Broken Empire: A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance (Boys of Oak Park Prep Book 3)

by Callie Rose

  The beginning of spring semester always felt different than the beginning of fall semester. It wasn’t so much a fresh start as a continuation of what had already started, so things tended to move faster and settle in quicker.

  As the first week continued, we all fell into a pattern. The Princes would meet at my dorm in the morning and walk me over to Craydon Hall. Then we’d split up to head to our separate classes, coming together again as a group for lunch and at gym. I was almost never alone, and although a part of me found it constricting, a bigger part of me found it comforting. We sat with Leah, Maggie, and Dan at lunch, and although the two groups—Princes and non-Princes—didn’t exactly gel, everyone got along okay. There tended to be two distinct spheres of conversation, but occasionally the bubbles would merge together and the whole table would talk amongst themselves.

  Unfortunately, classes weren’t the only thing that’d picked right up where fall semester had left off. The Oak Park admins and staff had scrambled to quickly contain and destroy the hundreds of pages of copied material Adena had distributed, but the blonde bitch herself was in no hurry to let it go. What she had on them—what I had given her, without ever meaning to—was enough to make the Princes miserable for a long fucking time. And she clearly didn’t intend to let anyone at school forget about it anytime soon.

  Printed copies of the pictures I’d taken of Elijah were pasted to lockers one morning. Mason tried to drag me to our first class, but I wouldn’t go until I’d yanked every last one down, hobbling from locker to locker until I’d collected them all. I kept them in my backpack to burn later, not trusting that some asshole wouldn’t dig them out of the trash if I threw them away.

  On the way to second period, I could barely look at Elijah. Shame and fury burned in my gut, and I was seriously considering lifting the “don’t go after Adena until we’re sure” edict that I’d made Mason promise to uphold.

  “You okay, Tal?” he asked quietly, as we stepped out the side door of Craydon.

  I turned to him, almost falling over as the rubber stopper on my crutch dragged against the walkway. “Why are you asking me that?”

  He caught me quickly, holding my arms to steady me as he gazed down at me. “Because you look like you’re about to blow a gasket.”

  I shook my head, my eyes burning as my entire body shook with repressed anger. “She’s such a bitch. Like it’s not bad enough she posted that shit on the internet? Now she has to put it up all over school too?”

  He shrugged, his expression serious. “It was already out. People already saw it. She’s trying to keep going after us, but she already used everything she has. People won’t care after a while.”

  “But it’s not—” I broke off, biting my lip.

  I hated that Adena was doing this, but what I hated most, what made live snakes seem to twist in my gut, was the fact that I had done it. I had taken those pictures of Elijah. If I hadn’t done that, Adena couldn’t do what she was doing now.

  Was this what Mason felt? This gnawing, overwhelming wish to rewind time and just make a different fucking choice?

  Maybe it made us all even, but I didn’t even care about that anymore. I just wanted Adena to stop. Wanted the little black notebook to never have been filled with a list of damaging information.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered.

  Elijah’s eyes widened, and he opened his mouth, already shaking his head to deny my words, but I spoke again before he could.

  “I shouldn’t have done it. That night was… special. It was good. It meant something to me, and then I just—wrecked it.”

  A small smile bloomed on his face, and he suddenly stepped closer to me, sliding his arm around my waist and splaying his hand across my lower back before dropping his head and pressing his lips to mine.

  I was so startled I almost dropped my crutches, my arms making an aborted movement to wrap around him in response. But I didn’t want to fall over, so I tightened my grip on the crutches instead as I fell into his kiss.

  We hadn’t done this since the night we’d both lost our virginity, but my body hadn’t forgotten how amazing it felt. The only points of contact between us were Elijah’s hand on my back and the connection of our lips, but even hampered by the crutches, my back arched, trying to reach him, trying to press more of our bodies together.

  His other hand delved into my hair, palming the back of my head as his tongue slid along the seam of my lips. When I opened my mouth, that addictive taste I hadn’t even realized I’d been craving flooded my senses as our tongues brushed against each other, teasing and exploring.

  Elijah angled his head a little, and I moved mine the other way, my breath coming faster as our kiss deepened.

  We were making out—heavily—in the little walkway between Craydon and Hammond Halls, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. At least, not enough to stop.

  The hand in my hair slid around to cup my jaw as his mouth moved against mine, and then Elijah finally pulled away. He was breathing a little harder too, and he dipped his head to press another chaste kiss to my lips before he met my gaze.

  “That night was special, Tal. It was maybe my favorite night ever. And I don’t care what happened after that. I know why you did it.”

  I hobbled awkwardly closer to him, hating the small space that still separated our bodies. He met me halfway, wrapping both his arms around my waist and pressing us flush together.

  “Maybe it’s a good thing it happened,” he murmured, although I could hear a twinge of pain in his voice as he spoke. “At least now we’re closer to even. If you hadn’t gotten back at us somehow, I don’t know if I’d ever be able to forgive myself for what we did.”

  “So you will forgive yourself? Someday?” I asked, my gaze catching on the bright flecks of green and brown in his eyes. They were mesmerizing. Beautiful and varied, as complex as the boy himself.

