Shattered Kingdom: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Royal Falls Elite Book 2)

by Kristin Buoni

  “Happy to help,” she said, doing a little mock bow.

  “Would the deputy head be in his office right now?” I asked.

  She glanced at her watch. “He should be.”

  “And what about Sanders? His office is really close to the deputy’s, right?”

  “Yes. But I remember him saying something at lunch about a long meeting with the school board this afternoon. So I doubt he’ll be around.”

  My shoulders slumped with relief. “Okay. Good. I really don’t want to run into him and have him ask me a million questions about what I’m up to.”

  “I understand. You will have to say something to the deputy headmaster, though,” she said, brows knitting. “As far as I know, he’s the only one with the key to the archive, seeing as it’s right next to his office.”

  I bit my bottom lip. “What should I say? I really don’t want this getting back to any of the other staff.”

  “How about you just give him an extremely condensed version of what you told me?” Ms. Flores asked. “Tell him you have an extra credit history project, and you want to do yours on the history of the campus. I doubt he’ll ask many questions about it.”

  “Good idea.” I stood up. “Thanks again, Ms. Flores. You’ve been so helpful.”

  She lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. “All I did was mention some yearbooks, but hey, I’ll take the credit,” she said with a smile.

  “You did more than that.” I picked up my bag. “Anyway, I’m going to go and check out the archive now.”

  “All right. Good luck.”

  When I was halfway out of the office, Ms. Flores called to me. “Laney?”

  I turned around. “Yes?”

  “Be careful, okay? I know better than anyone that the administration at this school doesn’t like people sticking their noses where they don’t belong,” she said, lips pressing into a thin line. “As you know, I’m out of a job in two months because of it.”

  I nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

  Hunter was waiting for me outside. On our way to the deputy head’s office, I explained what we were doing, and what I’d discussed with Ms. Flores.

  “You were right. She was a good person to talk to about all this shit,” he said, squeezing my arm affectionately. “I had no idea there were old RFU yearbooks anywhere, and I’ve been at this school for over three years.”

  “She won’t tell anyone what we’re up to, either,” I said. “Seeing as Sanders fired her for trying to do her job properly, she doesn’t exactly feel much loyalty toward him or anyone else at the school.”

  He let out a short snort of amusement. “Understandable.”

  We arrived at the deputy head’s office and asked his secretary if we could see him. She looked slightly suspicious, but she waved us in anyway.

  “Ms. Collins,” he said, acknowledging me with a nod as I stepped inside. He turned to Hunter with a frown. “Mr. Connery. What can I do for you?”

  I pasted on a bright smile. “We’re working on a history project together, and we want to base it on the history of this campus. There’s not much information online about RFU, though, and that’s a major part of the history, so we were hoping we could take a look at the old yearbooks.”

  “Our teacher said you have the key to the archive,” Hunter added.

  His eyes narrowed slightly. “Why would your teacher put you two together on a project when you’ve done nothing but accuse Mr. Connery of being responsible for that awful incident at the assembly for the last several days?” he asked, focusing his gaze on me.

  I swallowed hard and forced another smile. “I know it wasn’t Hunter now. We discussed it, and I think someone else was responsible.”

  “Hm. I see.”

  Hunter scraped a hand through his hair, affecting a bored expression. “So can we have the key?” he asked. “I’d rather not spend any longer than I have to on this dumbass assignment.”

  “Language, Mr. Connery,” the deputy head said, rolling his eyes. He stooped down to the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a key. “Here. You can take some of the yearbooks out to scan or photocopy things for your assignment if you want, but you must have them back in that archive by the time school is finished today.”

  “What if we need more time?” I asked.

  “Then you can come back tomorrow, I suppose,” he replied grudgingly. He sat down and waved a hand toward a door on his left. “Off you go. The archive is through there.”

  We unlocked the door and shut it firmly behind us. In front of us, rows and rows of narrow wooden shelves filled the tiny room, packed with navy blue leather-bound books with gold print on the spines.

  I groaned. “There’s so many of them!”

  Hunter nodded. “Yup. RFU was open from 1767 to 1988.”

  “Ugh. This is going to take forever,” I said, running my fingers along one of the shelves.

  “We’d better get started, then,” he replied, striding over to the last shelf on the end. “Let’s work backwards. We might be able to find out when the Network actually started up that way,” he went on, reaching upward. “If you’re right about it being an RFU thing, that is.”

  “Well, let’s hope I am right,” I said with a tight smile. “Otherwise we’re just wasting our time.”

  “I think you’re right. It makes sense. All those old secret society rumors had to start from something.”

  He grabbed the yearbooks from 1988, 1987, and 1986, and I took the ones from 1985, 1984 and 1983.

  “So what exactly are we searching for?” Hunter asked, brows furrowing as he opened his book.

  “Anything even remotely out of the ordinary,” I said. “We also want to pay close attention to the pages about college clubs. See if there’s anything there that stands out. Like a bunch of guys all wearing the same ring, or something like that. Or a club that doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose but still exists for some unknown reason.”

