Riot House (Crooked Sinners Book 1)

by Callie Hart

  I’m introduced to him on four separate occasions, and he doesn’t remember me once—an impoliteness that’s tempered by how happy he is when he learns my name all over again and hugs me like he means it.

  In between my run-ins with Oscar, Carina feeds me beer after beer like the party’s about to run out of booze any second. I’m no stranger to alcohol. I’ve tried every drink known to man, but admittedly it’s been a while; I’m buzzed by beer number three, and drunk by the time I hit the bottom of cup number five.

  At around eleven, Carina turns bright pink and points out a guy across the living room that really does look like a young Andy Samberg. He beams at her the moment he sees her, and then that’s it. My friend has eyes for no one but Andre. I don’t begrudge her the time spent with her new cilantro-lime ice cream sandwich; when you find your yum, you gotta enjoy every second of it while you can.

  And anyways. I have Presley to keep me company.

  “People tend to overlook the one with the skinhead,” she says, rocking beside me on her chair. She’s drunk, but still making sense. I think. Maybe we’ve hit that perfect equilibrium where she’s so drunk that she’s not making sense, and I’m so drunk that her mumbled words and fuzzy statements actually sound like real words.

  “People think he’s stupid because he’s a model, but I had to work with him on a science po—prop—project last year, and he was really smart. Really, really, really smart.”

  I pass her the beer we’re sharing. “Really, really, really smart?”

  “Yes!” she says, snickering. “Really, really, really…really, really…” She forgets what she was going to say. “Anyway, his name is Pax. That means peace in Latin. Did you know that?”

  “I did know that.”

  “Oooh, look at you. Clever little Elodie. I like your name. What does Elodie mean?”

  I hiccup loudly, trying to focus on Presley’s pretty, freckled face, but there are currently three of her swaying about all over the place and I’m not sure which version of her I’m supposed to be addressing. “It means ‘foreign riches,’” I tell the middle Presley. “In French. It was my mom’s middle name.”

  “It’s rrrreally pretty,” Pres slurs. “Really, really, really, rea...” She realizes what she’s doing and bursts out laughing. “God, at least you weren’t named after a fat man in a wig who…who fucking died sitting on the toilet, while sim…ul…ta…neous…ly—” She struggles with this one, “—eating a hamburger and taking a giant shit.”

  “I don’t think that was ever proven,” I splutter, trying not to laugh. How am I supposed to keep a straight face when she’s coming up with this stuff?

  “God, I’m really fucked up,” she says, wobbling as she tries to get to her feet. “I think I need a speed walk around the grounds to wake up. You ever seen those speed walkers? They look fucking ridiculous, don’t they? Hey! Oh, hey! Tom! Look, Elle, it’s Tom from the academy. He hasn’t seen us. Come on, let’s go scare the shit out of him.”

  “Pres, I think I’d rather just stay…here…” It’s too late, though. She has me by the wrist and she’s dragging me up onto my feet. Before I know it, we’re on the other side of Oscar’s living room, and we’re standing behind Tom, who’s telling a very animated story to some of his friends. “And then he was, like, leaning his forearm against my throat, looking at me like he was gonna fucking kill me, and I couldn’t fucking breathe, and I was like, “All right! All right! I’ll fucking do it. Just get the fuck off of me, man!’”

  “The guy’s unhinged,” a tall guy with glasses says. “I heard he stabbed one of the teachers during spring break last year.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the only girl in Tom’s little group says. The ends of her bright blonde hair have been dyed purple. She rolls her eyes. “If one of the teachers got stabbed, don’t you think we’d know about it? And why the hell would they let him continue attending the academy if he hurt one of the faculty. You should really run this shit through a filter before you let it spew outta your mouth, Clay. You know the rule. We fact check everything before we announce it as gospel.”

  “Relax, Jem. Jesus. He’s just telling us what he heard,” a short guy breaking apart a brownie with his fingers says. He tips back his head and drops some of the gooey chocolate cake into his mouth.

