RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,142
couldn't do it at home. Since he didn't have my mother to beat black and blue anymore, Colonel Stillwater had felt justified in laying into me during our morning gym sessions. Crying would have earned me the hiding of a lifetime.
“I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry,” Wren chants into my hair. “I'm sorry I brought it up. I hate that I’ve made you feel this way, I swear to fucking god.”
“Then...why bring it up at all?” I pant.
Wren sighs heavily, the sound pure frustration. He turns me around so that I'm facing him, holding my face in his hands. He makes me meet his fierce gaze. “You've been through so fucking much, and you've done it all on your own. I wanted you to know that you aren't on your own now. And I want you to know that it's been taken care of. You don't need to worry about him anymore, Elodie. He's never going to be able to hurt you again.”
“You don't know that. You can't say that. I still have months before I'm free of him, Wren. You might already be eighteen, but I have to wait until June.”
He shakes his head. “Calm down, E. It's okay. I swear to you. It's been taken care of.”
There's a tone to his voice. He says, 'It's been taken care of,' but he's saying something else as well. He's saying that he's done something, he's somehow taken care of my father, and he won't be able to hurt me again. A knot of panic rises in my throat. “Oh my god. What did you do, Wren?” I ask carefully.
“You knew I was a monster when you met me, Elodie. I've changed so much about myself for you because I want to be good for you. But there are parts of me that won't be denied, E. That bastard was a dead man walking the moment I knew how you felt. Once I saw my own feelings reflected in your eyes, I couldn’t allow him to get away with what he did.”
I...don't even know what to say. What to think. None of this is making any sense. “How I felt?”
Wren's mouth quirks up a little. “Yes. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?” He places my hand on his chest, right over his heart, laying his hand on top of mine. “I'm in love with you. And it'll be my fucking undoing if I'm wrong, but I think you're in love with me, too, Little E. Have I been deluding myself this entire time?”
I'm in love with you.
It's been taken care of.
I'm in love with you.
It's been taken care of.
I look up into his face—the savage, beautiful kind of face that poets have written about for millennia—and the terrible fear that's been crouched in the back corner of my mind since I was fourteen just disappears. “No. You haven't,” I whisper. “I do love you.”
He exhales, his head dropping, his chin hitting his chest, and I can feel his relief. “Thank fucking god.”
“Wren? Did you kill my father?”
He looks up at me from under those dark, dark eyebrows, and my breath catches in my throat. “No, Little E. I didn't kill him. But I hurt him. I hurt him real fucking bad.”
35
WREN
Mariposa used to tell Mercy and me stories when we were kids. She'd tuck us up in our beds and settle herself on a chair in the corner of the bedroom we shared, and then she'd begin, whispering in a sinister, creepy voice that used to make my skin prickle with fear. Her goal wasn't to fill our heads with fantastical fairytales that would infiltrate our dreams. Hell no. She wanted to put the fear of God into us, and the tales she told of hideous monsters and disfigured creatures were her way of trying to control us.
The little boys and girls who fell foul of awful fates in her stories were always Bad Children. They didn't listen to their elders. They misbehaved. They were disrespectful, never did as they were told, and they were punished severely for it.
Mariposa had hoped that her tales of woe would teach us poor motherless twins a lesson and we'd fall in line. Unfortunately, her horror stories only taught me one lesson: that the best way not to fear a monster was to become one.
I'll tell Elodie anything she wants to know. If she wants every single little detail of what befell Colonel Stillwater the weekend I dragged Dashiell and Pax on a