Broken Empire: A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance (Boys of Oak Park Prep Book 3)

by Callie Rose

  The other three Princes were grappling with the two older men as shouts and yells echoed in the large space.

  I pressed to stand, but I couldn’t put weight on my right foot without dizzying pain, so I dropped back down again, crawling toward Cole and Mr. Mercer.

  He needs help. He needs hel—

  Before I could reach them, Cole’s father shoved the broad-shouldered boy hard, making him stagger backward. As Cole regained his balance and moved to charge forward again, Mr. Mercer ducked down and picked up a six inch long piece of metal with a sharp, jagged edge—a remnant of whatever had been stored in the warehouse at some point.

  Before his son could reach him, the older man lashed out in a wild, arcing slash. It caught Cole across the chest and stomach, and he lurched to a stop, a stunned expression cracking the impassivity of his face. His t-shirt was a dark blue, but I could see lightly tanned skin, dark ink, and shiny red blood through the gash that opened in the fabric.

  He froze, swallowing hard as he put a hand to his chest.

  In the space of time it took for him to do that, his father backed up several steps, holding the metal blade out threateningly.

  The movement behind me, the shouts and yells, had ceased. The boys had either restrained their fathers or lost that fight, but I couldn’t look to find out.

  I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sight before me.

  “Back off!” Mr. Mercer shouted, his voice made ragged by anger and desperation. “Back. The Fuck. Off!”

  Cole’s shirt was soaked with blood. I could see it wetting the fabric, making it cling to his broad frame. His fingertips were stained with it, and when he curled his hand into a fist, it smeared over his palm.

  But he wouldn’t back off.

  I could see it in his eyes.

  He would never, ever stop.

  And his father would kill him if he had to, in order to keep his secret.

  Cole’s chest rose and fell, and I could see his muscles bunching, see him puffing up with rage. He would run headlong into that blade if it gave him one more chance to stop his father.

  Don’t, Cole. Please, goddammit, don’t!

  “I said back the fuck off if you know what’s good for you, boy,” Mr. Mercer grated out, shifting his grip slightly.

  I tried to stand again, tried to cry out, but then a soft voice behind me stole my breath.

  “Stop.”

  And everything did.

  Cole and his father both looked over sharply, and when my gaze followed theirs, I blinked.

  Mrs. Mercer, the small woman with the frail frame and the nervous eyes, stood several feet inside the door, the abandoned gun clutched in her hands. I could see her chest rising and falling jerkily with uneven breaths, and tremors seemed to quake her entire body.

  “Alice.”

  Her husband’s voice fell into the silence, commanding and soothing all at once. When I looked back at him, he still held the piece of sharpened metal out toward Cole, but his gaze was fixed on his wife.

  He looked almost… relieved.

  “It’s all right, Alice.” The soothing command was still in his voice. “I’ve got this under control. Go downstairs. I’ll deal with it.”

  She blinked, her eyebrows drawing together slightly. Her gaze flicked to Cole, to the son she’d never been able to protect. He was still standing, still puffed up with rage, but I couldn’t tell how much blood had seeped into his shirt.

  How much? Too much? How deep was the cut?

  Mrs. Mercer’s gaze shifted back to her husband, and she blinked again, as if she was trying to clear her vision of the awful sight before her, to wake up from this nightmare. Her eyelashes fluttered, and her lips trembled.

  “Alice,” Cole’s father repeated calmly. “Go downstairs.”

  Her tongue darted out to lick her lips, and she took a single step backward, as if she couldn’t stop herself from obeying his command.

  Then she hesitated.

  “Do you remember what you told me the night you killed Charlotte?” she asked softly, her throat working as she stared at her husband. “One more time, you said. Just one more time.”

  She blinked again, her eyelashes fluttering like a trapped bird’s wings.

  “Just one more.”

  Her voice was barely a whisper, but her hands were steady when she pulled the trigger.

  The sound was like a thunderclap in the large space, so loud and final it seemed to stop my heart.

