Page 94 of Riot House
I...don't even know what to say. What to think. None of this is making any sense. “How I felt?”
Wren's mouth quirks up a little. “Yes. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?” He places my hand on his chest, right over his heart, laying his hand on top of mine. “I'm in love with you. And it'll be my fucking undoing if I'm wrong, but I think you're in love with me, too, Little E. Have I been deluding myself this entire time?”
I'm in love with you.
It's been taken care of.
I'm in love with you.
It's been taken care of.
I look up into his face—the savage, beautiful kind of face that poets have written about for millennia—and the terrible fear that's been crouched in the back corner of my mind since I was fourteen just disappears. “No. You haven't,” I whisper. “I do love you.”
He exhales, his head dropping, his chin hitting his chest, and I can feel his relief. “Thank fucking god.”
“Wren? Did you kill my father?”
He looks up at me from under those dark, dark eyebrows, and my breath catches in my throat. “No, Little E. I didn't kill him. But I hurt him. I hurt himrealfucking bad.”
35
WREN
Mariposa usedto tell Mercy and me stories when we were kids. She'd tuck us up in our beds and settle herself on a chair in the corner of the bedroom we shared, and then she'd begin, whispering in a sinister, creepy voice that used to make my skin prickle with fear. Her goal wasn't to fill our heads with fantastical fairytales that would infiltrate our dreams. Hell no. She wanted to put the fear of God into us, and the tales she told of hideous monsters and disfigured creatures were her way of trying to control us.
The little boys and girls who fell foul of awful fates in her stories were always Bad Children. They didn't listen to their elders. They misbehaved. They were disrespectful, never did as they were told, and they were punished severely for it.
Mariposa had hoped that her tales of woe would teach us poor motherless twins a lesson and we'd fall in line. Unfortunately, her horror stories only taught meonelesson: that the best way not to fear a monster was to become one.
I'll tell Elodie anything she wants to know. If she wants every single little detail of what befell Colonel Stillwater the weekend I dragged Dashiell and Pax on a plane, halfway across the world to help me take down that motherfucker, then I'll sit down with her and go through it step by step. I don't think she wants that right now, though. I think she needs to process the fact that she's free, and this secret she's been keeping no longer needs to gnaw away at her soul. She can walk out of the darkness, into the light, and so help me god I'll be ready and waiting there for her when she does.
For now, the only question she asks is this: “If this happened weeks ago, why haven’t they said anything? Why haven’t they told me that he was attacked?”
I tell her what I know, trying not to sugarcoat the facts. “The first few days after he was dropped off at the hospital, they didn’t know who he was. He had no ID on him, and his face was, ahh, swollen beyond all recognition. Then the military police made the connection and moved him to an army medical facility. Your father was conscious there long enough to insist that he didn’t want you told what had happened. After that, he was placed into a medically induced coma so he could heal. My contact says he can’t access any further information without raising red flags, so that’s all I can tell you.”
She nods woodenly, taking all of this in.
After what I’ve done, I expect her to recoil from me, but she doesn’t.
We stay at the hotel until Sunday night, and I get far too used to Elodie falling asleep in my arms. It's the most terrifying, heavenly experience I've ever endured. I'm so fascinated by the sound of her slow, steady breathing that I hardly manage to sleep myself.
The drive back to Wolf Hall is silent. It's not an uncomfortable silence, though. It's peaceable and content, and Elodie leans her head on my shoulder, watching the world fly by out of the window, rubbing her hand up and down the inside of my thigh.
She gets closer and closer to my crotch, her movements becoming slower and more teasing, and I eventually have to pull off at the side of the road to adjust my raging hard-on.
“You're fucking trouble,” I growl, giving her a loaded sideways look. “How's a guy supposed to concentrate on the road when a girl's millimeters away from rubbing his dick?”
I expect nothing of her. I haven't touched her since we spoke about what happened to her back in Tel Aviv. Not sexually, anyway. I've kissed her, and I've held her, but other than that I've been waiting for her to make the first move. She makes it now, parked next to a stand of Elm trees, by placing her hand directly on top of my cock and giving it a squeeze so hard it borders on painful.
“Fuck knows how you're gonna concentrate when I have your dick in mymouth, then,” she says.“Drive.”
I laugh. “You want us both to die?”
She bites the tip of her tongue as she pops open the button on my jeans and slowly, suggestively pulls down the fly. “I've seen how you drive. We'll be just fine. Just keep your eyes on the road, Jacobi.”
I've had plenty of road-head in my time, but it's different with Elodie. That sweet, perfect little mouth of hers is so hesitant and gentle that it fucking kills me when she wraps her lips around me. And I don't want to kill usbefore we've had a chance at a proper life together, whatever that might look like. She slips her hand down the front of my boxers, her fingers fastening around my shaft, and she frees my erection. Her eyes go wide when she looks down at the swollen, glistening tip of my cock. “I'm not going to have to tell you twice, am I?” she asks.
She's fucking sassing me now? I like that. Still, I take hold of her wrist and stop her from going any further. “I'll make you a deal. You let me eat your pussy on the hood of this car and I'll let you do whatever the fuck you want to me when we get back to the academy.”
