Broken Empire (Boys of Oak Park Prep 3)

“What are you doing? Aren’t you here to see Cole?”

I glanced back up at him, my heart picking up speed with every beat.

“I’m—” My voice caught. “You know what, I think I got it wrong. I’ll just call him. It’s fine.”

As I babbled, I stepped away from the door, and Mr. Mercer’s expression grew even more annoyed. He held the door open wider. “You don’t want to see him? You came all this way just to call him?”

“No. It’s not important.”

I was white knuckling the phone, and after two more slow steps backward, I gave up trying to be subtle entirely, turning and limping at a fast pace toward my car.

Mr. Mercer was big.

But he was also quick, and so fucking silent I didn’t even hear him coming until his body slammed into mine from behind.

“You just can’t do this the easy way, can you?” he grunted.

A wet cloth pressed against my nose and mouth, and I let out a muffled shriek, struggling against the strong bands of his arms. His grip tightened like a vise as I thrashed and jerked, trying to break his hold.

I dropped all my weight, stomping on his instep, and I heard him curse behind me.

Then I didn’t hear anything at all.

Chapter 22

Consciousness filtered in slowly.

My head felt like it’d been filled with cement, too heavy for me to lift, too sluggish to form a single coherent thought.

And my leg hurt.

Not horribly, but worse than it had in a long time.

I vaguely remembered twisting, writhing, kicking, struggling against arms that felt like steel. That had been what’d hurt my leg, I thought. The twisting motion had tweaked something in my ankle.

A low murmur sounded nearby. Voices, maybe, but the sounds were too muddy and indistinct to make them out.

I wanted to sleep more. To sleep forever. To go back to sleep until Doctor Garrett woke me up and told me I’d had a horrible dream, that I’d never been in an accident and my leg was fine.

But I’m not in the hospital now… Am I?

Why was it so fucking hard to remember?

I let my head hang limply, chin on my chest, and focused all my energy on sorting through the pieces of fuzz cluttering my mind. Whatever had made me so tired and loopy was fading slowly, and as my mind grew clearer, something else rose inside me.

Fear.

Panic.

Terror.

“…was I supposed to do? She texted Cole. She knows too fucking much.”

The deep voice sounded like the speaker was underwater, but even through the distortion, I could hear the anger in it.

Cole…

Cole’s father.