Riot Rules

by Callie Hart

  God.

  Who the fuck even knows at this point?

  All I know is that Wren’s frustrated about all the wrong things, and I am the last person he should be taking it out on.

  Pax shows up with a handful of shrimp and a risky smirk on his face. He says something about Mercy looking hot. Wren threatens to murder him or something. I can feel my mouth moving—an attempt to keep the peace—but in my head, my thoughts are roiling.

  I haven’t said a word. I should be so angry with him. After keeping Fitz a secret, and the heat from Mara’s disappearance bringing the cops to our doorstep, now he has the audacity to fall in love with a girl right under our noses. I should knock the fucker out, but I take the higher road. Wren Jacobi saved me once. More than that, he invited me to live with him and made me his friend. I can’t forget that.

  “Fuck this. I’m outta here.” Wren spins on his heel and storms away.

  I yell after him, trying to convince him to stay, but he’s not listening—

  “Let him go.” Pax shoves another shrimp into his mouth. “Moody bastard wants to sulk, then we should let him. Oh, shit.” He does a one-eighty, chewing as fast as he can. He swallows, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “What?”

  “Incoming. Six o’clock. Your old man’s heading right for us.”

  I resist the urge to check. To find him in the crowd and see what his mood looks like. I stare at the side of Pax’s shaved head instead, my mind careening all over the place.

  “Well, well. Look who it is. Good evening, gentlemen. What a pleasure it is to see you here. Even if you did blatantly disobey me, boy. I distinctly remember telling you to wear a tux.”

  I slowly turn to look at him.

  Tall and broad, but slighter than me. He never could pack on any muscle when he was a younger man. He’s even thinner than when I saw him at Christmas. His dark hair, once a rich black, has turned to pepper and steel. His face is a crosshatch of lines that run deep around his permanently downturned mouth. Naturally, he’s wearing his tux. This is his big night—his chance to wow the Americans with his philanthropy and superior English breeding.

  We regard one another, and there’s no hint of familiarity on his face. No kindness. No fatherly compassion. Not even a flicker of pleasure over being reunited with his only son. There is only the dull, weak, absolutely ordinary blue of his eyes, and the downturned, bracketed mouth, and the disapproval over the tux.

  I put down my champagne glass on the buffet table and dust off my hands. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m out, too.”

  42

  CARRIE

  Imagine my surprise when I run back into the party, and low and behold, it’s Elodie who’s about to go nuclear on one of the tech nerds from the academy. Tom Petrov. I have to peel her off him. It isn’t until I get the full story out of him that I understand why she’s so mad.

  Tom was fixing Elodie’s phone for her. The phone that Wren inadvertently broke when he collided with Elodie in the hall earlier today—honestly, I’d forgotten all about it—and then Wren coerced Tom into giving him the phone. Long story short: Wren has Elle’s phone, and Elle lost her shit when she found out.

  I’m not surprised. I would have reacted the exact same way. But now Elle wants to go up to Riot House, in the middle of the night, to get it back. She knows the pricks are out of town, and she wants to retrieve her property.

  I would rather gouge my own eyes out than go to Riot House right now, but what choice do I have? I can’t let her go alone.

  We leave Pres with Andre, who promises to take care of her, and I reluctantly agree to drive Elodie halfway up the mountain. I attempt to talk her out of this madness, but it does no good. Before I know it, we’re standing in front of Dash’s house in the pitch black, and little Elodie Stillwater is picking the lock on their front door.

  Once the door clicks open, she steps inside and reacts exactly how one might expect her to react: she’s in awe of the place. The beautiful décor. The stunning staircase. The artwork on the walls. I begrudgingly admit that Wren is responsible for the stormy, violent, remarkable paintings, and I catch the admiration in her eyes. She tries to hide it, but she’s too late. I’m in no position to judge her at the end of the day. I swooned over Dash’s music when I heard him play the first time. How is this any different?

