RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,75
deny all I’ve said. Tell me I’m wrong. You don’t imagine me. You’re not plagued by me day and night, the way I’m plagued by you. See, I have no problem with the truth. I made friends with it a long time ago. A lie only makes a fool of the liar. The truth always comes out. I am besieged by you, and it fucking sucks. You’re in my head when I wake up. You’re in my head when I wander around this wretched place, and you’re still there, tormenting the ever-loving shit out of my when I close my eyes at night. So, do it. Lie to me some more, Little E. Please feel free. But you’ll excuse me if I choose to get wasted while I settle in for the show.”
I wasn’t expecting this confession out of him. I’ve always thought him too proud and too arrogant to ever admit that he has a weakness out loud. It’s impossible to comprehend that I am that weakness.
Wren takes another drink, then spreads his arms wide, as if encouraging me to get on with it. He’s so fucking sure of himself. He’s so certain that he knows me. Knows precisely what I’m going to say. I don’t plan on living up to his expectations. “Fine. You’re right. I’m rotten and eaten up on the inside because of you. Is that what you want to hear? I let something spoiled and bad into my head, and now I can’t rid myself of it, and it’s festering away, driving me madder and madder by the day. Congratu-fucking-lations. I’m going against every ounce of common sense I own every damn day, and I’m making decisions I know are fucking stupid, and I can’t do anything about it! How fucked up is that!”
If I were back in Tel Aviv, this wouldn’t be a problem. None of it. Colonel Stillwater’s foreboding presence would have nipped this bullshit in the bud the day I arrived here. I wouldn’t have been weak enough to let my head run away with these thoughts, and Wren…well, let’s face it, Wren would probably be dead by now. My father would have cottoned on to what he was doing and the guy would have mysteriously wound up in pieces, scattered along the embankment of a fucking highway in black garbage bags.
He drums his fingers against the side of the wine bottle, shifting so that he’s lying on the welter of blankets now instead of sitting. His shirt’s risen up, exposing a few inches of bare stomach, and my chest pinches tightly. I’m the worst kind of addict. I know precisely how bad he is for me, and yet I can’t stop myself from craving more. I had my first taste of him in the gazebo during the storm, the memory of his naked torso’s been driving me to distraction ever since, and now I want that shirt he’s wearing gone. I want it fucking gone, and I hate myself for it. Where’s all of the self-control my father taught me? And the common sense?
Like a sated cat, basking in a patch of sunlight, Wren closes his eyes, resting one hand on his solar plexus. “Was that so painful?” he murmurs. “Sit down, E. You have questions for me.”
“I don’t. I—” For fuck’s sake. Why is it so hard to be straight with him? I have a million questions, and I’m dying to know the answers to all of them but sitting on that blanket is inviting a kind of trouble into my life that I don’t need. “Whatever questions I have are irrelevant. The answers aren’t going to change anything,” I tell him. I’m beginning to feel a little hopeless now. This situation’s miserable; I’d give anything to get myself out of it, but the bitter irony of it all is that I’d also do anything to have him.
He’s the bad guy. The monster that crawls out of the shadows to hurt and maim those around him. Nothing good can come of him. But fighting this attraction I feel for him seems so futile and pointless that my will no longer feels like my own. I’m his prisoner, and Wren Jacobi is not a benevolent jailer. He’ll keep me under his lock and key until he’s bored of me, and I get the impression that his obsessions are for life.
“What harm can it do?” he murmurs. “You speak. I speak back. It’s a conversation, Elodie. It won’t fucking kill you.”