“I wouldn’t let that happen,” I replied.
He scoffed. “You don’t have a lot of control over it, do you? You need to get your shit together.”
“Or what?” I snapped, yanking myself free of him and puffing up a bit. “Maybe you’ve forgotten who’s the boss and who’s the assistant around here.Youwork formenot the other way around. Watch who you’re talking to.”
Milli’s jaw flexed and relaxed over and over. His nostrils flared and I could see in his eyes that he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t. He glared at me, but I held my ground, not backing down from him until he finally gritted his teeth and said, “Yes, sir.”
He turned around and walked down the hallway, leaving me fuming in his wake. I didn’t like getting nasty with Milli like that, but sometimes he confused his role because he’d technically been around longer than me. I carried the Raines name, and he didn’t, but at times he acted more like he had the same level of power than he did. He occasionally got out of line, but all it ever took was a quick reminder to bring him back down. He’d cool off and I’d go and find him later so we could talk it out. Accusing me of not having control was unacceptable. I’d have to remind him of that as well.
For now, I had to get to Avion.
I knocked on her door when I reached it, entering after she called out, “Come in.” She was standing at her easel, with it angled perfectly towards the window, and appeared to be working on a still of the moon outside. “Hey.”
“Hi,” I grunted, irritated that Milli got me all riled up before coming to see Avion, but at least I could rely on a session to calm me down. “Come here.”
“Okay, just a sec. I wanna finish this.”
That infuriated me more. I was already on edge and Milli had called my control into question, I didn’t want to get it from Avion. “I said come here.”
She side-glanced over at me, not displaying the same lust-filled gaze she typically did before a session. “And I said, just a sec.” She snorted. “I’m almost done. Just be patient.”
“I don’t want to be patient.” I stormed across the room to where she was standing and reached out for the paintbrush. “I’m in control, remember?”
“Not right now, you’re not,” she snatched backward from me and the brush in her hand dragged across her easel, leaving an out-of-place black mark on her portrait. “No!”
Seeing the look of disappointment on her face snapped me out of my rage in a second. “Shit, Avion, I’m sorr…”
She turned a fiery glare at me. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mess up your painting.”
“If you’d been patient and not acting like abratyou wouldn’t have,” she snapped back.
Some of my anger came flooding back into me. “Hey, watch who you’re talking to. Remember who the dom is and I don’t like being told no.”
“That’s too damn bad. You’re the dom when we’re having sex. If being your sub means that I have to be submissive to you all the time, then I’m out,” she barked back. “You can leave.”
It wasn’t really anger, but pure shock when I murmured, “No one talks to me that way.”
“Fine, then I’m done talking to you,” she said.
It brought my mind back to when Kellyanne stopped being my sub. The ending to that relationship was very similar, although Kellyanne didn’t want to give up total control in the bedroom either. Avion had been perfect in every way when it came to being my sub sexually, she just didn’t want to give over that kind of control in the other aspects of our lives. I wasn’t used to something like that. Everyone around me bent to me, it was just the way it had always been.
But if I couldn’t let Avion have control outside of the bedroom, was I going to lose her inside of it? I wasn’t sure I was okay with that.
“Look, Avion.” I gently grabbed her arm and turned her to face me. “I’m sorry. I… You’re new for me and I don’t quite know—”
Her bedroom door slammed open and Milli came rushing in. His head was covered in sweat and his hair was a mess. “We have a problem.”
I left Avion’s side and rushed over to Milli. “What’s the problem?”
Before he could answer, there was a loud crash. I looked back over just in time to see someone dressed in black paratrooper gear enter into the room through one of the windows they’d broken. He wrapped his arms around Avion and then yanked on his cord, being snatched backward instantly, pulling Avion with him.
If that weren’t bad enough, the fact that she actually reached out for me with a look of terror on her face and screamed, “Giovanni, help!” was really the nail in the coffin.
I’d let my guard down. I didn’t have a gun on me, but that didn’t matter at the moment, I rushed towards the window, prepared to leap out of it and take off after Avion and whoever had taken her, but as I was about to climb onto the windowsill, a bullet narrowly missed my head. It came so close that I felt the heat of it singe the side of my neck and leave a lasting burn behind.
“Gio,” Milli grunted.
