Married To The Mad Vampire Lord - Chapter 449

Chapter 449: “I won’t fail.”
Without Angel, the piano room became quiet, with only the wind outside the window and distant birdsong drifting in. Belle gazed through the glass, where the red curtains were pulled aside and hanging on their hooks, giving her a view of the pale gray sky.

Even with the fireplace burning and the windows shut, the cold still remained in the air, bone-deep and stubborn. She subconsciously pulled her coat closed again and buttoned it, concealing and shielding her stomach. Then she allowed herself to breathe and enjoy the silent moment, without Angel constantly talking and asking questions without a single pause for air.

She loved him dearly, but sometimes Angel talked far too much. The thought made her smile to herself as she sipped from the tea on the desk.

Life was so fragile that it could be lost in a single blink, and she was happy that once she completed retrieving the souls, she would remain in her mortal form. She could finally think about what her life would be like as a vampire. The elders would let her go once she rectified her mistakes, at least that was the rule and elders don’t go against it. But she was being very careful, making sure they never discovered she was breaking yet another law of the dead by keeping Rav.

To think that everything she had gone through in her past life was what brought her to this life now was almost unbelievable. She remembered how, in that life, it had seemed she would never be happy again after what happened with Deven and the way he ruined her life.

Being a reaper had taken away all that pain and sorrow, but it hadn’t taken away the incompleteness and emptiness that felt like it was eating her even in that form. They had said a reaper was not meant to feel, but she felt, because the feeling of emptiness was a feeling on its own.

It was when she met Rohan and became friends with him that she realized she wanted more than being a being of the dead. Turning back the hands of time and changing many destinies should be something she regretted now, but Belle did not regret it even now, because she had been given something priceless in life.

Belle’s hand went to her belly, caressing it absentmindedly as the baby kicked softly. The kicks were always gentle, with no aggression. Rohan had told her that the baby might be part vampire and even part demon, but it seemed that her own part was stronger in the baby which made the pregnancy less hard on her mortal body.

She had taken a hundred and ten souls and had forty-five more souls to send away. The one she would be taking next was in the land Rohan said was far away. It would be a long journey for both of them, and she was grateful the baby wasn’t a hard one to carry.

As she was marveling at this and planning how the journey would go, Kuhn, who could now go far away from the castle and often did, to escape Angel who until now hadn’t given up on removing his hood, appeared in the piano room, knowing Angel wasn’t there now.

‘Little demon is the same as the father. When Rohan was little, he also wanted to remove my hood,’ Kuhn grumbled as he walked forward and sat himself on the bench Angel had left, his wooden body cracking with the movement.

Belle smiled at his words, remembering how Rohan had once been the same, always wanting to see what Kuhn’s head looked like. Unknown to them, Kuhn had no head, only eyes with words coming out, and the cloak and hood were there to protect him until his body took on a reaper’s form. Not feeding regularly had delayed his growth, and if his hood were removed, it would delay it even more.

She owed it to the creature, as his past master, to make sure he fed well, which was why she never failed to take him along to collect souls. Before she could keep her mortal form forever, she had to ensure he completed his transformation into a reaper and would be free from her as well.

He was a good companion, one who had tried his best to protect her in his own way by keeping things out.

“I am sorry if Angel is a bother to you, Kuhn. He is as curious as a cat,” she apologized.

‘It’s fine,’ he replied tonelessly. ‘I don’t get angry because of the kid.’

“Have any of the elders noticed I am prolonging Rav’s time?” she asked the creature, who had just come from the land of the dead as the aura was strong around him.

Kuhn shook his head. ‘Not yet. Everyone is still waiting for you to fail and be punished for good. Many reapers still want you to be punished more than this to set examples for others. But others not like you, no one has courage to break rules.’

