RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,73
actual fact, he’s no one to me. I owe him nothing. I definitely don’t have to worry about making him fucking happy. He can kiss my fucking ass.
Launching myself off the bed, I grab my hoody off the back of the door, jamming my arms angrily into the sleeves as I fly out of my room and down the hall, toward the cleaning closet by the bathrooms. I’m muttering under my breath like a crazy person when I reach the closet door, not caring if anyone hears the very colorful and highly offensive curse words that tumble out of my mouth.
The inside of the closet reeks of bleach and must. I breathe through my mouth as I flip over a steel mop bucket, standing on its dented base so I can reach the lip of the crawl space that leads to the attic. Curse my short ass; without Carina here to give me a boost, it takes three failed attempts before I manage to jump high enough to pull myself up using my upper body strength. I graze my knuckles and scrape my back in my haste to drag myself through the crawl space, telling myself that my hurry is all about my simmering rage and not my claustrophobia.
Finally, I reach the other side, huffing and puffing and spitting wads of dust out of my mouth, still cursing like a sailor. I slide from the crawl space without a lick of grace, landing with a hollow thud on the ancient, splintered floorboards of the attic.
“Wow. It’s like watching a fully grown, fully clothed person emerge from a birthing canal.” The voice, emanating coolly from the other side of the attic, doesn’t sound all that impressed by the miracle of birth. Rather, he sounds quite put out by it. I sit up, slapping the sleeves of my hoody, whipping up a cloud of dust that makes me cough.
“Fuck…you…Jacobi…” It’s all I can manage around the hacking and spluttering. A glass of water appears directly in front of my face. A glass. A real one. Cut crystal, with a pretty flower design etched into its surface. Where the fuck did he get this kind of a glass up here? Stunned, I look up, prepared to tell him that I’m not drinking out of a receptacle that’s been packed away in a travel chest for the past three decades, but then I see the thick pile of very new, very luxurious looking blankets on the floor, and the basket, and the wine, and the hundreds of candles that have been placed on top of every available surface, their flames flickering and waving as they work industriously to drive back the dark, and the words turn to ash on my tongue.
“What the fuck is—” I finally look up at Wren, my tongue suddenly seems too big for my mouth. Holy hell, he looks incredible. His hair’s perfectly messy, tumbling into his face. Black shirt, with actual buttons down the front, the top button of which is unfastened. His sleeves have been cuffed to his elbows, exposing muscled forearms. His jeans are faded and frayed at the heel, and the denim smells distinctly of laundry detergent. I know, because he’s standing so close to me that his knee is right in front of my face. Not that I’m smelling his freaking knee. That would be weird.
Wren smirks down at me, and an unbearable ache swells in my chest, all the way up to the base of my throat. I can’t fucking breathe around it. “What the fuck is this?” he asks, finishing my sentence for me. “This is what a Friday night attic date looks like. No need to look so horrified. I didn’t bring any weapons with me.”
“I wish I had,” I growl. “You’re delusional. You know that, right? This is not a date.”
Wren spins around, holding the glass to his lips and draining the water inside. I force my eyes to the ground, mortified by the fact that I don’t want to look away. He walks back to the cozy set-up he’s arranged, sinking heavily to the floor. He faces me, lounging back onto the blankets, toying with the glass in one hand. “What would you call it, then?” he asks. “Maybe…a war council? You wanna go to war with me, Little E?”
“I just want you to leave me alone. Is that so much to ask?”
Wren huffs down his nose, his gaze wandering around our cluttered, curious surroundings. “You don’t really want that,