  “Urgh! None of you are listening to me!” Tom holds his hands up, exasperated. “Jacobi threatened to fucking kill me. And if I don’t get that girl’s phone back by the end of tomorrow, she’s gonna know something’s up. She’ll probably report me to Harcourt. I’ll get expelled, and my grandfather will kill me, and I end up dead in either scenario, so I’d really like some fucking help, please, ‘cause I’m kinda freaking out right now, and—”

  The kid eating the brownie swallows. “Hey, Tom?”

  “What, Elliot? WHAT?”

  “What’s this girl look like? The one with the phone?”

  “I don’t know. She’s hot. Short. Petite. Blonde hair. She has nice eyes. What the fuck does that matter?”

  Elliot grins humorlessly. “‘Cause I’m pretty sure she’s standing behind you. And she looks pissed, man.”

  Tom whips around like he’s just been poked up the ass with a cattle prod. “Oh, shit. Elodie! Uh…yeah, it’s Elodie. How you doing? Are you, um—” He rubs frantically at the back of his neck. “Are you enjoying the party?”

  I was enjoying the party.

  Now, I am not.

  Now, I’m the embodiment of rage.

  I’m a blistering sun, about to go supernova.

  I’m eighteen different kinds of angry.

  I’m mentally listing off all of the ways I could kill Tom and make it so that the authorities never find his skinny ass.

  “Explain,” I growl.

  “Uh, uh, well, I don’t know what you heard or anything, but—”

  “You know what? Don’t bother with the explanation. Just tell me what he wants with my phone and I might not break your miserable neck.”

  Tom’s pupils dilate—a panic response. Some guys might not believe a girl so small and so blonde as me could ever be violent. Tom believes me, though. He sees the murder in my eyes, and he knows, drunk though I am, that I will skin him alive. “He, I mean, I don’t know. I guess…I have no clue why he wanted it. He told me to fix it as quickly as I could and then take it over to his place. He told me to leave it on the desk in his room, and then get the fuck out of there. That’s it. That’s all I know.” He grabs the white napkin Elliot was holding his brownie in and waves it in the air. “I’m sorry, okay. Look! I surrender! I’m not good at this kind of stuff, all right? I’m used to people like you and like…like him ignoring me. I don’t exist to you people, and I wanna go back to being invisible, because this really sucks.”

  It’s taken me a beat to notice the split lip again. I see it now, though, because he’s been talking so animatedly that he’s reopened the wound, and a snake of bright red blood’s running down his chin. Wren did that to him. Beside me, Presley coughs uncomfortably. “Maybe we should go find Carina. I don’t wanna get tangled up in Riot House shit. This sounds like a you and her kind of thing.”

  I advance on Tom, pitying him and hating him in equal parts. He goes very, very pale. “What does that mean? People like me?”

  “You know,” he says softly. “Popular kids. Members of the social elite. You…you’re like them.”

  The fury that’s been spinning around like a ball of white, searing heat in my chest detonates, shattering my mind apart for a moment. Jem awkwardly sidles her way out of the group, slinking away, her eyes glued to the floorboards. Elliot and Clay look too stunned to move. “I’m not like them,” I hiss. “I’m nothing like them. How can you say that? You don’t know me at all.”

  Tom lowers the napkin as if resigned now to his fate. He knows he’s said the wrong thing. I’m a microsecond away from throwing myself on him, when Carina arrives in a swirl of purple fabric and braids. “Hey! What’s up, guys? Jem just said a fight was about t
o break out in here.”

  I can’t bring myself to look at her. “Tell her what you did, Tom.”

  He blinks. “It isn’t like I had a choice,” he moans.

  Carina’s friendly tone evaporates. “Tom Petrov. Tell me what you’ve done.”

  15

  ELODIE

  “For the record, this is a horrible idea. You know that, right?”