With the timeline of the land of the dead and here being different, only a few hours had probably passed for them since she returned to take back souls, not months. Many of the reapers who had disliked her as Astral for being a favorite of the elders would be waiting for her to fail and perish. They just didn’t know that her emotions would never hold her back from sending all those souls back, it only gave her determination to stay for people she cared about.

Failing was completely out of the question. If she failed now, there would be no third chance. She wouldn’t even be alive to ask for one. The elders knew exactly what they were doing when they granted her this single opportunity.

“I won’t fail. I will make sure of it,” Belle muttered. Then she added, “Can I send you to get something for me in town? I want to buy something for Rohan for tomorrow, but as you already know, I cannot go out and let people see me in this condition.”

‘What will I buy?’ Kuhn gambled. This wasn’t the first time he was being sent to run errands, where he would go and take the thing and then drop the money right there without even being seen.

—

That day, Angel had already told Rav and Evenly about Belle’s plan to celebrate Rohan’s birthday the next day, even before Belle could tell them herself. His excitement was just too much to contain. He worked on his surprise in secret, and Belle worked on hers in the drawing room where Evenly was snacking on the blood candy Rav had gotten for her.

Evenly’s stomach was larger than Belle’s, even though they were only a few months apart. Yet despite how well the baby seemed to be growing, fear still clung to her heart, the constant worry that she might lose this child too. Because of that fear, she and Rav moved to one of the rooms downstairs, where he stayed with her and cared for her every hour of the day himself.

She had lost her first child because of a fall on the stairs. Evenly didn’t want to take even the smallest chance with this one, which was why she rarely went upstairs anymore.

When Rohan returned from the royal castle that evening, nobody said a word to him about any birthday plans. These days his moods were up and down, shifting like the wind.

Being around people he despised all day was more exhausting than anything else. His cousins were the most annoying pairs not to mention the princess he wanted more than anything to send Rafael to visit her.

He had fought the urge to choke them all to death countless times, especially when he heard the suggestion that his wife should be kept in the royal castle, held hostage until the war was certain, and they knew whether Aragonia was against them. Those words had been suggested by the first vampire prince.

If not for one of the Gaggers who always brought such ideas down by reminding them to act righteously and follow the peace treaty, that the human bride would be protected unless Aragonia turned against them, Rohan might have lost control.

They still weren’t certain if Aragonia had joined forces with the other lands, and even though he knew the truth, he would make sure no one else did. He had already silenced more than three officials who sent spies to gather information from Aragonia, blaming their deaths on rogue attacks.

To protect Belle, he endured his days among narrow-minded vampires instead of enjoying every moment with his family. Until Belle finished taking back the souls, gave birth, and altered Rav’s destiny so they could proceed with their original plan to leave, Rohan didn’t think peace would ever be his.

As always upon returning, he shrugged off his coat and handed it to a waiting servant before going to find his wife and son in the big castle.

In two days, he would have to fly her to Groovestill to take a soul, and the journey was almost as far as the mountains where they had lived before.

He found Belle in the drawing room. She was sitting with her legs propped on a cushion. The moment she noticed him enter, she quickly hid something behind her and shifted a cushion to cover it, but he didn’t think much of it as he strode toward her where she sat on the couch.

She smiled up at him as he pulled her to her feet, one arm slipping around her waist.

“Hello, love,” he drawled, leaning down to kiss her before wrapping her tightly in his arms, breathing in her scent, the one thing that could always soothe him after a long day of work.

“How was your day?” Belle asked, rubbing her hand up and down his back.

“Annoying as always,” he muttered. “The talk of war is already getting under my skin. Sometimes I wish it would just happen quickly and wipe them all out, but then I remember I can’t think like that with all of you still here.”

He tightened his hold on her just as he felt the baby kick against him. Unlike with Angel, he couldn’t communicate with this little one and had no idea what the gender was, but every soft kick sent a quiet thrill through his heart. He leaned back slightly and rubbed his large, gloved hand over her belly, feeling another flutter beneath his palm.

They stayed like that for a while, until Angel came running in to greet his father.