RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,15

to life, blood surging to transform soft flesh to rigid steel. At the same time, my brain was obliterated by a need to see the girl cry, so fierce and intense that I could barely breathe around it.

Fuck her.

Hurt her.

Soothe her.

Ruin her.

I was so perfectly balanced on that invisible tight rope that it felt like Christmas fucking morning. After all, there’s nothing like a little internal warfare to perk up a shitty mood. And now, after two weeks of waiting, trawling through her social media accounts and clicking through all of her photos on Facebook—who doesn’t make their shit private these days?—I feel like I’ve got a solid grasp on who the newest student at Wolf Hall is.

She’s a walking contradiction.

I like this about her.

I asked a friend out in Tel Aviv to do some digging on her home life, which seems to be taking a lot longer than expected, but in the meantime, I’ve already concocted fifteen different ways to tear Elodie into a million little pieces. I’ve subsequently discounted each and every one of them. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, my last chance to condition someone else and bend them to my will. I need to be careful how I go about it. Make her crawl for my approval right away and it’ll all be over too soon. I’ll tire of her and be left having to find new ways to entertain myself until graduation. Give her too much free rein, though, and she could slip out of my grasp. There’s a happy medium somewhere in the middle, and now I need to work out exactly where it is. All part of the adventure.

“You broke the rules anyway,” Pax says, tearing off a huge hunk of bread from his sandwich with his teeth. The man’s a complete heathen. No fucking manners whatsoever. During the summer, he models for Calvin Klein, strutting up and down runways in tight grey underwear. Aside from his shaved head, he looks clean in those photos. He looks well-constructed, like a fucking G.I. Joe—American made, only the best parts and labor. His fancy agent, and his fancy friends, and the fancy fucking idiots who stare at his image and wish they were him…none of them get to see who he really is: this ruthless, simple creature that likes to break things and tear them apart with his teeth.

“By rights, she’s mine,” he says around his mouthful of food. “You had Damiana. Dash got Carina. I’m next up to bat.”

Growling, I type even faster, spewing a thousand words a minute into the Word document, determined to get my re-write of Fitz’s dumb Victorian morality assignment completed before the fun for the evening kicks off. “You know I hate sports metaphors,” I snarl. “Shut the fuck up and stop whining. You’re a grown ass man. If you want to go after the girl, then fucking do it. Doesn’t mean my plans will change.”

Do I care that Pax wants Elodie as his new mark? Sure I do. He’s a good-looking guy. Calvin Klein approved. He’s screwed plenty of girls here at Wolf Hall, and a million beyond the walls of our desperately boring little ecosystem, too. He’s dangerously charming when the mood takes him, and I’ve seen plenty of intelligent women fall for his bullshit. No reason why Elodie wouldn’t be the same.

To be a complete punk about it, though…I saw her first.

I’ve researched her. I chanted her full name inside my head—Elodie Francine Jemimah Stillwater—until it felt like a mantra, a pebble worn smooth by constant rubbing, and now she feels like she’s mine. I do not share my toys well with others.

We have our rules for a reason, naturally. Riot House wouldn’t exist without some kind of code or system by which its inhabitants were required to operate. There may only three of us here, but each of our personalities are such that we’d all wind up dead if we didn’t honor a line drawn in the sand from time to time.

Pax grunts, screwing up his Subway wrapper and lobbing it at the trash can on the other side of my bedroom. He shouldn’t even be in here while I’m trying to work, but trying to keep Pax out of anywhere is like trying to stop water leaking from a holey bucket. You learn to give up pretty quickly. Pax is quiet for a while. This means he’s thinking deeply about something. I manage to cram in three hundred words before he eventually