Riot House (Crooked Sinners Book 1)

by Callie Hart

  “What?” What the fuck is he talking about? Why the hell would my father tell such a vicious, flagrant lie? It makes no sense. “He didn’t do that. He couldn’t. I mean…” I mean, I can totally imagine him doing it. On his nicest day, he’s a vile monster who doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone else but himself and his own precious career. Why would he have said that, though? He could have told the staff at Mary Magdalene’s I was being relocated. It happens all the time—students coming and going from these kinds of schools.

  “I’m sorry, I know this is crazy. I’m fine, though, Lee. Really, I promise, I’m totally fine. Never been better, in fact. I know you probably have a thousand questions, but I have to go. I need to call my father and find out what the fuck is going on before I have a nervous breakdown.”

  “Uhhh…okay,” Lee says, laughing shakily. “All good. Call me back, though, yeah? If you don’t, I’m gonna think I dreamed this up and you’re still dead.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m one hundred percent gonna call you back. You have my word.”

  I hang up, reeling from the brief conversation. Over the years, my father’s done a shit load of cold, hurtful things to me. He’s done the most heinous things imaginable. He’s never told people that I’m fucking dead, though. Dead. What the fuck is wrong with him? I’m numb all over and dizzy as I hit the call button on the only number my new phone came equipped with when Colonel Stillwater gave it to me: the number to his personal aide.

  The phone rings eight times. Nine times. Ten. I think it’s about to go to voicemail, when Officer Emmanuel finally picks up. “Colonel Stillwater’s office. How can I assist you?”

  “Carl, it’s Elodie.” Carl’s only been with my father for six months, but that’s three months longer than any of his other military aides have lasted. Usually, the lucky ones are reassigned pretty quickly. The guys who had no strings to pull or favors to call in had to somehow make it through month after month of my father’s explosive, borderline abusive behavior before he finally lost his temper with them and had them demoted to cleaning out latrines.

  “Elodie? Great to hear from you. How are things Stateside? Are you enjoying being back home?” I like Carl, and I think Carl likes me. He was always appropriately apologetic whenever he had to pass on a hostile message from my father. It kinda felt like we were co-conspirators who empathized with one another, because we each knew what the other person had to deal with on a daily basis.

  “I just got off the phone with one of my friends from Mary Magdalene’s, Carl.”

  “Oh. Oh, man…” The chipper pitch in his voice takes a nosedive. “Well. I can imagine you’re pretty pissed right now,” he says.

  “I’m confused right now. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ll be angry soon, though.” A group of girls pass me in the hallway, concerned looks on their faces. I realize what I must look like, hugging the wall, white as a sheet, tension pinching my features into a pained expression; I give them a tight smile to let them know everything’s fine, even though it’s not. “Why the hell did he do that, Carl? Why did my friend just call me in tears, devastated because he thought I was dead?”

  “Urgh. I—I don’t think you’re gonna like the explanation.”

  “Spit it out, Carl!”

  “Your father had me look into your old school’s tuition rules. It turned out that the only way to get a partial refund for the semester you were already halfway through was if you were...was if you had died. So…”

  Oh. My. God. Un-fucking-believable. “So, he told them I’d died. In order to get a partial refund for the remainder of the semester. What does that come to? Four thousand dollars?”

  Carl gives up the exact amount reluctantly. “Not quite. Uh…two thousand, eight hundred.”

  “He has millions in the bank. MILLIONS!”

  “I know…”

  “He let my friends believe I’d died for the sake of two grand and change?”

  “I did try and explain to him how it might make you feel. I suggested we tell you what was happening so you could let your friends know you were okay, but he—”

  “But he didn’t give a shit about hurting me, or hurting my friends, and he told you to keep your mouth shut, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Sorry, Elodie. I should have sent you a heads-up.”

  With elastic, wobbly legs, I walk down the hall, toward the door to room 416. I need to get into my room and sit down before I fall down. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. My father shouldn’t be such an unbelievable bastard.”

