Chapter : 563

“You believe you know my husband, Lady Faria,” Rosa stated, the words not a question, but a simple, flat, and deeply insulting, statement of fact. “Because you spent a few weeks in a pavilion with him, painting a picture of soap.”

The dismissal was absolute. It reduced their intense, stimulating, and revolutionary artistic collaboration, the most exciting creative experience of Faria’s life, to a trivial, almost childish, absurdity. Painting a picture of soap. The words were designed to sting, to belittle, to put Faria firmly, and contemptuously, back in her place.

“You saw the surface,” Rosa continued, her voice the same cool, level monotone, a scalpel dissecting Faria’s naive, emotional outburst with a cold, clinical precision. “You saw the charming innovator. The clever merchant. The man who has learned, it seems, to play the games of the court with a surprising, new aptitude. You saw the mask he has chosen to wear for the world. And you, like a child dazzled by a particularly shiny new toy, have mistaken the mask for the man.”

She took a single, slow, deliberate step closer, and for the first time, Faria felt a genuine, primal flicker of fear. The aura around Rosa, the pocket of winter that always surrounded her, seemed to intensify, the scent of the roses around them seeming to dull, to fade, in its presence.

“You speak of his ‘warmth’,” Rosa murmured, the word itself seeming to freeze on her lips. “You speak of his ‘vision’. You see a brilliant, rising star.” She paused, then her voice dropped, becoming a whisper of pure, chilling ice. “I see a man whose power erupts from him in catastrophic, uncontrolled waves that can shatter stone and threaten the very stability of a royal palace. I see a man who is being actively, professionally, hunted by assassins from an unknown, and clearly very dangerous, organization.”

She tilted her head, her veiled gaze seeming to pierce right through Faria’s own shocked, disbelieving expression. “You saw him laugh with you over a pot of paint, Lady Faria. I have seen him unconscious on the floor of our chambers, his body wreathed in a chaotic storm of fire and ice that was threatening to tear his very soul apart, a storm so powerful that even my own mother-in-law, the Duchess, whose power you cannot possibly comprehend, struggled to contain it.”

Every word was a blow, a revelation, a shard of a darker, more terrifying reality that Faria had never even guessed at. Assassins? Catastrophic power surges? Weeping breakdowns? The charming, brilliant, and confident collaborator she knew was… this? A man walking a tightrope over an abyss of chaos and danger?

“So, you will forgive me, Lady Faria,” Rosa concluded, her voice now a blade of pure, sharp, and utterly, comprehensively, dismissive ice, “if I do not share your… romantic… assessment of his character. You see a vision. I see a volatile, high-risk variable whose full, and likely quite destructive, potential has yet to be calculated.”

She looked at Faria, at her stunned, pale face, and delivered the final, killing blow. “You have created a beautiful painting for him. A very effective piece of commercial art. Your debt is paid. Your business is concluded.” Her meaning was as clear, and as sharp, as a shard of glass. Your involvement in his life is over.

“Confine yourself to your canvas, my lady,” Rosa advised, her voice a final, soft, and utterly unforgiving, warning. “And do not presume to understand a marriage you are not a vpart of, or a man you clearly, truly, do not know at all.”

With that, without another word, without a backward glance, Rosa Siddik turned, and with the silent, fluid grace of a phantom, she glided away, leaving Faria Kruts standing alone in the suddenly cold, and silent, rose garden.

Faria stood frozen in the aftermath of Rosa’s verbal evisceration, the beautiful, fragrant rose garden suddenly feeling like a desolate, winter-blasted wasteland. The Ice Princess’s words had been more than just a dismissal; they had been a brutal, comprehensive demolition of her own, naive, and she now realized, hopelessly superficial, understanding of Lloyd Ferrum.

Assassins. Uncontrolled power surges. Ghosts that could reduce him to a weeping wreck. The image of the charming, confident, and brilliant collaborator she had come to admire, to respect, to… to feel something for, was shattering, replaced by a new, far more complex, and infinitely more tragic, portrait. He was not just a rising star; he was a man walking a razor’s edge, fighting a war she couldn’t see, haunted by demons she couldn't imagine.

Chapter : 564

And she, in her ignorance, in her passion, had presumed to understand him. Had presumed to champion him. Had presumed to challenge his own wife on the nature of his heart. The arrogance of it, the sheer, foolish, romantic arrogance of it, made her flush with a new kind of shame, a shame that was deeper, more painful, than any simple embarrassment.

Rosa’s warning—Do not presume to understand a marriage you are not a part of, or a man you clearly, truly, do not know at all—echoed in her mind, a cold, hard, and undeniable truth. She had seen a single, sunlit facet of the man, and had mistaken it for the entire gemstone. Rosa, for all her coldness, for all her emotional distance, saw the whole, terrifying, brilliant, and deeply flawed, diamond. She was not just his wife; she was his keeper (of his ruthless side). The guardian of his secrets. The silent, watchful warden of the storm that raged within him.

The realization was a profound, humbling, and deeply, deeply, painful one. The burgeoning, unfamiliar feelings she had been wrestling with—the admiration, the respect, the… affection—they now seemed not just foolish, but almost profane. She was a child, admiring the beautiful, shifting colors of a volcano, utterly oblivious to the destructive, all-consuming fire that raged at its heart.

She looked down at her own hands, at the faint, lingering traces of charcoal beneath her fingernails. She had thought they were creating something together, a shared vision. But now she saw that she had just been a tool, a skilled artisan hired to paint a pretty facade on a building that was threatening to collapse from within. Her art, her passion, her connection to him… it had all been a part of his larger, more desperate, game of survival.

A cold, bitter anger began to rise within her, an anger directed not at Rosa, not even at Lloyd, but at herself. At her own foolishness. At her own romantic, artistic naivety. She had let herself be drawn in, had let herself feel something for a man whose reality was so far beyond her comprehension that she might as well have fallen in love with a star.

She turned, her movements stiff, jerky, her earlier grace gone. She walked back to her easel, to the beautiful, serene landscape of the sea and the sky she had been trying, and failing, to paint. She looked at the blank vellum, at her own inability to capture the simple beauty before her, her mind so consumed by the complex, intoxicating enigma of him.

And then, her anger, her shame, her frustration, coalesced into a single, new, and fiercely, defiantly, artistic resolve.

Rosa was right. She did not know him. She could not presume to understand the depths of his pain, the shadows of his past. But she was an artist. And an artist’s purpose was not just to understand, but to see. To observe. To capture the truth of a subject, even a truth that was hidden, complex, contradictory.

She would not retreat. She would not confine herself to her canvas, as Rosa had so contemptuously commanded. She would turn her canvas into her weapon. Her tool of understanding.

She picked up a fresh stick of charcoal, her grip firm, her hand no longer trembling. A new, fierce fire blazed in her amethyst eyes, a fire that was not of romance, not of infatuation, but of pure, unadulterated, artistic purpose.

She would not just sketch his face from memory anymore. She would study him. She would observe him, from a distance, as a subject. She would deconstruct the paradox of him, the light and the shadow, the strength and the sorrow, the genius and the ghost. She would paint the man Rosa had described—the haunted, powerful, and brilliant warrior, walking a tightrope over an abyss. She would create a new portrait, a true portrait, one that captured not just his face, but the very essence of his beautiful, terrible, and tragic, soul.