  “All right.”

  We sat on the floor and spent the next half-hour poring over every page. Something from the 1985 yearbook eventually jumped out at me—a photo in the senior student section of the compilation.

  “Hey, look at this,” I said. “It’s your dad.”

  Hunter frowned. “Huh?”

  I held it up so he could see the page. “Your dad,” I repeated. “I had no idea he went to RFU.”

  He grabbed the book and stared at the photo with narrowed eyes. “He didn’t. He went to Yale.”

  “Well, that’s definitely him. Charles Connery, class of 1985.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck, brows knitting. “He’s only ever talked about Yale,” he said. “But I just realized something.”

  “What?”

  “He did post-grad at Yale. That’s what he’s always talked about. I just assumed he did his undergrad there too, but I never actually questioned him about it.”

  “That’s strange, right?” I said, tilting my head to the side. “The fact that he went to college right here, but he never mentioned it to you or your siblings.”

  “Yeah, it’s a bit weird. And what the hell is this quote next to his picture?” he asked.

  “I didn’t read it. What is it?”

  He scooted over to me and put the book in front of us so we could both see it at the same time. “Perhaps now you will ask how much you are worth,” he said, running his finger beneath his dad’s chosen yearbook quote. “That’s all it says. Then there’s this number after it. 9.”

  I sat back, brows rising. “That quote sounds so familiar to me,” I said.

  “It does?”

  I nodded. “I swear I read that exact line somewhere not so long ago. But I have no idea where. I’ve read so many books lately.”

  “Let’s Google it.” He pulled out his phone and looked up the quote. “Hm. Looks like it’s from Jane Eyre.”

  My eyes widened. “That’s where I know it from! We have that English test on Jane Eyre coming up soon, so I reread it recently.”
r />   Hunter was silent, staring down at his phone with a pinched expression.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Look at this,” he said, handing me the phone.

  On the screen, there was an online copy of the page that the line came from. When I saw it in its full context, I understood the look on Hunter’s face.

  “I thought Medusa had looked at you, and that you were turning to stone—perhaps now you will ask how much you are worth?” I read out loud.

  “Do you think it’s just a coincidence that it mentions Medusa?” he asked in a tentative voice. “I mean… it’s my dad. He couldn’t be involved in this Network-Medusa shit, could he?”

  I bit my bottom lip. Now that I was thinking about it, it actually made total sense that his father was a Network member. He was rich as sin and very influential in this town—and the state—and I’d directly witnessed one of the so-called Medusa parties at his house when I waitressed for his alumni event a few months ago.

  Shit…

  I sighed inwardly at my own foolishness. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t made that connection about Charles and the society until now. Of course he was involved. It wasn’t like the Network and the Medusa girls had just discovered the secret room in the Connery mansion by themselves and held their wild party in it behind his back.

  He knew. He had to.

  I’d also seen Charles at RFA on a number of occasions, claiming he had a meeting with Sanders, or something similar. But the first time I saw him on campus was directly after my first meeting with the Medusa girls several weeks ago. He was headed in the direction of their clubroom, too. That was why I bumped into him in the hall when I got distracted by my own thoughts.

  He was probably going to visit them that day to see how our meeting went. See if they’d convinced me to join them yet. I hadn’t thought anything about seeing him in that hall when it happened, but now that I knew he was probably connected to the Network, I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Hindsight was a real bitch.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly to Hunter, after I’d explained what I saw at his house all those months ago and right here on the RFA campus just a few weeks ago. “I think your dad is a member.”

  He scrubbed a hand across his face. “Jesus,” he muttered. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I’m sorry. I know how fucked up it is when you find out one of your parents isn’t who you thought they were,” I said, putting my hand on his arm.

  He sighed bitterly. “I know he’s a bit of a dick sometimes, and he has a bad temper. But this?” He shook his head. “I never suspected anything like this. There has to be some sort of explanation, right?”

  “Let’s keep looking through the books,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. I didn’t want to let him spiral into a dark place now that he’d discovered that his father might be involved in something terrible. We didn’t have enough proof yet, and the hunt for more could be a decent distraction for him.

  He drew in a deep breath. “Yeah. You’re right,” he said. “If his quote is meant to be a hint or reference for other members, then we need to figure out the rest of it. That number 9 has to mean something.”

  I turned the page, lips twisting. “Hey, look,” I said, pointing to another photo of a male senior. “This guy has the same quote, but there’s a different number after his name. 2.”

  “That’s weird,” Hunter said, forehead creasing. “Let’s see if there’s more.”

  All in all, there were five men in the senior class of 1985 at RFU who had the same Jane Eyre line as their yearbook quote, along with a number.

  “92158,” Hunter said. “What the hell does that mean?”

  I shook my head slowly. “No idea. A code to open a safe, maybe? Or a street number for an address the new members need to know?”

  “Yeah, maybe. It’s way too short to be coordinates or a phone number.”

  I frowned. “Wait a minute… I noticed something before.” I went back to the third guy and put my finger underneath the 1. “His number is the only one with a period after it. That can’t be an accident, can it?”