  I try not to look up at the huge skylight overhead as I urge Elodie toward the stairs, but I fail. I haven’t gone up to the observatory since the night I found Dashiell there with his cock in Amalie Gibbons’ mouth. I ripped my star charts off the wall that night, too. Threw out my planet earrings. Buried my NASA shirts, my telescope and my other astronomy trinkets at the bottom of my closet. It hurt to even think about anything astronomy-related, because my love for the stars had become so intrinsically linked to him. How I’ve missed the night sky, though. And how beautiful it looks through the vastness of Riot House’s skylight.

  I suddenly feel very, very sick. Hollowed out and sadder than I’ve felt in a long time.

  “Come on.” I usher Elodie toward the stairs. “No time to admire the architecture. We need to grab the phone and get back to the academy. I have an awful feeling about this.”

  “Where’s his room? Tell me and I’ll go find it myself.”

  Well, if that doesn’t sound like a terrible idea, I don’t know what does. “We’ll go together. It’s easier to get lost in here than you’d think.”

  Elodie smiles. Squeezes my hand. “I’ll be fine. Stay here and keep watch. If you see lights headed up the road, shout and we’ll get the fuck out of here. One of us needs to be on guard.”

  Coward that I am, I let her go. I saw the pity on her face; she knows how hard it is for me to be here, in his home. God, the last time I was here…

  I shove the memory down, willing myself not to catch hold of it and torture myself with a replay. What’s the point? What good does remembering any of it serve? It wasn’t real.

  I wait in the thick silence, the walls of Riot House silently breathing around me. I can sense him here; Dash’s jacket’s slung over the back of one of the chairs in the sunken living room by the window; his running shoes by the door; his new glasses on the coffee table. I breathe in, wondering if I’ll be able to catch his scent lingering on the air, disappointed (and a little embarrassed that I even tried) when I don’t.

  My nerves begin to get the better of me. I wait a minute, shifting from one foot to the other, trying to stay calm, but it’s no fucking good. I need to leave. “Elle! Hurry up, for fuck’s sake! I’m sweating down here!”

  No response. “Elodie! I’m not kidding. Let’s go!” My voice echoes up through the center of the house, bouncing off the walls, mocking me. I can’t be here. I can’t. I’m going to have to go and get her. I curse all the way up the stairs, racing past the second floor. When I hit the third-floor landing, I come to a grinding halt, my heart pulsing painfully.

  His door’s right there. Less than ten steps away.

  Flashbacks of the night Mara bailed for L.A. hit hard. The party raging downstairs. Wren, fucked up and hugging me, right where I’m standing now. And then seeing Dash’s room for the first time, marveling at the piano next to the wall by the window, and the huge bed, low to the ground, and the books, and everything so innately, intrinsically him.

  So much of the progress I’ve made over the past eight months is being whittled away just by me being here. If I don’t leave soon, I’m going to be right back where I started, fatally injured and emotionally bleeding out.

  I move robotically, skirting my way around the landing, heading for the final flight of stairs. Only five more steps. Four more. Three. But then I’m right in front of Dash’s door, and all pretense goes flying out of the window.

  If his door is locked, then that will be that. I’ll be saved. I’ll go up the stairs, grab my friend, and we’ll be out of here. My head pounds as I turn the handle… and the door swings open.

  Shit.

  I gasp i
n a jagged breath, gripping hold of the door jamb. I knew it was going to be hard, but…I wasn’t expecting this. A striking pain lances between my ribs, piercing the center of my heart. How can it still hurt this bad?

  It’s amazing how pain weaponizes our memories and turns them into bombs. I brace myself a second longer, fighting for the hurt to subside. It takes longer than it should for the blinding lightning bolt of agony to dull to a manageable burn. When I feel like I’ve regained enough of myself to stand without the aid of the doorframe, I slowly enter the room, fear eddying around inside the cavity of my chest.

  His bed is a mess. Sheets rucked up in a muddle of Egyptian cotton. Comforter hanging off the bed, half on the floor. There’s a shirt on the floor—the one he wore yesterday. God, how pathetic that I know that—balled up into a tight wad, like he purposefully screwed up the expensive fabric and hurled it onto the ground.

