Broken Empire (Boys of Oak Park Prep 3)

As if he could’ve saved her.

As if, at nine years old, he should’ve saved her.

My throat closed up, and I wanted to force words past the painful lump, to make him see that none of that was his fault, that he hadn’t let anyone down or done anything wrong—but I couldn’t speak. Instead, I just lowered my head to his chest, wrapping my arms around him and letting his heartbeat drum in one ear while his voice fell into the other.

“The water was red when I found her. Such a bright red. I’d never seen anything like it. It didn’t—it didn’t look real. And she was so pale. So… pale.”

His words were strained, and I had a feeling he hadn’t said anything about that day aloud in years.

Maybe not ever.

Tears I couldn’t stop slipped from the corners of my eyes, trailing down my face to land on his chest.

I hadn’t witnessed any part of my mom’s death. She had been there one day and gone the next, and all I knew or understood of what had happened was what my dad had told me. For a while, it’d been hard for me to believe she really was dead, that she wouldn’t walk back through the door at any moment and pick up right where she’d left off.

I had processed her death mostly through time. The longer we’d lived without her, the more real her loss had felt.

But Mason?

He had processed his mother’s death in a single, visceral image. One that would likely haunt him forever.

“You say I can’t save everyone, Princess… but what if I could have? What if I’d gone upstairs earlier? Just a few minutes earlier. Why couldn’t I have done that?”

Resignation and desperation battled in his tone, as if those were questions he had asked himself every day for nine years. Wishing, hopelessly wishing, to somehow turn back time and change one small thing.

If only life fucking worked that way.

I lifted my head, wiping away the teardrops on his chest before kissing the place where they had fallen. I closed my eyes, lips still pressed against his warm, salty skin as I inhaled the scent of cedar and spice, of sorrow and guilt and determination.

There were words I wanted to tell him, feelings pressing at the seams of my heart…

But they didn’t make sense.

I shouldn’t love him.

Not after the hurt he had caused me. Not after everything he had done. Not so soon after I had begun to trust him again.

But in the small, quiet space of my bedroom, with the smell of sex still hanging in the air and our naked bodies pressed together—our hearts and souls pressed together—I didn’t know what else to call what I felt.

He was broken. Maybe irrevocably so. And he was stubborn and proud and closed-off.

There was plenty not to love.

Plenty I had found easy to hate.

Still, when he ran his hand through my hair as I turned my head and pressed my cheek to his chest, the words slipped past my lips anyway.

“I love you, Mason.”

It was hardly more than a whisper, but I felt his body tense for a second beneath mine. Then his muscles unknotted, and his hand resumed its slow strokes through my hair. He gave no other sign that he’d heard me, and he didn’t say anything back.

I knew he had heard me, but I was grateful for his silence anyway—thankful he’d let it pass.

Because I never should’ve said it out loud.

Chapter 15

We missed seventh period, and eighth period too.