  Carl titters nervously. He wasn’t the one to call my father an unbelievable bastard, but these lines are generally recorded. If the top brass finds out he was even present to hear trash talk against my father, he could wind up in some serious shit.

  “Want me to let him know you called? I could try and persuade him to reach out and explain his actions for himself?”

  I’m at my door. I twist the handle, pushing it open. “God, no! No, that really won’t be necessary. I already know the details, what good would talking to him—” I grind to a halt, halfway through the door, my ears suddenly filled with a high-pitched ringing. “—do?”

  The room…holy fuck, my room has been destroyed.

  My clothes are everywhere. My books, the few I brought with me from Tel Aviv, are scattered all over the floor, pages torn out of them in clumps, strewn all over the hardwood floorboards. Every single drawer has been ripped out of every single piece of furniture, the contents upended and thrown around in disarray. My photographs are in shreds. My laptop lays on its side beneath the window, its screen shattered and flickering, a spasm of color interrupting the static every few seconds. And there are feathers. Feathers everywhere. They’ve settled in a thick layer over everything like powdery, delicate snow, covering the Persian rug, and my shoes, and the comforter that’s been ripped from the bed.

  Both of my pillows are in shreds. With my mouth hanging open, I walk toward the bed, too many thoughts bumping into one another for any of this to make sense. The sheets have been ripped back from the mattress, and the mattress itself…a giant bowie knife protrudes from the center of the pillowtop mattress, it’s rugged, carved handle glinting threateningly as I duck down to get a better look at it.

  Whoever did this didn’t just stab the bed once. Numerous three-inch long rents in the material, as well as longer, jagged tears where the foam and the springs inside the mattress have been exposed.

  “…perhaps handled in a more…empathetic way. I can’t really say any more than that, of course, but…”

  Shit. Carl’s still talking on the other end of the phone.

  “Uh, sorry, Carl. Something…I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta go into class now. Thanks for explaining things to me. I’d be really grateful if you didn’t tell my dad I called.”

  “Of course. Anything for you, Miss. E.”

  “Thanks.” I kill the call, dropping the cell phone to the ground. What…the fuck…happened in here? Who…who would do this? And why?

  “Holy shit!”

  Carina’s standing in the doorway. She gapes at the chaos in horror, her eyes roving over my broken and ruined possessions. I see the china bird my mother gave me on my tenth birthday, smashed into tiny fragments and ground into the low pile of the rug, and a pained cry slips out of my mouth.

  “What the fuck happened in here?” Carina whispers, stepping over an empty drawer. She comes and wraps her arms around me. It’s here, stiff as a block of wood and unable to breathe properly, that I realize there are fierce, hot tears streaking down my cheeks.

  “I don’t know.” It comes out as a moan. A cry. A desolate and mournful sound that shocks the hell out of me. It’s not my clothes, or my books, or the bed that’s done it. It’s the bird. My mother’s bird. She’s dead, and she’s gone, and there will never be another gift from her. The bird was all I had and now it’s gone, too.

  “Fuc
k. Come on. Come with me.” Carina guides me out of my room and down the hall, past Presley and some of the other girls who came to watch the movie with us on Friday; I make an effort to avoid making eye contact with any of them. I can’t face their open pity. I don’t want to even acknowledge that this is happening right now.

  Carina leaves me in her room and tells me to keep the door closed. She disappears for a long time, and I do nothing but stare into space, thinking about the bird…

  The pink nail polish on Mom’s fingernails when she gave it to me.

  The little chip on its tiny orange beak that I used to rub my fingertip over whenever I cradled it to my chest.

  The white of his chest, that faded to the blue of his back, that deepened to the dark, midnight blue at the tips of his wings.

  The song Mom used to sing when she would hold it high in the air, pretending he was in flight and swooping around my head.

