RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,119
from him. Honestly, I was surprised that he’d messaged at all.
I find him right where he said he’d be, in the Poetry section, amongst the likes of Rilke, Hugo, Keats and Wordsworth. With his head bowed over a book, his hair messy and all over the place, hanging in his face as it’s perpetually wont to do, he’s cast in silhouette by the light pouring in through the enormous windows behind him. I can make out his profile, though—the strong line of his jaw, the arrow-straight, uncompromising bridge of his nose, and his sinfully full mouth that works as he shapes out the words on the page in front of him.
He’s not who he portrays himself to be. Not really. Yes, he’s hard to reach sometimes, and he’s colder than the glacial waters of Antarctica on occasion. But there’s a deep, ponderous part of him that he doesn’t show people, too. I get the feeling that he hasn’t really shown that side of himself to me, either. It’s slipped out, unbidden, entirely by accident. The difference is that he hasn’t tried to stuff it back down into its cage with me. He’s let that side of him rest there, out in the open, for me to make of it what I will.
His mouth works some more as he continues to read, but out loud now—
“We look before and after,
and pine for what is not.
Our sincerest laughter,
With some pain is fraught.
Our sweetest tales are those
that tell of saddest thought.”
Ah. So he was aware of my presence. Great. I pull myself together, having a fierce talk with my heart, making sure it knows to behave, as I enter the stacks and go to him.
“More Bryon?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Shelley. He was a fucker, too, y’know. Complete drunk. Womanizer. Left his wife and knocked up another woman.”
“Mary Shelley. I read about that.”
Wren closes the book softly, looking at me out of the corner of those green eyes. No other part of him moves. “Like all the best artists, he was pretty fucked up.”
“That poem didn’t sound fucked up. It sounded sad.”
Wren smiles, slowly looking back down at the book. “It’s called ‘Skylark.’ One of his most famous pieces.”
“What’s it about?”
“The past and the future. Fear of death. Phantoms and ignorance. It’s about how even the sweetest love songs are tinged with sadness. And how a man can never be as free as a bird.”
“Sounds beautiful.”
“It is,” he agrees. Sliding the book back onto the shelf, he turns and faces me, picking over me with an intense gaze that makes me break out in goosebumps. “What did he do?” he demands.
“What?”
“Pax. What did he do? I know he did something.”
“Oh. Uh...he was just his usual, charming self. It’s all good. No harm, no foul.”
“You don’t know if there’s been any harm yet. You won’t know until you’re lying on the floor in a pool of your own blood. That’s how Pax works.”
I smile at his utter seriousness. “Are you telling me he’s going to try and eviscerate me? Because I’m not okay with that.”
Wren reaches out and grabs me by the hand, quickly spinning around and pulling me after him. Just like our run-in in front of Madame Fournier before my very first French class, shock spirals up my arm at his touch, surprising the hell out of me, but it’s different this time. He hasn’t taken me roughly by the wrist. He’s taken me by the hand. And he’s interlaced his fingers with mine.
I’m too stunned to say anything as he pulls me away from the windows and the grim, grey day outside, rushing, rushing, rushing until he reaches the rear corner of the library. He stops in front of a plain innocuous wooden door that anyone in the world would overlook if they weren’t standing right in front of it. Wren drops my hand and rifles in his pocket, pulling out a fat bunch of keys. His fingers flick deftly through a series of Yale keys and cruciform keys and skeleton keys until he finds the one he’s looking for.
A moment later and the door is open, my hand is in Wren’s again, and I’m following him inside. The door clicks shut behind us, and everything is stillness and perfect, velvet dark.
I can hear him breathing, soft and calm, and every cell in my body stands to attention. “Don’t suppose there’s a light in this place?” I ask. Whispering feels appropriate, given the weighty silence pressing against my eardrums.