  “I will when you do,” he whispered.

  I didn’t know if he meant when I forgave him or when I forgave myself. But I didn’t ask. Instead, I tilted my head up, wordlessly asking for another kiss.

  He gave it to me, slipping his tongue past my lips right away this time, kissing me breathless as his oak and sage scent surrounded me.

  We ended up being twenty minutes late to class.

  But I didn’t give a fuck.

  Adena, the raging unpoppable pimple, didn’t stop trying to drag the Princes down.

  And despite Elijah’s promise that people would eventually stop caring if she kept bringing up things she’d already revealed, I could see it affecting the way people looked at the guys. By the beginning of the second week of classes, they’d become the butt of jokes to some and persona non grata to others.

  Every time things started to calm down, Adena would pull out another page from her little stash and wave it around like a fucking flag.

  She used me against them too, claiming that only trash fell for trash. And unfortunately, the Princes had done such a good job convincing some members of the student body that I was worth less than wet garbage that it came back to bite all of us in the ass now. I had some money, but everyone knew I’d been kicked out by my grandmother, which meant I was no longer really a Hildebrand.

  The Princes may have changed their tune, but there were still a ton of Oak Park students who judged someone entirely based on their last name and family’s net worth.

  As the dynamic on campus began to shift, Adena doing everything she could to drain power away from the Princes, I realized I’d been wrong about a few things when I’d first arrived at this school.

  I vividly remembered Leah chattering at a mile a minute, describing the different tiers that existed in the school, each one lording over the ones below them. But what I hadn’t fully realized—what I was only realizing now—was that the Princes hadn’t created that system.

  They had only fought their way to the top of it.

  Some sort of similar power structure had probably existed in the school since all of our parents ha
d gone here, and even long before that. It probably existed in every fancy prep academy in the country.

  Knocking the Princes off their thrones didn’t end that system entirely—it just created a power vacuum, an empty spot for someone else to grab.

  And Adena was determined to make that person her.

  Personally, I didn’t know why it fucking mattered. We were about to graduate. We had one semester left, and then it would be over. What the hell was she hoping to gain that was so important it could make all this worth it?

  Maybe she really is that petty. Maybe she’d fight this hard for the chance to rule the school for even a single damn day.

  It worried me though, to see her edging her way into power even as the Princes’ hold on the school slipped. Sable and Preston were her constant shadows, although unlike the Princes, the three of them didn’t function as a cohesive unit at all. That little trio was ruled entirely by Adena, with the other two just hanging on for the ride.

  The guys, for their part, hardly seemed to notice or care about their slipping rank in the school.

  It wasn’t that they weren’t paying attention to Adena. They were. But all their attention was focused on me and her—on making sure she didn’t get a chance to hurt me again in any way, large or small. I felt like a celebrity or the daughter of a dignitary or something with the way they escorted me everywhere on campus. The only time I was ever really alone was when I was tucked away safely in my dorm room—and I was pretty sure if I’d allowed it, the Princes would’ve started sleeping over in shifts too.

  “You guys don’t have to do all this, you know,” I told Finn on Saturday when he came over to study with me.

  I’d done a shitload of research on dyslexia and had some ideas I thought might help him. I also wanted to try to get him to go to a reading specialist, but considering how much his parents had messed him up about it, I figured we’d start with baby steps.

  “Do what?”

  He followed me to the couch and sat down next to me, dropping his books onto the coffee table. There was a foot of space between us, but I found myself hyper aware of his proximity anyway, of every little shift and movement of his body. I’d been alone in a room with the blond boy plenty of times, but not recently, and not in my dorm.

  I tugged my gaze away from the taut muscles of his forearms, shaking my head and hoping he hadn’t caught me staring. Fuck, Tal. Stop it.

  “This whole ‘guard the princess’ thing,” I said. “I appreciate you wanting to watch out for me, and I know I told Mason not to go after Adena for the car until we know for sure. But what about what she’s been doing to you? Aren’t you going to do something about it?”

  He grinned at me, his dimples popping out in his cheeks, and all of a sudden the foot of space between us felt like nothing at all.

  “We are doing something, Legs. We’re keeping you safe. Honestly, that’s the best fucking revenge there is against that bitch. And besides, it’s all that matters.”

  “But she’s ruining your reputation around the school. Don’t you care?”

  He cocked his head as if seriously considering my question. Then he shrugged.

  “Not as much as I thought I would, honestly.” He scooted a little closer to me on the couch, and it got a tiny bit harder to breathe. “When we first got here—our freshman year—there was another group that kind of ran things. We became the kings of our class, but they ruled the school. When they graduated, we took over. We started throwing parties at Clarendon Hall. Making nice with the right people and being assholes to the right people. And our families were already well known by everyone who goes here, so it just made it that much easier.”

  He pulled his bottom lip between his teeth, pausing for a second as he considered his next words.

  “But you know what? It was fucking lonely. I mean, we had each other, and I love those three fuckers like my own flesh and blood. But that was all we had. That’s why when we threw parties at Clarendon, we always ended up in a back room, just smoking and drinking by ourselves. Because we couldn’t trust anyone. Everyone wanted something—either a favor or to bring us down or just to get close to the fucking school royalty, you know? None of it was real. Not even whatever fucked up ‘relationship’ Adena and Mason had. It was all… fake.”

