Married To The Mad Vampire Lord-Chapter 39: The wolf’s den_Part 3

Belle, who had just realized what had happened and that she had broken an important plant belonging to the devil she was trying to avoid angering for as long as she was in Nightbrook, nervously bit her lower lip and bent down without bothering that her expensive dress would get dirty and drenched from the wet grass.

She began trying to save the plant by covering its roots with the mud that had poured out of the broken pot, her slightly shaky hands turning clumsy with each word Cordelia panickingly told her about how important the plant was to Rohan. She wished the vampiress would shut up and not make her more nervous!

She wouldn’t have dropped it in the first place had Cordelia not told her something as shocking as the fact that she was once engaged to her husband and that she was special to him. From what she had noticed of Rohan, she did not believe a man like him would hold anything special. But then, if Cordelia wasn’t special to him, he wouldn’t have given her permission to be in a place forbidden to everyone. No wonder they had spoken so casually to each other in the dining hall and, at some point, forgotten about her presence.

It wasn’t a new thing for cousins to marry even in Aragonia. She’d witnessed many weddings between first cousins to keep the family wealth within the bloodline, not to mention second cousins.

Her own parents had been second cousins, and if she had been as beautiful as Eve, she would have also been wedded to her cousin, who had so openly said to her face that she wasn’t worth his glance if they were not relatives and, therefore, he wouldn’t take her as his wife—which she had been thankful for.

However, what shocked her into dropping the plant pot was that she had not expected the revelation, nor had she thought there was something between the two vampires that went beyond being cousins.

Cordelia had said they would have been married long ago had the late king and queen not died...

The two seemed to share so much in common when it came to being heartless. They would have made a perfect couple... Those thoughts ran through her mind as she tried to save the plant and also ignore the crying vampiress, who kept adding fuel to her nervousness. She didn’t need to be told what happened when one destroyed an important item.

Belle tried to save the rare-looking plant. The plant was relatively small, just a few inches tall on the ground, and was still in its early stages of growth, with only three ebony-black leaves on it that had piqued her curiosity to pick up the pot in the first place. But to her surprise, when she placed the wet soil around its roots so it wouldn’t die, it began to wither and turn dry.

Its black leaves slowly fell away, and the wind that whisked past her face, making her hair fall over her eyes, blew away the three fallen leaves from the plant. She gasped and stood up as if to follow the leaves, but she stopped short in her tracks as she came face to face with the devil, who looked totally annoyed beyond words.

Her breath hitched in her throat as his intense dark eyes bored into the middle of her forehead, not her eyes, causing her heart to skip a dreadful beat.

Using her tongue, she wet her lips, and she was surprised to feel that even her tongue had no moisture to moisten her dry lips. Just one day in this dreadful land and she’d brought trouble upon herself when she had been warned to not anger the mad vampire!

She saw as his eyes slowly moved away from her face to the side, where she knew the plant had been before she dropped it under the apple tree. He walked to it almost in a trance-like state, and Belle stepped aside as he walked past her. She turned to see him crouch down to use his gloved hand to gather the soil in his hand and let it slip through his fingers without a trace of the plant that had once been there, not even its root, which astonished and made her more curious about it at the same time.

Rohan had stopped to change his bloody gloves before coming down, and as he stared at the soil where there was no trace of his plant, a plant so special he would never be able to get it back again, his fingers clenched around the soil.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but Belle thought his honey-colored, unblemished skin turned two shades paler. He stood up to his feet, still staring intensely at the spot as if he couldn’t believe it. The wind blew at the disheveled blue strands of hair on his forehead, and lightning flashed in the thick, cloudy sky as if it would rain, but he did not move. And when he suddenly did, she hurriedly looked away and dropped her head.

Belle’s muddy hands clutched her dress as she saw from the corner of her eye that the sobbing vampiress had run to him. She didn’t look up, even when Cordelia began to tell Rohan what had happened, but Belle’s brows furrowed as she realized the woman had twisted the truth to her husband.

"...I tried to stop her from walking further into the garden, but she never listened. When Rav reminded me that you did not allow anyone into the garden, I only brought her here so we could look at it from the enclosed rails at the side of the yard," Cordelia said as she dabbed her handkerchief under her teary eyes in front of Rohan.

"She insisted on entering, and I couldn’t stop her when she told me that she is your wife and has the right to be anywhere in the castle. I know how important the plant is to you, and I warned her not to pick it up... I warned her, and now look what she did." She pointed a shaky hand to the broken pot where the plant had been whisked away by the wind.

Cordelia did not like the human bride, and if there was any way she could ensure that her relationship with Rohan would never become as close as her own, she was willing to do anything to push the human away from his life. Yes, there was an agreement signed about the human’s well-being in Nightbrook, but Cordelia could only tolerate the fact that she lived in the castle as long as she didn’t have Rohan’s attention. The way he had fed her and looked at her with amusement in the dining hall was the first time she had seen him behave that way with any human since she’d known him.

She couldn’t stand this human and wanted her to be strangled to death by Rohan for daring to ruin his important treasure!

Belle wanted to look up and defend herself against the vampiress’s accusations that she had been warned, but then she didn’t. She only clenched her fists tighter against the sides of her blue, dirty dress, now stained with wet grass at the front, as she felt his intense eyes on her while his cousin kept rambling on and on. She knew from experience that no one would believe her if she said the vampiress had encouraged her to touch anything she wanted, it would be her word against his childhood betrothed’s.

Many times, Eve had broken or taken something from their father and placed the blame on Belle, who had done nothing but try to fix the damaged item. Since she was the one caught with it, she always took the fall. And whenever she saw her sister crying, pleading with those green eyes for Belle to help her, she couldn’t help but shield her from their father’s wrath—silently accepting the blame as the elder.

However, in cases where she didn’t want to take the blame and tried to voice her innocence, she wouldn’t be believed and would be accused of playing the victim because she was jealous of Eve.

Now, however, she had broken the item, but she hadn’t been told that she wasn’t supposed to touch anything. The vampiress had pushed her under the moving carriage wheel without so much as telling Rohan that she had been the one who brought Belle here to explore.

Belle suddenly felt the wind blowing fiercely through the garden turn chilling as Rohan began walking toward where she stood. Cold sweat prickled the back of her neck, making her want to turn on her heels and run for it. She knew that plant was no ordinary plant from how it had dried up immediately, shrunk to nothingness, and lost its leaves to the wind.

What sort of plant takes years to sprout from the soil? And why was it black?

Her curiosity had always been her undoing, and she suddenly remembered a time when Jamie always made the joke that curious people died too soon. She shouldn’t have been curious about the black plant!