RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,93

he tear open the vacuum cleaner to get them out? And how the hell did he piece the figurine back together? It would have taken hours. Days. I can’t even comprehend how much time it must have taken. How much patience such an undertaking would have required. Far more patience than I credited Wren with possessing, that’s for sure.

It doesn’t take long for an uncomfortable suspicion to take root in my mind, like a weed pushing its way up through the cracks in a pavement. Wren didn’t put the bird back together. He just couldn’t have. In no reality would he have taken the time to do something that required that much effort. Which means that he forced, bribed or threatened someone else and made them do it. And then he dropped his little turquoise box off at my door, smug as fuck, pretending like he’s some kind of hero for returning something so precious to me. I go from grateful and amazed to jaded and disappointed in three seconds flat. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.

At six in the evening, I get a message from Wren, saying that he’s going away for three days. His short, ‘catch you when I get back,’ makes me so unreasonably angry that I lock myself in my room and I don’t come out until Sunday afternoon. What happened to the attic? Three days getting to know him my ass. I’ve expected this kind of behavior from him since the word go, so then why does it still sting?

I skip dinner, telling Carina I’m not hungry when she asks if I want to join her in the food hall, and I brood in my room, pacing up and down, wearing a trench in the floorboards as I whip back and forth like a lion in a cage, all the while staring at the bird like it’s a hand grenade, about to go off on my mattress.

How can he do something like this and then just bail? It makes no sense.

Monday and Tuesday scrape by, and every little thing gets on my nerves: the line in the cafeteria; Damiana’s snarky, relentless comments in English; the fact that there’s no creamer left for my coffee; my assignments, which have piled up to the point that I have to stay up all night on Tuesday to complete them. Carina notices my shitty mood and comments on it, but I tell her I’m PMSing, and she seems to take it all in stride. Inside, I’m boiling away like a pot left on the heat. It shouldn’t bother me that he just left without explaining himself. I shouldn’t care at all that I find out it was Mercy’s birthday over the weekend, which means it was Wren’s birthday, and he went off with his friends to celebrate. But it affects me. All of it does. God, what kind of fragile, pathetic kind of loser have I become?

When Wren doesn’t show up for class on Wednesday, I’ve become so irritated by the whole thing that I decide I need to do something about the situation. For the sake of my own sanity, if not for poor Carina’s.

Underneath all of the frustration and anger lies the sickening worry that I hurt Wren when I didn’t take his hand in the library. He could be pissed that I didn’t immediately drop to my knees in gratitude when he told me that he cared about me. I’m sure that’s what he was expecting me to do. If he’s salty because of some perceived rejection on my part, then maybe that’ll be it. He’ll leave me alone and I won’t have to deal with his attentions anymore.

This thought should make me happy. I’ve been frustrated by him for weeks, and with him backing off I’ll be able to settle into life at Wolf Hall properly now, without fear of further complications.

But.

Urgh, why is there always a fucking but? Why can’t I just do a celebratory dance and move the fuck on like any sane person would do?

I sit in the dark in my room, stewing. I scarf down half a bar of chocolate, but the sugar tastes sour and the candy curdles in my stomach, making me nauseous. I do whatever I can to take my mind off of the fact that Wren still hasn’t messaged me, frittering away an hour playing Animal Farm on my Nintendo Switch, then chatting with Levi on WhatsApp, but I still can’t shake the disagreeable funk