  He leaned against the back cushions of the couch, putting his feet up on the coffee table and tugging me back to rest beside him. He left his arm around my shoulders, and his thumb rubbed gentle circles over my upper arm as he added, “So, no. Maybe I won’t miss whatever reputation I had around this place. Maybe it doesn’t fucking matter.”

  I leaned into him, enjoying the strong, solid feel of his body against mine. My cast was too clunky for me to put it up on the coffee table too, but I put my good leg up, stretching it out alongside his.

  “I never would’ve thought I’d hear one of the Princes say that.”

  “Hey.” He poked my shoulder, careful to avoid any of my scars. “People can change, you know.”

  The monumental meaning of those simple words, spoken with casual ease, hit me right in the chest.

  He was right.

  People could change.

  But they so very rarely did.

  “I know,” I whispered. Then I turned my head and craned my neck to press a kiss to his cheek, stealing a hit of his sunshine scent as I did.

  His breath hitched, and his arm tightened around me, and for a second, my heart slammed wildly in my chest. Our faces were so close together—close enough that just the slightest shift of his head would bring our lips into contact.

  He hesitated, and I could feel the coiled tension in his body, a mirror to the energy that pulsed through mine. Terror and giddy hope swept through me like a tidal wave as the moment seemed to hang suspended in time.

  Then Finn cleared his throat, giving my shoulder one more squeeze before sitting up straight and grabbing his literature textbook off the table.

  “Okay. So… what the fuck is this thing about?”

  A snort-laugh burst out of me before I could stop it, and I scooted forward on the couch, grabbing my phone instead of my textbook. “Before we do that, I wanted to show you a couple things I found. I don’t know if they’re any good, but there are some tricks people use to…”

  I went over what I’d found on the internet, passing the phone over to him a couple times to show him images and graphics that’d popped up. He nodded and occasionally shook his head as I talked, but the things I was saying seemed to make sense to him. I hadn’t been sure they would, since I didn’t know quite what it was like to be inside his head.

  We spent several hours studying, working through a few techniques to help him sort the shapes of the letters into recognizable words. The whole time, our bodies stayed close, our sides pressed together as we bent our heads over the phone or the book. My skin felt electric and alive, as if the contact between us was building up a static charge, but maybe the most surprising thing about it was that I felt… comfortable.

  I’d become almost used to the intense physical reactions I had around the Princes. My body had been drawn to them even when my mind and heart rebelled against that fact. From almost the first moment I’d met them, that connection had existed between us.

  But this was different. The intense attraction was still there, but it was both tempered and inflamed by the fact that something else was there now too.

  Something deeper.

  A feeling I didn’t dare put words to yet.

  Before Finn left, he bent down to where I still sat on the couch and pressed a kiss to my cheek, just like I’d done to him earlier. I watched him leave and stared at the door for a long time after he was gone, fingertips still brushing against my cheek.

  He’d almost kissed me on the lips. I was sure of it.

  And maybe more terrifying was the realization that I wished he had.

  That thought stayed with me through the rest of the weekend and into the beginning of the second week of classes, bouncing around in
my brain and colliding with memories of the conversation I’d had with Elijah.

  Had I forgiven the Princes?

  I wasn’t even sure what that word meant anymore. It felt too small and mundane to encompass my feelings toward the four boys, the things that existed between us. And I wasn’t sure it was the right question to ask either.

  Maybe it wasn’t so much about forgiveness as about understanding. And I understood them now, in a way I never had before.

  Per Doctor Garrett’s orders, I was still supposed to stay off my feet as much as possible, so gym had basically become a free period. On Wednesday afternoon, I watched the guys play volleyball as I typed absently on my phone.

  I’d moved on from combing through articles and forums about dyslexia to digging for dirt on Adena. Her attacks against the Princes had only gotten worse, and I couldn’t stand it. She still came after me too—though not physically, since the boys escorted me pretty much everywhere—but all she had against me were words she’d used a hundred times before.

  Bitch. Trash. Whore.

  I could ignore those. But I couldn’t ignore her dragging out the Princes’ dirty laundry every other day, making sure no one on campus would ever possibly forget about it.

  We needed to stop her. But we still didn’t know how.

  A bit more digging had revealed that Elijah was right. Among their many business dealings, her family ran an investment firm that had been started around the same time Element Investments got off the ground.

  But unlike Element Investments, which seemed to have limped into an early and quiet grave, Adena’s parents’ company was still going strong.

  So what does that mean? Is there any connection between them at all?

  The information that was readily available online about Allegiant Capital was basic and boring. They had a nice corporate website and good ratings on several money management sites.

  Pursing my lips, I searched for “Adam Pierce Allegiant Capital” just to see if anything showed up. But nothing did.

  Then again, almost nothing came up when I searched for the phrase “Adam Pierce Element Investments” either. Very few articles even mentioned his name, as if his imprint on the company had been minimal compared to the other royal families.