Belle was taken aback, "Is it a she then?" She asked. "Tell me who it is."
Rohan rolled his eyes, "He died long ago." He delivered the words with that same blank voice and Belle’s shoulder slowly began to drop in disappointment as her guess about the person not being alive had been proven.
"Oh..." she said and then looked down at the words on the parchment. "Was he a servant in the castle?" she asked quietly.
Rohan watched her disappointed and disheartened expression as she stared at the words in the old parchment that had been there for more than three decades. How could she feel for someone who had written those words without feelings? Her sympathy for the person by just reading the written words astonished and intrigued him. They were just words to him when he read it just now; he felt nothing, nor had the urge to want to know more.
"He was worse than a servant in the castle," Rohan said before he could stop himself and she looked up at him.
"How is that? He wasn’t a servant then?" she asked with a frown. "Tell me what you know about him, please..." she pleaded before he would say no. She knew how he didn’t care about those lower than him but these words would keep bothering her if she did not know whether the person who had written had gotten the chance to live before he was killed.
"Then come lay next to me," Rohan said as he patted the very space next to him and smiled devilishly at her like he dared her. "It’s only fair that I get something in return for having to talk about someone as useless as the person who lived here before. If you can’t do..." He didn’t get to finish his words as his wife quickly rolled over and came to lay right next to him, her back turned to his front as she faced the other side.
"Tell me," she said desperately. He had already touched and even done unspeakable things to her that she would never be able to talk about with any other married women like those in Aragonia, laying next to him was no longer a big deal, as daunting as it might be, she no longer found it uncomfortable. But then her husband wasn’t only looking for her to lay there, he reached out his arm and wrapped it around her, bringing her back close to his front where he pressed their bodies together and his hand that lay on her belly moved through her petticoat, causing her to suck in a breath. She felt his head come to rest in the crook of her neck.
"Are you that desperate to want to hear a story of someone so worthless and low life one shouldn’t bother with as he deserves whatever he got?" he whispered thickly, his lazy voice falling on her skin and causing her toes to involuntarily curl under the sheet that covered her.
"No one deserves to be killed before they could live. A life, no matter how broken or misguided, still holds the right to try, to change, to seek something better. We are not born perfect," she said quietly, and she felt his hand move and tighten around her before his reply fell right on the shell of her ear. "I never knew my wife had so much wisdom." He chuckled softly and ran his tongue against the lobe of her ear, causing Belle to impulsively press her shoulder up at the ticklish sensation.
"You were going to tell me his story?" she reminded, her voice sounding somewhat breathless for no reason, or perhaps for the way he was using this opportunity to make her feel things she wasn’t supposed to all over again.
She heard him sigh and move his head back to rest on the crook of her neck before he started to tell her. "Many years ago before the previous king and queen, the king had a wife he loved and would give the world to. The marriage was of love and not alliance like what many did, they ruled the kingdom with love and then one day the queen got pregnant and it became the happiest moment of their lives as they began to expect the day the child would be born. But closer to when the child began to grow in her belly, they started to see signs that made the king worry,"
Belle listened quietly without interrupting knowing his story would lead to what she wanted to hear about the words in the parchment and how it had gotten there.
"The queen’s pregnancy gave her so much difficulties that the king suggested one night to get a good doctor to get rid of it and the mother agreed immediately. His wife meant the world to him more than the unborn child, but you know the strangest thing everyone couldn’t believe?" he asked her, his voice sounding dry, and without waiting for her reply, he continued, "That unborn child could hear them clearly and know that they wanted to kill him. He began to behave in his Mama’s belly as he wanted to see the world outside the dark womb. He made sure not to request too much blood that drove his mama into killing her own kinds because she craved their blood,
"Their unborn baby was a savage monster that terrified them. On the day he was born, the queen had to be cut open and the child that had started to feed on her from the inside ripped out of her. People say the amount of damage that baby caused to his poor mama was unspeakable, he didn’t deserve to be brought into this world. And to add more salt into their wounds, that child ended up being different, a savage indeed. Tsk, and then they made the decision to make him normal thus they locked him in this room, where he was only allowed to step out once in a while, but that child was so ungrateful he caused many problems for his loving family and they decided one day to kill him, but who would have thought he had written a letter down before his death?"
Rohan stroked her hair as she remained silent for some moments to digest everything he had just told her. "Now you see why I told you it’s not a story worth mentioning because the person who wrote that letter deserves his death for being what he was."
"No, I don’t see it. The story feels incomplete, I want to know what made his parents decide he was a monster and want him dead. It wasn’t fair," Belle said, turning around to face him where their faces were only a breath away, causing her stomach to clench.
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Married To The Mad Vampire Lord