Riot House (Crooked Sinners Book 1)

by Callie Hart

  I have no idea how vigilant the librarians are here, Carina knows better than I do, so I take her word for it. I offer to come with her, but she tells me to stay put and save our spot for us. I get back to work, hunting for references and information that will be useful in our essays, but as the minutes tick by, I grow more and more restless. I can’t concentrate. Trying to focus on any one thing is almost impo—

  “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

  And his cohorts were gleaming in the purple and gold…”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, adrenalin singing through my body, bringing my focus to a very sudden, sharp point.

  “And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

  When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.”

  I slowly close my eyes. “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time than quote grim poetry at me,” I ask, valiantly maintaining my cool, as the phantom owner of that voice comes to stand behind me. I can feel him there, his presence like a raging inferno at my back.

  “I wouldn’t call it grim.” I nearly jump out of my skin when something touches me. My hair, specifically. I see his hand out of the corner of my eye, as he coils a length of my hair around his index finger, his nail still marked with the tiniest chip of black nail polish, rubbing the pad of his thumb lightly over the blonde strands.

  Fighting for an even breath, I remain very, very still. I lick my lips, my mouth too, too dry, and then I speak.

  “For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

  And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

  And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

  And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still…”

  Wren lets the loop of hair he wound around his finger fall loose. He moves silently, walking around the desk so that he’s no longer hovering behind me but standing, brazen as you like, as if he doesn’t care who sees us together, right freaking beside me. “So, you do have a favorite after all,” he muses, looking down at me with curiosity kindling in his eyes.

  I try not to look at him, but not looking at him is like not picking at a scab, or not poking a wobbly tooth with your tongue. Impossible. “Not really. I had to memorize that poem for a class last semester. I guess I haven’t scrubbed it from my memory just yet. Byron’s poems were too flowery for me. I don’t like how they rhymed so obviously most of the time.”

  Wren catches his bottom lip between his teeth, his eyes glowing in an amused way I’ve never seen before. He skirts the table and sits down opposite me, leaning across the polished wood. “You like poetry.” That’s all he says, but it looks as though this revelation is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to him.

  “That seat’s taken, y’know,” I reply bleakly. “Carina’s gonna be back any second. If she sees you sitting here, talking to me—”

  “The whole world will implode and burn to ash, and the seas will dry, and meteors will strike the Earth, obliterating all life as we know it.”

  “—she’ll piece this together, whatever this is. And—”

  He looks confused. “Whatever this is?”

  “Oh. I forgot. Piece of Shit Playbook, rule number three. This is the part where you pretend like nothing happened between us last night, right?”

  Wren smothers a dark grin by resting his chin in his hand, covering his mouth. His hair looks extra wild and unkempt today, which only makes me want to run my fingers through it even more than normal. He’s wearing a thin black sweater with a tiny hole in one of the cuffs. I can’t stop staring at that little hole, as I wait for him to confirm my suspicion: that he truly is a motherfucking asshole.

  “Is this the part where you judge me again and make assumptions about what I’m gonna do?” he fires back.

  God, I’m too tired for these kinds of games. I barely slept last night, and after jogging so far this morning, grinding myself into the ground before dawn even broke properly, I’m running on fumes. Rolling my eyes heavenward, I sag back into my hardbacked chair. “Is there something I can help you with, Wren?”

  My disloyal, double-crossing heart jackhammers away beneath my ribs as he stops smiling, pinning me with that rude green gaze. Normal people don’t look at others the way Wren looks at me. It’s as though he’s searching for something in my face and he won’t blink or turn away until he’s found it. It’s extremely uncomfortable to be studied this way. “You can start by telling me what you meant by, ‘whatever this is.’”

  “Fuck. I don’t know! I didn’t mean anything by it. It was an off-the-cuff comment, okay? Don’t worry, I’m not expecting you to declare me your girlfriend now.”