  An eternity passes. Principal Harcourt comes to see me. Tells me they’ve already gotten another mattress out of storage for me—“Very lucky, actually. It’s brand new, still in the plastic!” —and they’ve tidied up most of the mess. She informs me that it’s safe to go back to my room now, which feels laughable and absolutely stupid because of course it’s not fucking safe, someone knifed my bed to death, but I follow after her, my legs mechanically doing their job as I re-enter room 416.

  Carina hugs me, an anxious smile on her face. My clothes have all been folded and returned to their rightful places in the closet and the chest of drawers. The furniture is reassembled and back where it belongs. The bed’s been made up, sheets on the mattress to disguise its newness, and there are two fresh pillows plumped up like fluffy sheep, leaning against the headboard. Everything appears normal, if a little emptier now.

  “There was no point keeping the books,” Carina says softly. “We wrote down the titles, though. Principal Harcourt says she’s going to get replacements for you.”

  My eyes sweep over the surfaces of the furniture, searching. “And the little china bird?”

  “I’m afraid Gustav vacuumed up some of the pieces before he realized there was something on the rug,” Principal Harcourt says from the doorway. Her voice is clipped and harsh, and she clearly doesn’t want to be dealing with this anymore. She has better things to be doing at eight p.m. on a dark and stormy night, and none of them include pacifying a troubled teen about a broken ornament. “If you know where it came from, we’ll happily get you another bird as well, Elodie. We’ll have a new laptop for you soon hopefully. Just make a list of anything you need, and we’ll make sure it’s taken care of.”

  She turns around and walks off down the hall, her heels clipping angrily against the hardwood as she goes, leaving me and Carina alone in my bedroom, which now smells of chemicals, and plastic, and brand-new mattresses.

  “Want me to stay with you?” Carina tucks a strand of hair back behind my ear. “I don’t mind. We can watch something on my laptop. Polish off some chocolate? I have a stash in my room.”

  Wearily, I shake my head. “If it’s alright with you, I’d kinda like to be alone. I just…this is all a lot to wrap my head around.”

  Carina looks unsure, but she accepts my decision with a sorry smile and gives me one last hug. “All right. I’m just at the other end of the hall if you need me, okay? Shoot me a text if you change your mind.”

  The moment she’s gone, a fissure of lightning rips open the sky outside my bedroom window, bleaching the gardens and the trees outside the academy bone white, throwing tall, menacing shadows across the lawns. Darkness descends a moment later, shrouding everything in black, the rain continuing to hammer against the glass, but in that brief moment of illumination, I see something: a figure cloaked in shadow, standing at the mouth of the hedges that lead to the maze.

  10

  ELODIE

  No one said a word about the knife sticking out of my bed.

  Strikes me as a little odd, that fact.

  I’d have thought it would have been the first thing Principal Harcourt wanted to discuss with me. Surely, she should have wanted to reassure me that I was safe, and that no one would be allowed to harm me here at Wolf Hall Academy. She seemed far more concerned with replacing my damaged property instead of getting to the bottom of the matter, though.

  And no one, no one, had any ideas or suggestions as to who might have done this to my room, or what they were hoping to achieve by trashing my stuff.

  The military-style training that passed as my childhood wasn’t just physical, though. It was mental, too. I was taught how to read and assess a situation on sight from a very young age. I know how to read a room and take it apart, piece by piece, without touching a single thing. Colonel Stillwater trained me how to draw educated conclusions about a person’s intent from their actions, and I’ve already drawn a number of educated conclusions about the break in, based on what I observed during the first five seconds after I walked into my room.

  Whoever tore my room apart wasn’t trying to threaten me.

  Or at least that wasn’t their main purpose, anyway.

  The pages ripped out of the books? That was a pointed exercise, as were the drawers that were pulled off their runners and dumped upside down onto the floor. Whoever broke into my room was looking for something. Something concealed inside the jacket of another book or taped to the bottom of a drawer. And the pillows and bed? Same thing. They were searching for something that I don’t think they found.

