shuhaige
Chapter 21
I was pissed.
Not because the house was a shithole, although it was.
…kind of.
It looked horrible from the outside, yes – but to be honest, it was kind of cute on the inside. I’d seen places like it in movies my entire life and had secretly wanted to stay in one since I was a little kid.
Which was not really an option when you grew up as a mafiosa’s granddaughter and lived in a 700-year-old palazzo in Venice.
Once I saw how clean and nice it was on the inside, I was actually kind of excited. I felt like I was a little kid again and got to stay the night in a treehouse from a movie.
I wasn’t about to let him know that, though.
No, I was pissed because he was being a bossy asshole –
Just like every other dumbass mafia thug who worked for my grandmother.
It was gonna be his way or the highway.
I…
can’t…
STAND that.
He didn’t ever ask me once what I wanted.
He was running the show, and that was THAT. He decided everything.
And to be really honest…
If there was one thing I was still super pissed off about, it was that he’d spanked me back at the university.
I was still angry.
He hadn’t apologized, that was for sure.
Yes, okay, he’d saved me from being kidnapped –
But he’d also humiliated me in front of dozens – if not hundreds – of people.NôvelD(ram)a.ôrg owns this content.
And his attitude!
Like I owed him an infinite number of blowjobs for what he did –
When we both knew he only did it to suck up to my grandmother.
I was a job for him. That was it.
If I wasn’t Nona’s granddaughter and he wasn’t getting something out of it, he would have left me back at Ca’ Foscari to die, and that was the truth.
He’d get what he wanted from Nona when this was all over – whether that was money, a business deal, or whatever mafia bullshit he had in mind.
He’d get his reward. There was no doubt about that.
The point was, he didn’t do any of it for me…
And yet he still expected me to kiss his ass.
His…
Ahem…
Very nice ass.
…okay, I’ll come clean.
…
…he was hot.
And I was kind of into him.
Or I would have been into him if he wasn’t such a prick.
And the fact that I was into him (SORT of)…
And that he was bossing me around…
And acting like HE was the man, and I was some stupid little girl who should just be thankful he’d saved me…
Plus how he’d humiliated me in front of all those people…
(And the weird feeling, which I didn’t want to admit, that I’d kind of liked it when he spanked me…)
You add all that up, and what you got was this:
The motherfucker was gonna pay.
I’d been making him pay ever since we’d left Venice.
Bit by bit…
Drop by drop.
Death by a thousand cuts.
I’d actually really enjoyed today.
Breaking into a car? That was fucking cool.
Driving into the mountains? AWESOME.
Hearing gravel under tires for the first time? I know it’s stupid, but it made me so happy.
Staying in a weird-ass little cabin in the woods? Kind of diggin’ it.
It was like I was getting to live in a Netflix series. So much more interesting than my boring, everyday life.
Dinner had been pretty good, too. Not what I was accustomed to, but I really enjoyed it.
You know what I’d enjoyed even more?
Getting him to flip the fuck out.
He loved pretending he was so calm, and so reasonable, and such a manly man!
Asshole.
All it took was me punching his buttons over and over and over and over –
And he fucking lost it.
HA!
It had taken everything I had not to burst into a grin when he nearly started shouting in the restaurant.
I didn’t want to give it away that this was all a game to me…
Just a way to get back at him.
Plus, I knew from being around my grandmother’s henchmen my entire life how far you could push a guy before he’d go apeshit.
You gotta go right up to the line…
And then back off.
Then, next time, you can go even further…
But then you gotta back off again.
It was a process.
You kept moving the line half an inch every time…
And eventually, you’d drive them absolutely bugfuck insane.
So I let Massimo have his way for a while.
Let him think he’d won.
…and then I would start annoying the hell out of him again.
Some of my reactions were genuine, though.
I was actually pretty shocked when we drove up to the cabin.
I did not want to stay here (at least until I saw the inside). That part had been real.
I guess he’d gotten me to flip out, now that I thought about it…
Which pissed me off, too.
So I wasn’t about to let him know that I was actually okay with the place.
That’s the headspace I was in when I finished up in the bathroom, walked out…
And suddenly shit got real.