  A bullet hole opened up in Mr. Mercer’s forehead, and his head whipped back as the muscles in his body all gave out at once. He crumpled backward, death stealing him away so fast his face didn’t even have time to register the surprise of it.

  Alice swung the gun over my head, aiming toward the cluster of men behind me. Her face was pale, and something about it had hardened—as if some piece of her had changed and would never go back to the way it had been.

  “On your knees,” she said softly, her voice still thin and strained.

  But there was a murmured grunt as the two older men complied, and I turned to watch as the three boys shoved them down onto their stomachs on the hard concrete floor.

  A heavy thud behind me made my stomach drop.

  When I turned back around, Cole was on the floor near his father. A plaintive wail ripped through the silence, and didn’t know if it came from me or from Alice.

  Maybe it came from both of us.

  Then she was running, and I was crawling, trying desperately to reach the black-haired boy who was lying prone and too, too still on the floor.

  She reached him before I did, falling to her knees beside him, and this time, I knew the horrible sobbing sound fell from her lips, not mine.

  And it broke my fucking heart.

  Chapter 23

  Alice was bowed over her son’s fallen body when I reached them, her thin, frail frame shaking with sobs. She didn’t stop me when I crawled up beside her, and although his chest was soaked with blood, I felt it moving beneath my hands.

  Stay alive, Cole. Please, please, stay alive.

  The two of us kept vigil over his form, bound together by fear stronger than words, as a flurry of activity burst up behind us.

  Someone was calling 9-1-1, telling the dispatcher we need an ambulance and the police. I heard the low tones of Mason’s voice, then his father’s. Then Mason shouting, and the other two boys restraining him. Calming him.

  I heard it all, and some part of my brain processed it, but I couldn’t focus on it.

  Not until I knew Cole would be okay. That he would live.

  After what might’ve been twenty minutes or might’ve been two hours, a hand fell on my shoulder.

  “Hey, Legs. We’ve gotta get you looked at, okay?”

  Finn’s face was stark, his eyes hollow, every bit of sunshine snuffed out of his expression.

  People had arrived. Men in uniform and paramedics. Several of them gathered around Cole, and I scooted back to let them work, my gaze landing on the two medics who’d squatted down beside his dad’s body.

  I heard one of them mutter, “DOA,” and then two more paramedics converged on me, shining a light into my eyes, wiping away the blood on my lips, and running probing fingers over my ankle.

  Cole was lifted onto a stretcher and carried away, and I wanted to cry with relief and fear. He was getting help, and I knew that was good, but they were taking him away from me, and a part of me couldn’t help but feel like I’d never see him again.

  As he disappeared from sight, officers pulled Alice to her feet, and it was only when they hauled her hands behind her back that I realized she’d still been holding the gun.

  But she couldn’t be in trouble, right?

  She’d saved us.

  She’d killed her husband to save us.

  “Ma’am, what happened here?”

  When the officer started to question her, she looked down to me as she answered, and I didn’t think her words were meant for him at all.

  “It wa
s Adam,” she whispered softly, her voice broken and dull. “It was always about Adam. When we started Element Investments, they let him in on it because of your mother. But they never liked him. Kept him on the outside.”

  Squaring her shoulders, she seemed to gather herself. Then she looked back up at the police officer in front of her, jerking her chin toward her husband, whose body was now covered with a sheet. “That man, Richard Mercer, killed two people—Adam Pierce and Charlotte Hildebrand.”

  The officer’s eyes widened as his brows rose. “When was this?”

  “Years ago.” She shook her head as she said it, as if realizing as she spoke just how long she’d kept that secret. “We… all of us except for Adam and Charlotte… stole from the company. Adam found out, and they killed him. But Charlotte saw it happen. She loved Adam. And she saw…”

  Cole’s mother looked like she was going into shock. Her face was ashen, and her whole body had started to shake. The officer questioning her must’ve realized it too, because he gestured to two of his compatriots, and they started to lead her away.