  The view out of his windows is once again a canvas of black and grey—eldritch shadows that hint at a canopy of trees, and the line of the mountain, rising up in the distance.

  Just as I was the first time I came here, I’m drawn to the beautiful well-loved piano in the corner of the room. The objects that capture our hearts the most ring with an echo of us in our absence. When I see the smooth black and white keys, and the bench with the threadbare orange pad atop it, protruding out at an angle, as if Dash pushed away from his composition and left the room in a hurry, every single memory I have of Dash rushes at me, so overwhelming that my legs buckle.

  Dash, standing amongst the headstones of Wolf Hall’s eight-grave cemetery, angry and frustrated…

  Dash, sitting in a silvery pool of light in the orchestra room, head bowed, eyes closed, fingers flying up and down as he plays...

  Dash, biting the finger of a glove, eyes awash with dark intent. “Fine then. Have it your way.”

  Dash, holding me in his arms, laughing. “Sorry, Stella. You can’t see planets with the naked eye.”

  Dash, at the observatory, his fingers twined in someone else’s hair…

  I flinch away from the image, reeling from the bright sting of sorrow that accompanies it. How? How could he do it? I know, of all the possibilities and probabilities that could have unfolded for us as time went on, it was likely that he was going to fuck up. Dash’s cruel reputation and the truths he promised me when we first spoke prepared me for that. But I looked into his eyes and I saw the truth there, too. A truth that overwrote everything else.

  He wasn’t lying when he told me that he loved me. He swore he would never hurt me. I believed those words because they were fact. So what happened? What changed to make him do something so mean and hurtful? It…it just doesn’t make sense.

  Tears course down my cheeks as I approach the piano. My soul aches. It has for months, throbbing with the questions that I can’t ask, that I won’t ask, because they hurt too much to even raise silently inside my own head.

  I run my fingers over the disordered piles of sheet music, studying Dashiell’s scribbled, messy notations across the staves. Dash was always so much better at communicating in this elegant language than he ever was in his mother tongue. Staring down at the variety of notes, the names of which I don’t even remember properly, I find myself wishing that I’d paid more attention in music class. I wish I could read the meaning behind each streak of carbon from his pencil and hear the beauty of the music that he’s created—

  My eyes lock, refusing to look anywhere else, when I see the title Dash wrote on the piece of sheet music that sits on the very top of the stack. I can’t even blink.

  Stellaluna.

  My hands shake as I lift up the piece of paper, my eyes struggling to understand the complicated, frenzied scribbles that sweep across the narrow black lines. My chest squeezes even tighter when I see that the second page of sheet music is labelled with the same title. And the third. And the fourth. I pick up a good chunk of the stack, checking a page halfway down the pile, and that, too, is labelled Stellaluna.

  I know what this is. It’s the music he played for me at the party. Expanded on. Rearranged. Rewritten and reworked, over and over.

  Click.

  I drop the sheet music. The pile falls, sheets fluttering to the ground at my feet.

  My heart stops.

  Out in the hall, another sound breaks the leaden silence. This time it’s a creak. A loud one. A foot treading floorboards.

  FUCK!

  I move. Somehow, I keep my footfall light. I’ve never run this fast before in my life. I take the stairs three at a time, nearly breaking my neck twice. At the bottom of the stairs, I stick my head out of the front door, scanning the pitch black, searching for any signs of a car, but there’s nothing.

  Christ.

  I swallow, working to steady my erratic pulse. Houses creak and crack, Carrie. They groan with the wind. No house is ever perfectly silent. Still, it’s better to check. “Elodie!” I call from the bottom of the stairs. “Was that you? Did you hear that?”

  She doesn’t reply, and my imagination leaps into overdrive. She’s dead. She’s been murdered by the ghost of the paranoid old bastard who lived here before Wren bought the place. “Elodie! What the hell!”

  “I’m coming! Just a second!” She leans over the railing on the very top floor of the stairs. I catch a glimpse of her blonde hair and then she disappears again.