  He tips his head back and laughs. In the library, where silence is golden, he tips his beautiful fucking head back and he laughs. A stern sshhhhhh! echoes across the room, and a horrible heat creeps up my neck. It was bad enough before, when only a few of the other students working at the desks had noticed Wren’s arrival. Now everyone in the place knows that he’s here, and that I just said something that he found patently ridiculous.

  “You might not have figured it out, but I know exactly what this is, Elodie,” Wren says, his laughter dying on his lips. “If you ever scrape up the courage and want to find out, all you need to do is ask. You know I’ll be unfalteringly honest.”

  “Oh yeah. I can always rely on your unfaltering honesty.” I wonder what the punishment would be for slapping another student. If we were in the art rooms, or Fitz’s den, or the food hall, I might do it and find out, but not here. I wouldn’t dare risk my library card.

  A ruinous smirk tugs at Wren’s mouth. That wicked curve to his lips is absolutely torturous. When I see it, all I can think of is the heat of his mouth as he kissed me on that blanket. The smell of fresh pine and salt air and half-forgotten beaches in his hair as he dipped down to press that cruel mouth to my neck…

  “Is this the part where you tell me how excited you are to meet up tonight?” he asks.

  I ignore the question. “Are you seriously going to risk Carina coming back here and seeing us together?”

  He looks at me like I’m speaking in tongues and nothing I’m jabbering about makes any sense. “I’m sorry, Little E. I don’t know what I did to encourage this belief that I give a flying fuck what Carina Mendoza thinks about anything but let me clear this up. I don’t care if Carina comes back and finds me sitting in this chair. I don’t care if she knows that I want you. I don’t care if she knows that I had my tongue down your throat last night and you made my dick harder than it’s been in two fucking years.”

  Wow.

  I look down at my hands, my cheeks burning like crazy.

  “Oh, Elodie,” Wren whispers breathlessly. “You don’t like hearing that? That you made my dick hard? Or…do you like hearing it too much?”

  “For god’s sake, can you not say stuff like that in public, please?” I despise myself for blushing. From the way he’s staring at me, his lips parted, eyes wide, he’s fascinated by my reaction to his outrageous statement. It would have been so much better for me if I’d kept my cool and not reacted at all. For some reason, it matters to me that he doesn’t think I’m some stuttering, stupid, inexperienced schoolgirl. It shouldn’t, but fuck, it really does.

  Wren slides his hand across the table, palm facing upwards, his fingers curled up toward the ceiling, his eyes fierce and intense. “You do know how crazy you drive me, don’t you, Little E? You know that my body isn’t my own anymore. I fucking crave you. And I really don’t give a fuck who knows it.”

  He looks down at his hand, resting between us on top of the lacquered table’s surface. Clearly, this is some sort of test. He’s waiting for me to reach out and take his hand. I have no idea what his end goal is here, but it feels like a trap and if I put my hand in his I’ll be endangering myself. I follow his gaze, staring at the lines of his palm, tracing them with my eyes, wishing very badly that I could reach out and trace them with t
he tips of my fingers, to feel the heat and the roughness of his skin…

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he whispers.

  Numb. I am so fucking numb. I can’t feel anything bar my own churning fear. It’s impossible not to feel that. “You do?”

  Wren’s voice is as soft as silk, as hushed as snow falling in winter. “Yes. And I swear you’re wrong. This isn’t some bet between me and the other guys. I’ve pinned no wager on whether you care if I live or die. I’m not trying to make you feel something for me that you shouldn’t, purely for my own entertainment…”

  “But that’s what you wanted, right? When I first got here, you decided you were gonna target me as your next plaything. You wanted to hurt me, and you were going to smile while you did it. I saw it in your eyes.”

  “And what do you see now?” I barely hear the words, they’re so quiet.

  Fuck. Please do not look up at him, Elodie. Do not fucking do it.

