Page 12 of Honeythorn
Milan scoffed. “You are achild. It was you who invited me to this meeting!”
“A grave mistake on my part, I agree.”
“You—if you were expecting some wilting Omega to be barely seen and certainly not heard, then you have agreed to marry the wrong person! You allow my questions yesterday, but not today? It is like I’m betrothed to two men. You are making me dizzy.”
Raphael snorted air out of his nose like a bull. The effect was entirely ridiculous. Without another word, he strode out of the room. Milan watched him go.
“See you at dinner!” he called out before the door slammed shut.
Milan had not felt so frustrated in his entire life.
**********
Larry was hovering nervously as Milan glared at the empty dining room. It wasn’t that Raphael’s infantile behaviour was a surprise, but it was no less enraging for it.
“I expect his highness is in his abode? Playing with his bilboquet, perhaps?” Milan waved his hand around to enhance his sarcasm.
“Um…”
“Never mind. My apologies, Larry. I think I will go and see what is keeping my dear husband-to-be from the simple act of attending dinner.”
Stomping rather ungracefully—there was a time for grace and another for bullish force, Milan had always thought—up the stairs, he had to take a moment in front of Raphael’s door to try and compose himself. It was a lost cause, however. He could feel his cheeks were hot, his hands refusing to unclench from tight fists. He was utterly at his wit’s end as to how he had ended up with an Alpha as mercurial as a teenager and just about as mature.
Milan pounded on Raphael’s door. There was a faint noise from inside. Milan waited. He felt the pressure in his head heighten as thirty seconds passed. He knocked on the door again. He waited twenty seconds, this time. Nothing.
“Raphael,” Milan called, his fist on the door again, “I swear to all that has ever been alive, if you don’t open this doorright now—”
Milan took a startled step back as the door was yanked open, revealing a glowering and half-undressed Raphael. No shirt, breeches loose, and missing even his stockings. Milan couldn’t help but find his feet oddly vulnerable. Not that Raphael’s state was of any consequence to the matter at hand.
“What,” Raphael said, for there was no questioning inflection anywhere to be seen.
“Dinner is waiting downstairs.” Milan managed to make his voice a reasonable volume, despite the tone being cold enough to match the Nordic weather.
“I have asked for my dinner to be brought to my rooms.”
“And for what reason is that?” Milan grit out.
“I desire solitude,” Raphael had the gall to say with a straight face.
“Then do not marry,” Milan hissed. They were to be wed in less than a week, and this was what Raphael was doing because Milan showed more interest in the estate than was befitting of an Omega?
Raphael would be lucky to leave this marriage in one piece.
“Fine. I will go downstairs,” was all he said before the door was slammed shut. Milan raised his fists to his mouth to muffle the scream of frustration.
To Raphael’s benefit—for Milan did not know what he would resort to if the promise hadn’t been kept—Raphael did appear ten minutes later. Ten minutes, Milan struggled not to comment, that Milan had to spend sitting alone in the dining room letting anger wash everything in a rather unfetching red.
The next few minutes were a pantomime of an unhappy marriage, despite the fact that they weren’t even bonded. They ate, stared straight ahead, and each stubbornly kept their silence as if it were punishment for the other.
In the midst of the swamp of his anger, Milan had a sudden, strange moment in which he was forced to step back from his body and see the scene without the blood pumping so furiously through his body.
What he saw was…ridiculous. Two grown men scraping their knives and forks against their plates, chewing like bovine, practically choking on their righteous pride.
Milan missed his family terribly. He had always been impetuous, stubborn, impulsive. It was only because of his parents and siblings that he had been able to curb some of those habits. They had helped him become a better person.
What would his mother say if she were there? His mother, with her kind eyes and calloused hands and glowing halo of curly hair? He could almost hear her disappointed clucking ring through the tense silence of the room.
The vision deflated the anger that had buoyed him this far.Perhaps, Milan conceded in his mind,the fury is easier to feel than fear, loneliness, and sadness. Anger blinds, but it does not cure.