  Seconds drag out, turning into minutes, and my mind snags on the sheet music. The loose pieces of paper scattered everywhere, skidding all over the floorboards and twisting in the air, landing on the rug by the window. The moment Dash walks in and sees the mess, he’s going to know someone was in his room. Somehow, he’ll know it was me. I’ll never be able to live down the mortification if he figures it out. Eventually, I can’t handle the thought of it anymore. Against all better judgement, I climb the stairs again. Halfway up, I hear a voice and my blood turns to ice water on the spot. It’s Wren’s voice. I’d know it anywhere.

  I hurtle up the remaining flights of stairs, desperate and panicked. “Elodie! Oh my god, Elle! I think he’s in the house! Move, move, move!” Elodie appears over the side of the handrail again. “I heard a voice. I can’t see anything, but I think he’s in th—OH MY GOD! FUCK!”

  I nearly fall ass backwards down the stairs.

  Wren Jacobi, a wraith dressed in black, stands on the top floor landing, right next to Elodie. “Hi, Carrie. Yeah, I’m in the house.”

  How the fuck did I not notice him come in? How long has he been here? Why is my heartrate going up instead of down? I take a deep breath, trying to compose myself. “You should be ashamed of yourself. I tell you to stay away from her, and then you go out and steal her phone? You’re fucked in the head.”

  “Jesus. Stop. I’ve had enough screeching for one night, thanks. The drive back from Boston was miserable. I had to hike all the way back here from town because the Uber driver wouldn’t come up the mountain. And then I arrive home to find two petty thieves in here, sneaking around in the dark.”

  I lunge for Elodie and take her by the hand, ignoring Wren. “Did you get what you came for?”

  Elodie’s eyes are wide. A little stunned. “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Good. Then let’s get out of here.”

  “Elodie, wait.” Wren shoves away from the wall. “Here. Take the book. I want you to have it.” He does have a book in his hands—a small, leather bound affair with gilded edges that shine in the moonlight.

  Fuck. Maybe there’s still time to save my friend from this nightmare. If only Mara had stuck around and talked me out of falling for Dash, then I wouldn’t be so fucked up and broken now. I know it’s hopeless, but I have to try at least. “Don’t! Remember Persephone? She accepted those pomegranate seeds from Hades and doomed herself to the fucking underworld.” Okay, it sounds waaaaaay over the top, now that’s out of my mouth, but this is Wren Jacobi we’re talking about. Nightmare creature that he is, I can totally see him as the king of the underworld.

  Wren grins at me, a
nd my skin prickles from the malice on his face. “I appreciate the comparison, but you’re being a little dramatic. It’s nothing but a book. There’s nothing magical about it. Or…rather, it’s magical in the same way that all books are magical. But it’ll hardly bind her to hell.”

  “Elodie.” I pull at her arm more this time. She can’t resist without falling down the stairs and landing on her butt. I’m relieved when she finally gives in and turns at last. It’s only once we’re outside, with the icy northerly wind driving into our faces and we’re running for the Firebird, that I see the stupid book in her hand.

  43

  DASH

  My phone rings eighteen times on the way home. Fifteen of those calls are from my father. His voicemails are borderline hysterical. The first starts out wheedling, asking me to come back and be civil for once in my spoiled existence. By the fifteenth message, he’s done with the shouting and screaming that messages five through fourteen featured so heavily, and he’s moved onto a quiet and deadly, ice-cold rage.

  “No more Wolf Hall. No more position with the Estate. No more title. No more expensive car. Drive the Mercedes to Boston first thing in the morning, Dashiell. I’m taking it back. You are officially cut off, boy.”

  Pax winces, sucking air through his teeth when I play it out loud in the car, but I brush off the message for what it is: absolute fucking garbage. I turned eighteen on New Year’s Day. He can’t make me do anything now. He can come and get his ugly ass Maybach himself if he wants to take it back. The only place I’ll be driving it is off a fucking ravine. Wait. Correction. I’ll push it into the ravine. If I’m gonna be committing suicide in a car any time soon, it sure as hell won’t be in something as clichéd as a fucking Maybach.