RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,16

says, “How about…a trade?”

I stop typing.

Turn around in my chair.

There’s a worrying look on Pax’s face.

I narrow my eyes at him. “Explain.” From time to time, he’s been known to be a little tricksy. Not as tricksy as me, but it’s wise to be on guard.

He pouts, staring up at the ceiling. He’s being far too nonchalant right now. He wants something big. Bigger than Elodie, which means he’s about to try and pass whatever this is off as a fair exchange. “The boat,” he says airily. “You have it while it’s still in Corsica. Trade me the boat over spring break and I won’t lay a finger on the girl.”

Hah. He talks about ‘The Contessa’ like it’s a fucking schooner, not a forty-foot long, seven-bedroomed luxury super yacht. She’s my father’s pride and joy. If I let Pax stay there unsupervised during the spring break, the damn thing’ll probably end up at the bottom of the Mediterranean. My father would tar and feather me, then disinherit me.

“A week,” I counter.

Pax folds his arms across his chest, the casual, carefree expression he was just sporting vanishing as he settles in for negotiations. “Two weeks, man. The whole break. I’m not flying across the world for one fucking week.”

“Ten days. Final offer.”

“No deal. I guess you’re gonna have to stand down.”

He could make me stand down. If he wanted to, he could involve Dash, and the two of them could vote that I stay away from Elodie until the end of fucking time. House rules. We try to avoid forcing each other to do anything most of the time, it only winds up with someone getting hurt, but it wouldn’t be an unprecedented move. Pax really must like the look of Elodie, which makes me want her even more.

She already is mine, though, and this claim he’s trying to make on her is boiling my fucking blood. “Ten days, Pax. Go see your Mom in Prague afterward.”

He looks horrified. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“All right. Fine. You get the boat. Two weeks in June. But I so much as hear you’ve been making Molotov cocktails again and I’ll call in the fucking gendarmerie.”

If anything, this only seems to make the smile on the piece of shit’s face spread even wider. God, what the fuck am I doing? This is going to be an unmitigated disaster. I can already feel it in my bones. “Stop crowing. I can hear the laughter bouncing around the inside of your thick skull from here,” I grumble, spinning back around to face my desk. I won’t be able to write anymore. I know I won’t. I’m relieved that ownership of Elodie Stillwater has been cleared up, but there’s a rank taste in my mouth that I can’t shake now.

I made a copy of her file with all her personal contact information a week after I took the photo. I considered calling her before she even arrived, just so I could hear her voice and stop driving myself mad with wondering what she would sound like. I’d managed to show a little restraint, though. But I couldn’t stop myself from texting after our English class. I’d wanted to rile her up. To watch her reaction from afar. Annoyingly, she’d barely reacted at all. She’d been confused at first, because she didn’t know the number, I’m assuming, but then her face had gone blank.

No fear. No anger. No irritation. The only emotion I saw cross her face, from my casual lean against the wall fifteen feet away, was a brief flicker of amusement, at which point she’d tucked her phone back into her pocket and jogged up the steps towards the biology labs without a backward glance.

“Why are you so dead set on this girl, anyway?” Pax asks, making a hell of a noise as he purposefully fires the lid on a can of pringles across the room, jams his hand inside, pulls out a stack of chips and stuffs them into his mouth.

I tap out a sentence, focusing on my laptop screen. “She’s nothing. She’s unimportant.”

“Bullshit, Jacobi. You haven’t shown the slightest bit of interest in a girl since Mara and you know it.”

BANG!

I think I just shattered my laptop’s screen.

I shouldn’t have slammed it closed so hard, but then again Pax shouldn’t have just uttered that name within my earshot. He knows better than that. Closing my eyes, I inhale a shaky, uneven breath, trying to level out the rage spiking in my bloodstream.