The Titan Queen - Levi X Reader

Chapter 7 - The Proposal

Orion wasn't mad.

No.

Mad didn't even begin to cover the boiling, raw emotion that made him want to punch everything and anything. He could practically feel his temperature rising, the blood simmering in his veins.

No, he wasn't mad.

He was enraged.

It was made worse as he stood in Belua's bedchambers as she changed clothes in her bathroom. Ordinarily, he would have gleefully taken the opportunity to snoop around and sneer at the sheer amount of time she was taking to get dressed – but fury made it so that all he could see was that stupid, moronic girl spitting at him.

Orion did not know why she'd captured his gaze immediately, but she had. Her eyes – something about them called to him. He didn't know why or how – and that made him mad. Mad enough that he'd found an excuse to kneel before her and grip her chin, jerking her head towards him so that he could get a closer look at what whispered to him beneath the endless black.

It wasn't lust.

He'd seen Annie's hardened, smug gaze as he'd been wondering about the human. He'd known what she thought, what she suspected about his intentions.

He knew enough about lust to know that this was not it.

Fury, though – that was the right word to use. After she'd spat in his face, it had exploded under his skin so that one moment later, the girl had been thrown to the floor by the sheer force behind his punch to her face. It hadn't stopped Belua's strangled laugh – the sound echoing in his reddening ears, even now.

Belua opened the bathroom door, her fingertips massaging the sides of her head at the sight of Orion prowling the length of her bedroom – as if he were the cause of her headache. He opened his mouth to snarl something, anything – but then he got a good look at what, exactly, she'd spent so long putting on.

The dress was beautiful. It was a pretty, idle green tunic that had been hinted with gold – and if Orion dared to be poetic, he would have sarcastically commented on how it offset the grey of the sky and the miserable weather. The rain had, after all, washed away snow so that it had become grey mush along the sodden grass, and the grey sky had continued to darken as the sun admitted its defeat. But the look that Belua gave him told him to shove his words up somewhere that he wished not to explore at this precise moment. "It crushes my ribs something awful," she seethed.

The effect the corset had, in Orion's opinion, was rather favourable.

But he was smart enough to like the fact his teeth were all in his head and knew to not say anything too stupid. "I think it's nice."

"Nice? I did not spend time figuring out the hooks and doom my lungs to get the praise of 'nice'. It needs to be stunning enough to make my Mother and Uncle think I was sulking all day."

Orion allowed his hand to reach out and tug one of the frilled sleeves lightly. "Stunning, then."

Belua raised an eyebrow and walked to the door, her skirt dragging along the floor. "That's what I was going to say about that human's black eye."

Orion didn't answer – just allowed his mouth to tighten as anger again simmered to the surface. It didn't matter that his betrothed had walked out in a dress and every single rational thought had emptied from his head – the anger was still so close to brimming over.

"I know that you're mad that I let them live," Belua continued – using that damned word. Orion was not mad. "But I told you – they mean something more than just food. We don't know if they're truly alone or if they had help."