Broken Empire (Boys of Oak Park Prep 3)

There still wasn’t a lot of information available about him beyond these little snippets, and I didn’t know how or when he’d met the Princes’ parents.

But a new thought began to trickle into my brain as I rolled over onto my stomach, still gazing at the screen as I abandoned my stretches.

The dark hair, the straight nose, the angled jawline… they all looked so familiar.

I’d always been able to see myself in pictures of my mother, to find my features in her face. But the longer I stared at the picture of Adam Pierce, the more I started to think I could see myself in his image too, though his eyes were a soft brown, not the green-flecked hazel I shared with my mom.

And I knew she’d known him back then. I had photographic evidence that Adam Pierce had been in her life when I was just a little girl. There were no pictures of my dad from that time, although I’d assumed it was just because my mom had hidden her relationship with him. Jacqueline would never approve of blue-collar “trailer trash” like Leo Parker.

But maybe there were no pictures of the man I’d called “Dad” my whole life because he hadn’t even known my mom back then.

Maybe he hadn’t been in my life at all until she arrived in Sand Valley.

I stared down at the picture of the dark-haired man’s handsome, smiling face for so long that my vision blurred and the image went fuzzy.

Adam Pierce, who the fuck are you?

Chapter 13

Over the next two weeks, I worked as hard in my sessions with Scott as I did on my schoolwork. The final semester at an elite preparatory academy was no joke, and all the teachers were already ramping up the difficulty of the tests and assignments.

Finn’s grades had been steadily improving—even in math, which I had nothing to do with. Nothing had happened between us since the day he’d found me in the dance studio, but our study sessions every weekend were infused with a heavy dose of sexual tension.

He seemed… easier around me too, as if something had clicked into place between us and things just made sense now.

Elijah was the same, but Cole and Mason were almost the complete opposite, and it made me seriously question Finn’s proclamation that the Princes were mine to claim if I wanted them.

The raven-haired boy and the boy with the brown hair and aristocratic features were both such fucking mysteries to me sometimes. I wished I could crawl inside their heads and see their thoughts, because they both had a tendency to shut down when they were feeling strong emotions—which I knew they were almost all the time these days.

Cole still had to go home every weekend, but he refused to talk about what it was like there. I never saw marks on him, and I knew he was happy to see Penny, but I hated that his dad was controlling him like that.

And Mason?

Fuck. I didn’t know what the hell his problem was.

Something had been slowly building inside him, like pressure building in a closed pot, ever since I had punched Adena.

The kids at school had finally gotten bored of her tired material, so she’d stopped dragging out the photocopied page

s of my notebook or the pictures I’d taken.

But the damage had been done.

She’d made the princes the butt of enough cruel jokes that the reputations they’d spent years cultivating at Oak Park were destroyed. They still had friends—or rather, there were still people who wanted something from them—but their standing as unequivocal rulers of campus had been torn down.

Is that what’s bugging Mason? That he lost his place on the throne?

Whatever was bugging him was bugging me, making it hard to breathe when he was around, as if the tension radiating from him devoured all the oxygen in the atmosphere.

And at the end of the sixth week of classes, the pressure building in him finally snapped.

I walked back toward Craydon from the gymnasium with Cole and Elijah, working on keeping my gait steady and even. Finn had gone ahead of us to talk to his seventh period teacher before class, and I’d lost track of Mason sometime during the middle of gym.

As soon as we pushed through the large entry doors into Craydon, I realized why.

He had Preston shoved up against a locker several yards down the hallway, with a small crowd gathered around them. I didn’t see Adena, but Sable was screaming at Mason to stop as he pummeled the other boy with his fist. We’d obviously missed part of the fight, because Preston’s lip was already split open and Mason’s knuckles were bloody.

“Fuck,” Cole muttered under his breath, picking up his pace as we hurried toward the altercation. I knew the only reason he wasn’t running was because he didn’t want to leave me behind.