  My breath stoppers up in my throat; it must have been stuck there for a while, because my lungs are beginning to burn. I can’t help myself. I do it. I look up at him, dead in the eye, and it’s as though I’ve been shot in the chest, a cold, creeping sensation spreading outward from my solar plexus. His eyes are clear. I see no deception in them. I see plenty of pride, and a whole heap of ego, but I also see the faintest, weakest glimmer of hope.

  I can’t bear the pressure building between us a second longer; I look away, out of the window. Wren closes his hand into a fist, withdrawing it back across the table.

  “Is this the part where you leave now?” I ask morosely.

  “Yeah. This is the part where I leave.” He stands, running both his hands back through his hair—a gesture of pure frustration. “I came to tell you that I left something by your door for you, Little E. I thought about going inside and putting it by your bed, but we both know how you feel about people breaking into your room, right?”

  He goes before I can say another word.

  Goddamnit.

  An invisible hand closes around my throat, choking the life out of me as I sit there, waiting for Carina to come back with our lunch. After a while she shows up with a couple of sandwiches, two apples, and a giant bag of Doritos balanced in her arms. I let her chatter away, and I chew and swallow the food she so kindly brought back for me, but I’m not really here. I’m just waiting for an opportunity to bolt. That opportunity arrives when Carina’s phone begins to buzz and she holds up her cell, grinning like an idiot, and tells me that Andre’s calling.

  I make my excuses and I leave her to go talk to her boyfriend.

  On the fourth floor, outside room four sixteen, I find a small turquoise box with a pale green ribbon tied around it, sitting there, waiting for me. With shaking hands, I collect it from the floor and hurry inside, my insides twisting themselves into knots.

  He left me a gift?

  I place the box down on the bed, glaring at it with my hands on my hips.

  He should not have brought me a gift.

  It takes all of my courage to gingerly untie the ribbon and lift up the lid.

  “Oh my god!” I cover my mouth with my hands, trying not to cry out. My eyes sting as I take a step forward, bending over to get a closer look at the tiny little object nestled in amongst a bed of lilac tissue paper inside: the white of his chest, that fades to the blue of his back, that deepens to the dark, midnight blue at the tips of his wings…

  It’s the bird, my mother’s bird, the one that was shattered into a million pieces…and he’s somehow been pieced back together.

  20

  WREN

  A paradigm shift.

  That’s what philosophers would call a change like this.

  Because I haven’t simply changed my mind about something. I’ve had a change of heart. Ponder that for a second. A man’s heart is his footlocker, where he keeps the key pieces of his identity. Where his very purpose and the traits that make up his character reside. His hopes, his dreams, and his nightmares. And Elodie Stillwater has come along, taken a knife to my chest, and removed my heart. She’s switched it out for another one entirely, and now I don’t know where the fuck any of my shit is. I don’t know who I am, or what I’m supposed to be doing, and quite honestly the whole thing is a fucking mess.

  More than anything, I want it to be over.

  I get the feeling this isn’t gonna be over for a very long time, though, if ever, and now I find myself in a position where I feel obliged to do something very rash.

  That manila goddamn envelope. I tried to forget what I’d read, but the words are still there, burning brighter than the sun, whenever I close my eyes. It’s put me in the foulest fucking mood.

  I cut through the rose garden, grinding my teeth so hard that they’ll probably be little more than dust by the time I reach the gazebo. The maze is both prison and sanctuary as I wind my way through the memorized pathway to its center, biting out curse words colorful enough to make steam blow out of my father’s ears. Pax and Dash are already waiting for me when I arrive at the small building hidden beneath the oak trees. Sprawled out on the steps that lead up to the front door, Pax takes one look at me and starts howling like a wolf. “Dear god, Jacobi, you look even saltier than usual. I take it your little meeting with the French whore didn’t go according to plan.”

  With murder in my eyes, I turn and glower at Dash, who’s leaning effortlessly against the wall, plucking the petals from an unopened rose bud. “What?” he asks, feigning innocence. “I had to tell him something. He wanted to know why you bailed on our Albany College plans last night. He’d been looking forward to that sorority party all month.”