  I grunt, tucking my chin into the collar of my jacket. It’s freezing in Carina’s car. Her mood’s frosty, too. She’s pissed that she’s had to leave her Samberg lookalike unattended back at Oscar’s, but this was her choice. “I told you to stay,” I grumble. “I could have ordered an Uber.”

  “Uber drivers won’t take us up the mountain,” she grouses. “Too many entitled Wolf Hall kids have thrown up in the back of their Priuses. We’re blacklisted, down to a man.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit.”

  “So, no, you couldn’t have ordered an Uber. I’m the only way you were getting back up this hill, and I’m telling you, categorically, that this is fucking insanity.”

  “You said it yourself, Carrie. Those arrogant motherfuckers are in Boston tonight. They won’t be back until tomorrow at the earliest. So what does it matter? They’ll never even know we were there.”

  “Of course they’ll know! Wren will know as soon as he sees that your phone’s not in his room. And then what?”

  “Right. And then what? He can’t exactly report it as a theft, can he? He obtained my property via means of assault for unknown, nefarious purposes. The last thing he’s gonna do is tell anyone that I went into their precious house to take back what is rightfully mine.”

  “Christ,” Carina mutters through clenched teeth. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into, girl. No idea what you’re getting me into. You’re still drunk. Why don’t we wait until morning, have a think, and see if we can’t come up with a better pla—”

  “I’m stone cold sober now and you know it. Look, I totally get it. If I were you, I wouldn’t want any part of this either. Why don’t you just drop me off in front of the house and go back to the party. I can walk the rest of the way from there.”

  “Two miles, Elle? In the middle of the night? In the cold and the dark? Along windy, narrow roads? You’ll get smoked by a car. They won’t even see you until it’s too late. What kind of friend would that make me, huh?”

  I have nothing to say to that. What can I say? Hiking my way back to Wolf Hall sounds like a shit time. There’s no sugarcoating it. And she would be a crappy friend if she left me on the side of a mountain road. I’m grateful that she’s in possession of a fully functioning conscience. That said, I don’t want to put her in a compromising position, though.

  We sit in silence, watching the twin beams from the headlights pierce through the dark like swords of light, illuminating fifteen feet of blacktop in front of us. After a while, Carina says, “Fucking piece of shit. I knew he was creepy, but I didn’t know he was this creepy. He was probably gonna load up that phone with spyware apps. He’d have been listening to your calls and reading all of your texts. He would have been able to access your camera whenever he wanted…God, I didn’t even think about that until now.”

  “Mmm.” I’ve thought about it. I have experience with cloned phones and all manner of different spyware. It’s all been loaded onto my phone before. What Carina doesn’t know is that my phone is already brimming over with ghost apps and dummy screens, all designed to trick me into thinking I’m not being watched. My father would have made sure of it. “We’ll get in, get the phone, and then we won’t have to worry about any of that,” I mumble.

  “You should call the cops, Elle. I’m serious. This is some shady shit.”

  “Let’s just see what we’re dealing with first.” I’m fobbing her off. I’m sure she knows that. But getting the police involved now would be bad. For starters, Wolf Hall will report the incident to my father, and there’s no way in hell I’ll risk him jumping on a plane to come and find out what’s going on in person. I’d rather be dragged over hot coals than have to face him.

  My pulse jumps all over the place when Carina kills the headlights and turns into the driveway that leads through the forest to Riot House. I can tell by the way she grips onto the steering wheel that she’s anxious. About getting caught breaking into the place or being here in general, I can’t tell, but I’m beginning to feel really bad for putting her through this.

  In the pressing darkness, all I see are trees. And then we turn a sharp corner, and the house appears out of nowhere, the three-story structure so large and imposing that it’s a miracle it isn’t more obvious from the road. It’s difficult to tell how old the place is. Perhaps it would be easier to assess when the place was built during the daytime, when there’s a little more light to work with. Right now, the floor-to-ceiling glass windows on the second floor makes it look modern, but the exterior makes it appear very old indeed.

  “Just looking at the place makes me wanna throw up,” Carina murmurs. “Doesn’t it look like it was conjured right out of your nightmares?”