  It’s possible that the knife in the bed wasn’t a threat. It’s possible that whoever tossed my room got disturbed at some point, either by me or someone else, and they fled, leaving the blade buried up to the hilt by accident.

  I have no reason to believe it was Wren who did this, but every cell in my body is screaming that it was him. The way he was staring at me during our English class…it looked like he was plotting terrible, evil things, and for some sick reason I couldn’t force myself to stop looking at him. That hour, trapped inside Doctor Fitzpatrick’s room, was an embarrassment. I should have had a little more self-control. I should have been able to block Wren out. I’ve never had an issue ignoring a guy with an attitude problem before, but this guy. This guy. He’s different.

  I suspect he’s way more than I can handle. And invading my room? Breaking every personal possession I own? Destroying the only thing I really, truly hold dear? That’s so cold and calculating that I’m actually worried I might not be able to manage the attentions of a guy like Wren Jacobi all by myself.

  I’m too agitated to sleep, so I pace back and forth by the window, turning things over in my head. What the hell does he want from me, for fuck’s sake? And what the hell did he want in this room? I know so little about Wren that guessing the answers to these questions is near impossible.

  So, what do I do about him? What do I do about this troubling fascination I feel coiled like a snake around my insides every time I think his cursed name? How the fuck do I make it through these final months at Wolf Hall without falling foul of some terrible, dark act? Because it feels like something terrible and dark is about to happen. Just like the storm clouds amassed in the sky above Wolf Hall, this sense of foreboding presses down on me from above, filling me with dread.

  From the way Carina reacts any time Wren, Dashiell or Pax are close by, my worries seem justified. Dashiell treated her horribly and broke her heart, but something in my gut tells me there’s more to that story than she’s letting on. I think she’s keeping secrets, and I don’t begrudge her them. We’ve only been friends for a little over a week. I can’t expect her to trust me and take me into her confidence, when neither of us have figured each other out yet.

  She warned me not to go near the boys or their precious Riot House, but shit. If there’s something I need to know, something specific that could prevent me from getting seriously, actually hurt, then that would be useful information.

  The best thing I can do is stay the hell away from Wren and his friends. Avoid contact with
them at all costs. And get a fucking lock on my bedroom door, even though they’re forbidden according to the Wolf Hall rule book. Fire Ordinances, or health and safety, or something like that. I dare anyone to challenge me over a little protection for myself and my belongings, now that this has happened, though.

  By midnight, the storm outside has gotten so bad that the wind howls through the gaps in the windows, and the rain slamming down on top of the eaves above my window sounds like my father’s old unit are practicing their drills right on top of me. It’s so dark outside that I can barely make out the boughs of the huge live oaks that loom over the maze, tossing and groaning under the elemental assault.

  I’ve lived in all kinds of different places, climates and landscapes. For a time, my mother insisted I stay with her for a year in Chicago when I was a child, but aside from that all of my other homes have been in warm climates. Deserts and beaches, for the most part due to my father’s dislike of the cold. That he sent me to live in such a bitterly cold spot now really speaks to the fact that he plans on never visiting me here. Which is totally fine by me.

  But this kind of weather feels unnatural to me. I’ve never experienced anything remotely like it. I’ve hated thunderstorms since I was a child, but my fear is amplified a thousand-fold tonight, given what took place in my room.

  Urgh.

  The clock on my cellphone reads 2.15 am when the storm reaches its climax. Somewhere, a shutter door bangs loudly, crashing every few seconds in the gale-force winds. I try to sleep, but with the normally silent building moaning and sighing so deafeningly, there’s absolutely no way I can pass out. Agitated beyond measure, I get out of bed, throwing back the covers, shivering against the cold that seeps through the thin material of my pajamas. I stand in front of the window, baring my teeth at the sheet rain that obscures the view on the other side of the glass, willing it to fucking stop…