Broken Empire (Boys of Oak Park Prep 3)

Chapter 1

Finn

“Okay. I’ll head out right now.”

“Good.” I grinned. “We miss you, Legs.”

There was a hiccup of silence on the other end of the line, then, “See you soon.”

There was something in Tal’s voice as she spoke—or, hell, maybe it was in the little pause before she spoke—that made a stupid sort of hope swell in my chest. Like there’d been more she’d wanted to say, but she hadn’t let herself.

That was fine. I could wait. I’d wait for fucking ever to win back her trust, and I wouldn’t push her to say anything before she was ready. If she ever decided to trust me again, I didn’t want it to be a halfway deal, something forced and incomplete, with a bunch of doubts clinging to the edges of that trust. I wanted her to feel sure of it from the tips of her gorgeous brown hair right down to the bottoms of her crazy ballerina feet.

I wouldn’t settle for anything less.

My grin widened for a second as I tapped the end call button with my thumb, staring down at the screen.

Considering what a shit-show the past couple days had been, I shouldn’t be feeling hopeful about much of anything right now. All of our parents were pissed as fuck, and out of the four of us guys, I’d had things the easiest. Elijah looked like hell, I wasn’t sure Mason had slept once in the past two days, and Cole? Well, he wasn’t talking about it at all. I honestly didn’t know what things were like at his house right now, but judging by his silence and the look on his face, they weren’t good.

After we’d left Oak Park on the last day of school, we’d all sort of split up to deal with our own private catastrophes. This was the first time we’d managed to get together since Adena had spread the contents of Talia’s little black book all over campus.

And that was the reason we were all together.

Adena.

She wasn’t done yet. All four of us agreed on that.

We just didn’t know what else was coming, what else she had planned—whether she’d be flying by the seat of her pants now, waiting to see what we did and reacting to that, or whether she had something else up her sleeve.

But we had a few weeks before school started back up, and I sure as fuck wanted to walk back through those doors prepared.

“She coming?” Mason asked, poking his head in from the balcony where we’d all gathered.

“Yup.” I slipped my phone back in my pocket and turned toward him.

“Good.” He jerked his head back toward the balcony, his face grim. “Come on.”

There was a lot of shit you could say about Mason, but one thing the guy could never be accused of was half-assing anything. Or of leaving anyone he cared about behind. We’d been friends since before I could walk, and I knew what his mom’s death had done to him—how bad it’d messed him up. That’s how he’d managed to talk us all into the fucked up shit we’d pulled on Talia.

But now that things were different, now that they were changing, I could already see his drive and determination, his single-minded focus, shifting to something else. This time, instead of tearing Tal down, it was about taking care of her.

Fuck yeah. I can get on board with that.

I stepped back out onto the second-floor balcony that overlooked the pool in the yard. My folks never used this balcony, or much of the second floor, really. And they never used the damn pool. So it was a spot that guaranteed some privacy.

While we waited, we bounced around ideas about what Adena’s endgame was, and how she planned to use that shit-for-brains, Preston West, to help her.