  But she dug her heels in, putting up as much resistance as her tiny body would allow, and turned back to me one more time, her face contorted with pain.

  “They made her promise to keep quiet. And she said she would. But she hated us—hated us so much. And in the end…” Her gaze shot back to her husband, fear flickering in her eyes, like he might rise from the dead and terrorize her again. “In the end… it didn’t matter. He never believed her anyway.”

  “Ma’am, you need to come with us.”

  She stopped resisting the men who held her arms, shifting her focus back to me as she resumed walking. “I’m sorry. I tried. I sent Erin to help you—I just wanted to help. I never thought you’d come back.”

  The large uniformed officers pulled her away, and even as she moved out of my line of sight, the emotions she’d been projecting seemed to linger, seeping into my bones until I was shaking too. I couldn’t process everything that’d happened to me, everything I had just learned. I hurt everywhere, from the inside to the outside, and the world around me seemed too bright and chaotic.

  Finn squeezed my hand hard as I was lifted onto a stretcher, and a moment later, Mason and Elijah were at my side too. None of them looked too badly beat up, although Mason had a purple bruise on the side of his face and Elijah had a smear of blood across his cheek. Hands held onto me, keeping me from flying apart, and when one of the paramedics seemed to suggest I might need space, Mason actually growled at him.

  I clung to them harder, begging them in slurred words not to leave me.

  Because I didn’t need space.

  I needed their hands.

  Their warmth.

  Their presence.

  They held me together as I slipped under a black wave.

  When I woke again, I was in a hospital bed.

  Mason, Elijah, and Finn were all gathered on one side of the large bed, and as I blinked myself awake, glancing around the room, I saw two empty chairs on my other side, and a bed next to them.

  Cole rested in it, his bruised face smooth and almost peaceful in sleep.

  But he’s here. He’s here. That means he’s…

  “…alive.”

  The word scratched out past my raw throat, and the three Princes’ heads whipped up as they realized I was awake.

  “Yeah.” Finn sat up straighter, resting a hand on my good leg. “You’re alive, Legs. We’ve got you.”

  “No.” I shook my head, the small movement making the room spin a little. “Cole. Is he…?”

  “He’s okay,” Mason said in a low voice, his eyes glittering. His entire body was rigid, as if someone had taken all of his muscles and bones and replaced them with unyielding steel. “He’ll live too.”

  “With a shitload of stitches and a badass scar,” Finn added with a half-smile, but his eyes still had that hollow look from earlier.

  “Your grandparents are here.” Elijah leaned forward in his chair. “They just stepped outside for a bit. They both came as soon as they heard what happened.”

  “Are your parents…?”

  He nodded, tugging his lip between his teeth. “They got arrested, yeah. I dunno what the fuck’s gonna happen.”

  “My dad did too.” Finn shook his head, looking both furious and crushed. “He wasn’t there today, but that doesn’t mean he’s innocent in all this shit. They were all fucking accomplices.”

  I remembered Mason and Cole’s dads talking about calling Mr. Whittaker, and how the man had refused to come. He may have been trying to keep his hands clean when it came to me, but had he been so judicious when it came to my mom’s murder? When it came to Adam Pierce?

  “My car,” I muttered. “It wasn’t Adena. It was—”

  “We know.” Mason’s jaw clenched. “I… called her. The shit she said at prom? She was talking about keying your car. You must not have noticed the scratches when you got in to drive to Finn’s house that day. That’s all she did. The ones who tried to kill you were—”

  He broke off, and the same pain I often saw flare when he talked about his mom burned behind his eyes—as if he had too much anger and hurt inside him and no idea what to do with it, where to put it.

  I reached for his hand, and as our fingers laced together, a new thought occurred to me. Cole had been sent out with his sister, according to their father, but I hadn’t seen her at the warehouse.

  “Penny! Is she okay?”

