back at her, like she was looking at her and yet not. It was so realistic and perfectly done, it made her insides warm with embarrassment.

The woman had gold-blonde hair, and she lay on the bed with nothing but her petticoat, where the bosom area around her areola was damp—as if a man had used his mouth to make it so, the fabric clinging to her breasts. Her thighs were bare, and one was bent while the other stretched out on the bed. Her head was thrown back, and she stared back with eyes drowsy with lust. Her hand was placed just above her intimate part. frёeωebɳovel.com

The woman was none other than her.

The painting was so inappropriate, so accurate to what had happened that night when Rohan told her to remove her dress—only a few fantasies were added to the details, like the way she lay there—that Belle quickly tried to hide the painting from the creature but instead ended up knocking it off, and it fell back against one of the can of paints.

She was reaching for the canvas to straighten it when she realized Kuhn hadn’t been looking at her painting but at another next to it, and he was pointing his wood finger at it.

Belle turned her head in the direction, already knowing who must have painted everything in the room, and looked at what Kuhn pointed out. It was one of another dark image that required studying to understand. Already flustered by her inappropriate painting, she went closer to study what Kuhn seemed more interested in.

Belle looked hard at it, but no matter what, she couldn’t understand what was painted. Only strokes of dark colors all around that gave off the illusion of different things in one picture that made it all the more confusing.

"What’s that?" Belle asked.

Kuhn reached out and grabbed her wrist and then brought her hand towards the painting for her to touch it. Belle stroked her fingers against the random brush strokes, and then, to her surprise, she saw flashes of memories and images that made her feel light.

She was in a room—a dark chamber so dark one couldn’t see anything—but she could hear the whimpering sounds of someone. Someone was in the chamber.

Belle knew she should pull her hand back from that painting to stop this, but wanting to see and explore what she could do, she continued to stroke it. The vision moved to the side of the chamber the whimpering was coming from.

At a corner, someone was crouched down. It was a kid, his head buried between his knees, something like blood—but darker—pooling up around him. He was shivering so hard as he whimpered, Belle wanted to reach out to the poor kid.

Everything was dark, but the kid’s figure could be seen, and so was the pool of blood-like thing around him. She walked closer to him—everything seemed like she was seeing it in her mind’s eye while at the same time like she was living it.

She was reaching out to touch his bent head when the boy shuddered and cried out hoarsely, his voice like that of a kid who had cried so much.

"It hurt. Make it stop. They killed me, take me to the hell, Astral. My heart, it’s gone, it’s gone... Look what they did to me!"

The boy jerked his head up, and before Belle could focus on what he was showing her, she was yanked back from the painting that she almost lost her balance—but was steadied by a strong hand that wrapped around her upper arm.

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