Savage Royals (Boys of Oak Park Prep 1)

I stood blinking at them, my hands on my hips.

“What? This? This is the thing that was so pressing I had to break my plans with Leah? You’re not doing anything!”

“Chill, Legs.” Finn patted the couch cushion next to him, and I sank down onto it reluctantly, smoothing my skirt and trying to ignore the feel of his muscled leg pressed up against mine. “This is important. And we are doing something. We need to find as much dirt as we can on Evan Baxter and his whole family.”

My nose wrinkled. “Evan Baxter? The senior who drives that loud as fuck Mustang? Why?”

“Because,” Elijah said evenly, not looking up from his phone, “his dad is trying to steal a client from my dad. So we need to find something on either Evan or his family that we can use against them.”

“What, like blackmail?”

“If it comes to that.” Mason met my eyes over the black rectangle of his phone. “But we won’t know how we’ll use it until we find it—whatever it is. So hop to, little Princess.”

I gaped. “You want me to help you find shit on a teenage boy and/or his parents so you can bring them down and protect some business deal Elijah’s dad is doing? Why don’t you just leave it up to the adults?”

“Because what they do affects us. Every win or loss affects what our legacy becomes.” Mason’s emerald eyes glittered darkly. “I told you it’s not all roses and puppies on this side of the fence, Legs. You sure you still want to play this game?”

No. I wasn’t.

At all.

Chapter 18

We spent the rest of the evening in Elijah’s room, tapping away at our phones.

I didn’t actually find much—partly because I didn’t know where to look and partly because I didn’t want to find anything—but I was shocked at the amount of info the guys were able to dig up.

And what they found…

Well, it made me feel a lot less bad about their plans to sabotage Samuel Baxter. The man was a fucking creep.

But none of that made me feel better about the whole situation. Was this the world I was living in now? Where the “good guys” were only good because they were slightly less awful than the “bad guys”? Where everything existed in shades of gray, and blackmail could actually be a good thing somehow?

Finn went to pick up food at seven, and after they were satisfied with the information they’d gathered on Evan Baxter’s dad, we turned on a movie and chilled. It was strange, doing something so ordinary with them?

??something I’d done with people I considered my real friends plenty of times.

But it felt too… normal to be doing it with the Princes.

We watched a scary movie, which made me think of Leah with a twinge of guilt and shame.

Finn couldn’t restrain himself from yelling at the screen, and every time he did, Cole would swing something at his head. Since I was still sitting next to the blond football player, that meant I did a lot of ducking too, and even though the movie was legitimately terrifying, I found myself laughing.

“Jesus. You are the fucking worst. And now you’ve got her as your backup worst,” Cole bitched when his stash of nearby projectiles ran out.

“Sorry if we know how to enjoy cinema and you don’t.” Finn smirked, kicking his feet out in front of him, stretching his long legs. “It’s meant to be an interactive experience.”

“She’s fucking laughing. It’s not a comedy!”

“Legs,” Finn intoned, turning to me with a serious expression as he gestured to the TV. “This is serious. Someone is about to die. Can you please be respectful of that?”

That only made me giggle again, and Mason shot us both a look.

“Spoilers, motherfucker. Shut the hell up.”

Finn rolled his eyes, but for the rest of the movie, he actively tried to stop himself from speaking to the screen—which was actually funnier to witness than him blurting things out.

By the time the last victim was murdered, I found my eyelids drooping, and as soon as the movie was over, I made my excuses and left before any of them could offer to walk me back to my dorm.