RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,36

plastic!” —and they’ve tidied up most of the mess. She informs me that it’s safe to go back to my room now, which feels laughable and absolutely stupid because of course it’s not fucking safe, someone knifed my bed to death, but I follow after her, my legs mechanically doing their job as I re-enter room 416.

Carina hugs me, an anxious smile on her face. My clothes have all been folded and returned to their rightful places in the closet and the chest of drawers. The furniture is reassembled and back where it belongs. The bed’s been made up, sheets on the mattress to disguise its newness, and there are two fresh pillows plumped up like fluffy sheep, leaning against the headboard. Everything appears normal, if a little emptier now.

“There was no point keeping the books,” Carina says softly. “We wrote down the titles, though. Principal Harcourt says she’s going to get replacements for you.”

My eyes sweep over the surfaces of the furniture, searching. “And the little china bird?”

“I’m afraid Gustav vacuumed up some of the pieces before he realized there was something on the rug,” Principal Harcourt says from the doorway. Her voice is clipped and harsh, and she clearly doesn’t want to be dealing with this anymore. She has better things to be doing at eight p.m. on a dark and stormy night, and none of them include pacifying a troubled teen about a broken ornament. “If you know where it came from, we’ll happily get you another bird as well, Elodie. We’ll have a new laptop for you soon hopefully. Just make a list of anything you need, and we’ll make sure it’s taken care of.”

She turns around and walks off down the hall, her heels clipping angrily against the hardwood as she goes, leaving me and Carina alone in my bedroom, which now smells of chemicals, and plastic, and brand-new mattresses.

“Want me to stay with you?” Carina tucks a strand of hair back behind my ear. “I don’t mind. We can watch something on my laptop. Polish off some chocolate? I have a stash in my room.”

Wearily, I shake my head. “If it’s alright with you, I’d kinda like to be alone. I just…this is all a lot to wrap my head around.”

Carina looks unsure, but she accepts my decision with a sorry smile and gives me one last hug. “All right. I’m just at the other end of the hall if you need me, okay? Shoot me a text if you change your mind.”

The moment she’s gone, a fissure of lightning rips open the sky outside my bedroom window, bleaching the gardens and the trees outside the academy bone white, throwing tall, menacing shadows across the lawns. Darkness descends a moment later, shrouding everything in black, the rain continuing to hammer against the glass, but in that brief moment of illumination, I see something: a figure cloaked in shadow, standing at the mouth of the hedges that lead to the maze.

10

ELODIE

No one said a word about the knife sticking out of my bed.

Strikes me as a little odd, that fact.

I’d have thought it would have been the first thing Principal Harcourt wanted to discuss with me. Surely, she should have wanted to reassure me that I was safe, and that no one would be allowed to harm me here at Wolf Hall Academy. She seemed far more concerned with replacing my damaged property instead of getting to the bottom of the matter, though.

And no one, no one, had any ideas or suggestions as to who might have done this to my room, or what they were hoping to achieve by trashing my stuff.

The military-style training that passed as my childhood wasn’t just physical, though. It was mental, too. I was taught how to read and assess a situation on sight from a very young age. I know how to read a room and take it apart, piece by piece, without touching a single thing. Colonel Stillwater trained me how to draw educated conclusions about a person’s intent from their actions, and I’ve already drawn a number of educated conclusions about the break in, based on what I observed during the first five seconds after I walked into my room.

Whoever tore my room apart wasn’t trying to threaten me.

Or at least that wasn’t their main purpose, anyway.

The pages ripped out of the books? That was a pointed exercise, as were the drawers that were pulled off their runners and dumped upside down onto the floor. Whoever