RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,179

fact that they subtly threatened my life and implied they were going to murder my ass on the night of prom.

Assholes.

I snatch up the slip of paper and scrunch it in my hand, then toss it across the room. I’m aiming for the trash can, but I’m a terrible shot. I miss, and the balled-up nomination slip ends up on the floor with all the other anonymous threats to my life.

Out of the corner of my eye, Jacob Weaving hunches over his desk, scribbling furiously into his notebook. He’s supposed to be writing an essay on the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I can picture the scrawled mess he’s drawn instead—a manga fuck doll with giant, bare tits and parted lips, legs spread wide open. Anime porn is Jacob’s specialty. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches me watching him, and a smug, infuriating smirk fishhooks his mouth, pulling it up at one side. “Need a ride home later, Sil? Cillian and Sam are waiting in the lot. We really enjoyed the last time we all hung out.”

“I’d rather crawl on broken glass.”

Jacob feigns shock. “No need to overreact. Just thought you might like to play us a few songs or something. No harm, no foul.”

But there has been harm. There’s been more than one foul on Jacob Weaving’s part. He’s a pig. A psycho. An evil, twisted, disgusting excuse for a human being, and I hate him with every fiber of my seventeen-year-old being. I grab the purple sparkly ballot box Mr. French thrust at me when I arrived at detention thirty minutes ago, swing my bag onto my back, and I get to my feet. A loud screeching sound fills the room as my chair legs scrape the floor, and Jacob sits back, lacing his fingers together, stacking them on top of his stomach as he observes me heading for the door.

“Abandoning detention before you’ve been dismissed? So brave, Parisi. Your courage makes my dick hard.”

I kick at the screwed-up paper littering the floor by French’s desk. Yanking open the door, I pause before I leave, casting a disgusted look back at him over my shoulder. “We both know it isn’t my courage that makes your shriveled-up dick hard, Jake. You prefer it when I’m screaming and afraid, don’t you?”

A cold, detached viciousness settles into the handsome lines of his face. Because Jacob Weaving is handsome. He’s the hottest guy at Raleigh. He’s tall, and he’s ripped, and there was once a time when the sight of him smiling would have made me weak at the knees. Not anymore, though. Now, when he smiles, all I see are the many lies and the secrets, lurking just beneath the surface of his privileged, All-American demi-god charm, and it makes me want to puke. It makes me want to claw my way, broken and bleeding out of my own skin, so that I no longer have to be me anymore.

“Careful, Parisi,” he snarls under his breath. “Your fall from grace has been pretty hard already. Wouldn’t wanna go making things worse for yourself.”

My own smile is a ruined, sour thing. “Worse?” I want to laugh, but I’m afraid to. My body’s been betraying me lately; It can’t be trusted to carry out the simplest of tasks. No matter what emotion I try to project, I end up displaying the exact opposite, and I cannot afford to cry in front of Jake Weaving. I draw in a deep breath, stepping out into the empty hallway, and I let the door swing closed behind me. Jake’s eyes remain on me, burning into my skin like twin brands, until the door clicks shut and he’s gone.

I’m going to be in shit for bailing on detention, but I don’t care. Sometimes, it’s as though even the Raleigh faculty are in on this sick, twisted game I’ve found myself caught up in. They know about Jake. They know about our history, and yet they’re still willing to leave us alone, unsupervised in a room together after school hours?

Madness.

Pure and absolute madness.

I check the watch at my wrist, Mickey Mouse on its face, grinning, one arm longer than the other, pointing out the hour and the minutes, and I hiss between my teeth. It’s almost four p.m. which means Mr. French will be coming by to cut us loose any moment. My boots ring out, my footfall echoing loudly off the unending row of scuffed blue lockers that line the hallway, and I fight the