  I look at the house, shrouded in shadows, each window cast into darkness, and…the place looks desolate. “No,” I tell Carina. “I don’t have nightmares.”

  She blows out a long breath through her pursed lips. “I envy you. That must be nice.” She twists the key in the ignition, killing the engine. “Then what are you afraid of? Monsters? Ghouls? Flesh-eating beasts?”

  “No,” I tell her, staring up at the house with a steely resolve. “I’m afraid of real life. The people who are supposed to care for you the most.”

  Carina doesn’t ask how I know how to pick a lock. She urges me to hurry up and get it done, peering over her shoulder into the forest as if she’s expecting Dashiell to emerge from the night with a hatchet in his hand, ready to dismember both us into tiny pieces. He doesn’t come, though, and I have the door to Riot House open in record time.

  I enter, preparing myself for the avalanche of empty beer cans and festering takeout containers, but the place is neat as a pin. Scratch that. It’s actually beautiful.

  Carina turns on the flashlight feature on her phone, dispersing the dark, and I marvel at the grand entranceway I find myself in. A huge, magnificent staircase stands before me, splitting off to the left and to the right, leading to the eastern and western wings of the house. On the first floor, huge paintings hang on the walls—mostly cool, sleek contemporary art that doesn’t seem to be of anything in particular, but as I gaze at them I’m hit with the unsettling certainty that they’re all depictions of raging storms, brought to life in swirling blacks, and blues, white and greys. They feel angry. “Wren’s,” Carina murmurs. “He might be the biggest shithead to walk the Earth, but the bastard can paint.”

  I reel in my surprise, storing that information away for later.

  The house has a unique, dizzying smell to it. Far from the sweaty socks and unwashed teenaged boy odor I was expecting, the air’s colored with notes of bergamot, black pepper and rosewood.

  There are knick-knacks and small keepsakes everywhere I look, placed with thought and care on the exorbitantly expensive-looking sideboards, tables and the bookcase that runs along the back wall, by a door that leads off into the unknown.

  I gasp when I look up. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” Carina agrees, matching my stance as she cranes her head back, staring up through the winding staircases that wrap around what can only be described as the inner courtyard of the house. From where we stand, you can see all the way up to the top floor of the house, and beyond that, in the roof high over our heads, a vast skylight gives access to a view of the night sky that takes my breath away. Scores of brilliant pinpricks of light, burning away in the heavens, form the roof that Wren Jacobi sleeps under, and it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

  “Come on.” Carina takes me by the arm, pulling me toward the stairs. “No time to admire the architecture. We need to grab the ph
one 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.”

  Carina shakes her head. “We’ll go together. It’s easier to get lost in here than you’d think.”

  I squeeze her hand, giving her a reassuring smile. “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.”

  Uncertainty shines in her eyes, but there’s relief in them, too. She’s glad of the excuse to stay downstairs, within sprinting distance of the exit. “All right. Go, and be quick about it. The top floor. When you get to the top of the stairs, turn right on the landing. Wren’s room is the door right in front of you. There’s a black feather nailed into the door frame. I haven’t been in there. I can’t tell you where his desk is, but—”

  “Don’t worry, shh, it’s okay. It’s a desk. It’s not like I’m looking for a hidden trapdoor or anything. Give me one minute and we’ll be out of here.”

  Shaking ever so slightly, Carina nods. Jesus, she looks like she’s on the verge of tears. I don’t know what she’s so terrified of here, but her emotions are proving to be contagious. My heart thumps aggressively in my chest as I jog up the first flight of steps, where I take the next flight on the right. My lungs are burning like crazy by the time I hit the third floor, and by the time I reach the fourth all I can hear is my blood charging behind my eardrums.

  Gulping down breath after breath, I don’t waste a second. I head straight for the door on the right, curiosity eating at me like nobody’s business when I see the lush black feather my friend told me would be nailed into the wood. It’s right where Carina said it would be.

  Now.

  Will his door be locked?