  “That would make it 921.58,” Hunter said, scratching at his cheek. “Still means nothing to me.”

  My eyes widened as clarity hit me like a bolt of lightning. “Oh! I know what it is!”

  “What?”

  “It’s a Dewey Decimal code,” I said excitedly. “You know, the call number for a book in a library.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Hunter said, brows lifting. “That’s gotta be it.”

  “Yup.” I rose to my feet and held out my hand. “Let’s go find that book.”

  9

  Laney

  Once we got to the library, it didn’t take us long to find the correct row of shelves.

  “921.46…. 921.54… oh, here it is!” I said, tapping the spine of a thick book with the call number 921.58.

  I pulled it out and showed it to Hunter. “Transnistrian Architecture: A Marxist Interpretation, by James R. Neilson,” I read aloud.

  Hunter snorted. “Who the fuck would want to read that?”

  I arched an eyebrow. “I think that’s the point,” I said. “The Network wants their stuff to be accessible so their members can come in and grab it whenever they want, but it needs to be something non-members will totally ignore. Hidden in plain sight.”

  “Well, let’s have a look.”

  I sank to the carpeted floor and leaned my back against the shelf before flipping the front cover open. The first page had nothing but an image of a serpent coiled around a rose. “Just what I thought,” I murmured. “It’s a fake book cover to mask the real shit.”

  Hunter slid down next to me, brows furrowed. “Keep going.”

  I turned to the second page. It had four columns, each filled with letters, symbols, and strings of numbers. “Any idea what this means?” I asked, glancing upward.

  “No fucking clue,” Hunter replied.

  I kept flipping through. The next few pages were exactly the same as the second one—numbers, letters, symbols, and then more numbers. It all seemed to be in some sort of order, hence the column arrangements, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  There were a lot of totally blank pages after that. At least twenty-five of them. Then I found a full page of information in neat black handwriting.

  “This is more like it,” I murmured. “Actual words.”

  Hunter frowned and tilted his head to read it. “Looks like a mini dossier on someone named Lucy Walker.”

  I quickly flipped through the next few pages. They were all similar to that first one—a woman’s name, followed by information about her like her date of birth, hair and eye color, height and weight, and family background. It also included a date of initiation into the Medusa Society, contact details, a record of all the money spent on her, and a short description of her usual attitude and behavior.

  One page in particular stood out from the others. While all of the other entries were written solely in black ink, this girl’s name had a red line drawn through it. Her name was Vera Everett, and she’d been initiated in 1995.

  “This must be all of the Medusa girls over the years,” I said, going back to the first ones. “Looks like Lucy Walker, Yui Saito, Emilia Emerson, Jennifer Bing, and Lisa Adams were the first. They were all initiated in 1986 at the old RFA across town, while this campus was still RFU.”

  “Keep looking to see if you can find Camila and the other current ones,” Hunter said. “That’ll prove it.”

  I flipped through until I found Camila’s page. “Here. Camila Rose Valmont, September 2017. She’s been a member since she was sixteen.”

  Hunter frowned. “Are you in here?”

  I turned to the most recent entry. It was about Dayna and her initiation at the start of this school term.

  “No,” I said, showing the page to him. “I guess they only put girls in here once they’ve actually passed the initiation. There are probably a few who don’t, like me, but
the others bully them into keeping their mouths shut about it, and the whole thing gets swept under the rug.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so.” He opened his mouth to say something else, and then he paused, brows creasing in a deep frown.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I need to look at something,” he said, grabbing the book from me. He flipped back through the girls’ entries until he found one from 2015. Someone named Brittany Cox.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  He looked over at me. “It’s the girl I saw my dad with a few weeks ago,” he said. “I just remembered that I saw a little snake tattoo on the nape of her neck when she was getting dressed. All the Medusa girls have snake tattoos, don’t they?”

  I nodded. “Yes. They must get them after initiation. Trina and Adam seemed to think they were just henna, but now that I know the truth about the society, I think it’s permanent ink.”

  “Almost like a brand,” Hunter muttered.

  I returned my attention to the pages. “It looks like most of the past Medusa girls were at RFA on scholarships, like the ones now,” I said. “So they definitely seem to target girls from lower-income families.”

  “Makes sense. Girls from rich families aren’t gonna care about joining a club that offers money and future opportunities. They already have all of that.”

  “Yeah.” I bit my bottom lip and frowned. “I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  “I overheard you and your dad talking in the hall once. He said he arranged my scholarship to this school,” I said. “Back then I thought he might’ve done it to be nice, because I’m the daughter of someone who’s worked for him for years. But now…”

  I hesitated, and Hunter picked up where I left off. “Now you think he arranged it just to get you here so the girls could start the recruitment process.”

  I nodded. “He probably saw me waitressing at that alumni party all those months ago and decided I was a decent target. Then it snowballed from there.”

  “Makes sense. But it’s not like you didn’t deserve the scholarship,” he said, squeezing my right arm. “Your grades are basically perfect, right?”