  “You could have gone without me,” I snarl. “I wasn’t stopping you.”

  Dash pulls a pouty face. “I know, man, but, for some ungodly reason we both like having you around and it really wouldn’t have been the same if you weren’t there to ruin everybody’s fun. In the meantime, you’re bailing on us for the second time in twenty-four hours to go and see the same girl. We’re beginning to feel like you might be struggling a little with your priorities. Need I remind you that we’ve had your back for the past four years. We’ve lived together and gotten into a whole heap of shit together.” He holds his hands up. “We’ve done so many drugs in so many countries that I have stamps in my passport I don’t even recognize. I could have sworn I’d never been to Brazil. Anyway, the point is, we’re gonna need you to rein this thing in a little. Just for a while, yeah?”

  “Yeah. We need regular, normal, wicked Wren back this weekend.”

  I narrow my eyes, already sensing that something bad’s on the horizon. “Why? What’s happening this weekend?”

  Pax scrambles up, dusting off his jeans. He jumps down the steps, boots thudding when they hit the dirt, and he throws his arm around my shoulder. “It…” He pauses for dramatic effect, “is your birthday, you sneaky fuck! You really think we’d forget? We’re having a last-minute Jacobi turns eighteen! party, and there’s nothing you can say or do to stop it.”

  Christ. I really had hoped they’d have forgotten about that. Chances are they would have—they’re not very good at remembering important dates at the best of times—but then Mercy showed up. And my sister isn’t one to let anyone forget her birthday. Unfortunately for me, we happen to share the same one. “We’re not having a party.”

  “Yes, we fucking are.” Pax nods like he’s just parachuted a bunch of speed.

  “We’re not having a party,” I repeat.

  Dash crosses his arms in front of his chest. “Yeah, mate. We are.”

  “We’re not. I need your help with something this weekend and it can’t wait. I’ve already bought the tickets.”

  The boys look intrigued. “What tickets?” Pax asks suspiciously.

  “Plane tickets. We need to leave the country for a couple of days. And you can’t tell anyone where you’re going, or we’ll all be fucked.”

  Now I’ve got their attention. Really got it. They love a covert tr
ip more than anything else in the world. Including Riot House parties. “How long are we gonna be gone for?” Dashiell queries, pretending to scrutinize a loose thread hanging from the cuff of his shirt.

  “Three days. We leave tonight.”

  “Wow. Well, someone’s feeling presumptuous, aren’t they? What if we don’t wanna go on this little jolly of yours? What if we don’t wanna miss two days of school?”

  “Then I’d have wasted thirty thousand dollars. And you’d be the most confusing person in the world, because who doesn’t want to miss two days of school?”

  “We haven’t filled out the paperwork with Harcourt,” Pax points out, taking a smoke out of a dogeared pack and lighting it.

  “I took the liberty of completing it on your behalf this morning.”

  “Asshole,” Dash groans. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

  “Come on, Lovett. Wouldn’t want to ruin my birthday now, would you?”

  “That’s a low fucking blow.”

  “At least it sounds like we’re flying first class,” Pax mumbles.

  I grin. “Nothing but the best for my boys.”

  “God, don’t you just hate it when he does that? It’s fucking terrifying when you smile.” Dash’s shoulders sag in resignation, though. He’s coming with me on my little sojourn. And if Dash is in, then so is Pax. The guy in question rubs a hand over his shaved head. “Fine. We’ll go where you command, no questions asked. But we are having a party when we get back, Wren. I get the feeling you’re gonna owe us one after this. And there had better be fucking strippers.”

  Cosgrove’s is a squat, ugly building on the outskirts of Mountain Lakes—a bar, managed by a short, balding guy called Patterson, who has the misfortune of looking like Danny De Vito. The guy’s in his late fifties, has a penchant for polishing a glass at least three times before putting it back on a shelf, and does not like me in the slightest. Primarily because I’m underage and shouldn’t be drinking in his bar. But also, because I’m his boss.