  “Yeah.” Elijah nodded, running a hand through his hair, leaving the ends mussed and disheveled. “She and Cole were at the mini-golf place. They’ve been there enough times that she knows the staff, so he left her there when he went to try to find you. She’s with a neighbor now. Same with Meredith and Sebastian—I’ve got people watching them. I’ll… explain everything to them later.”

  A little ball of tension loosened in my chest. Then I shook my head, making the room spin again. “How did… how did Cole know anything was wrong? He didn’t send me those texts telling me to come over. His dad did, from his phone. Then he deleted them.”

  “Yeah, but after Mason got your text, we texted Cole to see what was up,” Finn said. “He didn’t know what the fuck we were talking about, or why you were going to his house. It sent up just about every red flag he had. So he left Penny and went after you. That warehouse is one his dad owns.”

  I swallowed, glancing back at the prone figure next to me. “And he’s really okay? He’ll be alright?”

  “Yeah.” Mason followed my gaze. “It was a deep cut, and he lost a lot of blood, but they got to him in time.”

  I wished I could reach over and touch the dark-haired boy, just to verify for myself that he really was solid and real and alive. But I was fading again already as pain meds, exhaustion, and shock slowly turned off the lights in my mind.

  There were so many more questions to ask, so much more to process. But I couldn’t do it all now, and if I tried to let all of it in at once, to absorb the whole truth, it would overload my system entirely.

  As my eyes started to droop shut again, Philip and Jacqueline stepped into the room. They both looked exhausted and shell-shocked, and for the first time since I’d met her, Jacqueline looked completely undone. Her hair was messy and unkempt, the skin under her eyes smudged with mascara as tears ran down her cheeks.

  I was too far gone to keep my eyes open any longer, but as sleep took me again, I thought I felt her arms around me, thought I heard her soft sobs in my ear.

  Whatever drugs I was on must’ve been good, because I slept hard and deep, untroubled by the nightmares that prowled at the edges of my mind.

  It was only when I woke again that I remembered most of the nightmares were real.

  The room was dark, lit by the glow of the streetlamps outside. Several shadowy figures were spread out around the room, taking up all of the available seats. Jacqueline and Philip had pressed their chairs close together, and she rested her head against his shoulder, her body c
urled toward his.

  I blinked into the darkness, listening to the quiet sounds of the room, the soft noises of people sleeping. But when I turned my head toward the chairs lined up alongside my bed, I found a pair of deep green eyes watching me.

  Of course Mason wasn’t asleep.

  His body was still as rigidly tense as it’d been before, and I wondered if he had moved from that spot once since I’d woken up earlier.

  Sitting up slowly, I pushed the blankets off and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My right one was wrapped in a cast again, but I refused to think about what that meant right now.

  Mason sat forward quickly, his voice a whispered hiss. “Princess, what are you doing? You shouldn’t—”

  Before he could rise to his feet, I limped over and crawled onto his lap, ignoring the awkwardness of my hospital gown and the clunkiness of my cast. For a second, I thought he might stand with me in his arms and deposit me right back on the bed, but when he didn’t, I wrapped my arms around his neck and rested my cheek on his chest.

  He held me like that for a long while, and although it felt a little like sitting on a statue, I eventually felt his fingers start to comb lightly through my hair.

  “My dad told me everything. He told me the truth. Finally.”

  His voice was rough, and I had a sudden vivid memory of him yelling back at the warehouse, of the anger in his tone. I hadn’t been able to register the words, but it must’ve been directed at his father.

  “What did he say?” I whispered. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know, but I felt like Mason needed to speak it out loud. Needed to tell me.

  “My mom… killed herself because of this. She couldn’t live with the fucking guilt of what they’d done. Everything in her note was about that; everything your mom said to her was because of that. Charlotte Hildebrand didn’t torture my mom—she tried to get her to do the right thing.”

  I closed my eyes, focusing only on the feeling of Mason’s body beneath mine, the feel of his fingers in my hair.