RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,87

me to reach out and take his hand. I have no idea what his end goal is here, but it feels like a trap and if I put my hand in his I’ll be endangering myself. I follow his gaze, staring at the lines of his palm, tracing them with my eyes, wishing very badly that I could reach out and trace them with the tips of my fingers, to feel the heat and the roughness of his skin…

“I know what you’re thinking,” he whispers.

Numb. I am so fucking numb. I can’t feel anything bar my own churning fear. It’s impossible not to feel that. “You do?”

Wren’s voice is as soft as silk, as hushed as snow falling in winter. “Yes. And I swear you’re wrong. This isn’t some bet between me and the other guys. I’ve pinned no wager on whether you care if I live or die. I’m not trying to make you feel something for me that you shouldn’t, purely for my own entertainment…”

“But that’s what you wanted, right? When I first got here, you decided you were gonna target me as your next plaything. You wanted to hurt me, and you were going to smile while you did it. I saw it in your eyes.”

“And what do you see now?” I barely hear the words, they’re so quiet.

Fuck. Please do not look up at him, Elodie. Do not fucking do it.

My breath stoppers up in my throat; it must have been stuck there for a while, because my lungs are beginning to burn. I can’t help myself. I do it. I look up at him, dead in the eye, and it’s as though I’ve been shot in the chest, a cold, creeping sensation spreading outward from my solar plexus. His eyes are clear. I see no deception in them. I see plenty of pride, and a whole heap of ego, but I also see the faintest, weakest glimmer of hope.

I can’t bear the pressure building between us a second longer; I look away, out of the window. Wren closes his hand into a fist, withdrawing it back across the table.

“Is this the part where you leave now?” I ask morosely.

“Yeah. This is the part where I leave.” He stands, running both his hands back through his hair—a gesture of pure frustration. “I came to tell you that I left something by your door for you, Little E. I thought about going inside and putting it by your bed, but we both know how you feel about people breaking into your room, right?”

He goes before I can say another word.

Goddamnit.

An invisible hand closes around my throat, choking the life out of me as I sit there, waiting for Carina to come back with our lunch. After a while she shows up with a couple of sandwiches, two apples, and a giant bag of Doritos balanced in her arms. I let her chatter away, and I chew and swallow the food she so kindly brought back for me, but I’m not really here. I’m just waiting for an opportunity to bolt. That opportunity arrives when Carina’s phone begins to buzz and she holds up her cell, grinning like an idiot, and tells me that Andre’s calling.

I make my excuses and I leave her to go talk to her boyfriend.

On the fourth floor, outside room four sixteen, I find a small turquoise box with a pale green ribbon tied around it, sitting there, waiting for me. With shaking hands, I collect it from the floor and hurry inside, my insides twisting themselves into knots.

He left me a gift?

I place the box down on the bed, glaring at it with my hands on my hips.

He should not have brought me a gift.

It takes all of my courage to gingerly untie the ribbon and lift up the lid.

“Oh my god!” I cover my mouth with my hands, trying not to cry out. My eyes sting as I take a step forward, bending over to get a closer look at the tiny little object nestled in amongst a bed of lilac tissue paper inside: the white of his chest, that fades to the blue of his back, that deepens to the dark, midnight blue at the tips of his wings…

It’s the bird, my mother’s bird, the one that was shattered into a million pieces…and he’s somehow been pieced back together.

20

WREN

A paradigm shift.

That’s what philosophers would call a change like this.

Because I haven’t simply changed my mind about something. I’ve had a change