by Elle East
Cruel Riches
The Kings of Crestmoore Academy, Book 1
Elle East
Copyright © 2019 by Elle East
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Next Part of the Story
Thanks for reading!
Also by Elle East
Chapter 1
I swore I would never come back, but there I was, standing on the deck of the boat that was speeding me back into that fucked-up world I thought I had left behind forever.
The salty air rushed across my skin and tossed my long, dark tresses behind me. The bow of the boat plowed through the waves and the sound of their gentle crashing joined the continuous hum of the motor. Crestmoore island rose up in the distance, a green jewel sitting on an infinite expanse of blue. It was a beautiful day. The cold bite of Fall hadn’t come yet to Maine, so I closed my eyes and savored the warm sun as it beat down on my face.
I felt like I hadn’t had a chance to just take a minute and breathe. The last couple weeks had been a whirlwind, one which had completely shattered my life and rearranged the pieces into something weird and new—and scary. The fact that I, Maddy Baker, a poor public school girl from Queens, New York, was on her way to Crestmoore Academy, one of the most exclusive prep schools in the United States, was not even the weirdest thing that had happened to me recently.
I felt the pocket of my jacket vibrate and I opened my eyes. Pulling out my phone, I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face when I saw the text.
Dean: Good luck. I know you can do this
Despite the breeze from the ocean, heat rose into my cheeks.
After my mom and stepdad had been arrested, I was forced into protective services. I had refused to go at first, arguing that I was almost eighteen and could take care of myself, but apparently you can’t argue your way around the law. Detective Smith made me a deal, I didn’t have to go to an orphanage and I could stay with him but only if I agreed to go to a boarding school once the school year started.
I was already reaching out to shake hands on the agreement—staying in some cop’s home was infinitely better and safer than staying in an under-funded and understaffed institution with a bunch of kids I didn’t know—before I heard the other stipulations. Detective Smith hadn’t reached out to take my hand, and it awkwardly dropped back down into my lap.
“While you’re there, I want you to do something else,” he had said slowly.
My eyes had narrowed in suspicion as I asked what else he wanted me to do.
Apparently he wanted me to spy on my old friends to find out what illicit activities they were up to at their fancy prep school. He said that if I could get enough incriminating evidence on them, he could bargain down the charges against my mom and stepdad and get them out of jail.
I was hesitant. The four of us used to be best friends, but that was over seven years ago and I hadn’t talked to them since. My loyalty was to my mom, not to them, so I agreed and Detective Smith finally reached out to shake my hand. He was throwing me a lifeline, and I wasn’t about to let it go floating by. I needed my mom.
When Detective Smith had taken me back to his narrow townhouse in a middle class neighborhood in Queens, I was about ready to collapse from exhaustion. I walked in behind him and then the hottest boy I had ever seen in my life walked around the corner towards us.
I froze. I think my mouth was probably hanging open in a really unflattering way too. I was pretty much an emotional wreck at that point from all the stress of the last couple days and romance was the last thing on my mind—but I wasn’t blind.
“Hey, Dad,” the hot boy said before he looked me up and down quickly and smiled.
“Hi, Dean. This—” The detective motioned to me with his hand. “—is Maddy, she’ll be staying with us for two weeks.” Detective Smith must have thought that brief introduction was enough because he started walking past Dean and down the hall. “I’ll show you your room.”
I gave a small smile back to Dean before following the older man. I allowed myself a peek back over my shoulder and saw Dean staring at me with his warm amber eyes. His tall, broad frame was taking up most of the small, New York-sized hallway. He seemed to command the space in a way that was friendly but also intimidating. I quickly looked away.
“This is your room,” Detective Smith grunted. He was a terse man.
“Thanks,” I mumbled as I walked into the tiny room.
It wasn’t much more than a closet shoved between the kitchen and the stairs, with a single bed and a dresser taking up most of the space. There was a small window though, so that was nice… even if it looked out onto a gray brick wall. It was still better than an orphanage, and besides, it was only temporary. Soon I would go to Crestmoore Academy—a place that was the opposite of this.
“Help yourself to whatever is in the kitchen. Do whatever you want during the day but you need to be home by sundown. No partying. No boys. No drinking. No drugs. Got it?”
“Got it.” I nodded. I was used to people thinking I’m a bad kid just because I’m from a bad part of town.
“We’ll go over things next week before school starts,” he said. I nodded again.
Looking at him, it was crazy to think that he was related to that gorgeous guy in the hallway. His son was tall while the detective was on the shorter side. Dean was broad and muscular while the detective was average size and developing a slight belly. Dean had thick brown hair cropped close to his head, a straight nose, full eyebrows, nice lips that were on the thin side, and a cleft chin. The detective had quickly graying black hair that was getting very thin on top, hard blue eyes, thick lips and a jaw that wasn’t defined.
They did have one similarity though, they both wore stubble beards, but Dean’s dark stubble looked thick, expertly trimmed and emphasized his strong jaw while the detective’s looked haggard and patchy like the beard had been an accident and he had just been too busy to shave for a couple days.
The detective shut the door, and I heard his footsteps as he walked away. I was alone for the first time in two days, for the first time since the arrest. I sank down onto the bed, which was surprisingly comfy, and turned my head to stare out the window at the weak light that had made it down between the steep buildings to illuminate the brick.
I missed my mom.
We had always been super close. It used to be the three of us back when my dad was still alive, but now it was just my mom and I—I didn’t count my step
dad, because he was a horrible person and I hated him. He was mean and manipulative and his secret drug addiction had progressed into dealing. He was the reason my sweet, caring mother—a woman so gentle she wouldn’t kill bugs in the house but would take them outside to be set free—he was the reason she was in jail.
Despite the fact that I despised him, I begrudgingly understood why he had done it. My mom’s cancer treatments were bankrupting the family. She didn’t have insurance and wasn’t able to work and my stepdad was always struggling to hold down a job for very long so we were heavily in debt. I hated him because I thought he was a bad person, but I respected that he never left her. He knew about her diagnosis when they got together and he had taken on her burden. He had to pay our bills somehow and, unknown to us, he had decided that drug dealing was the only way he could do it.
Two days ago there had been a loud knock on the door and some man with an authoritative voice had shouted, “POLICE, OPEN UP!”
My mother and I had looked up from the couch where we had been watching a movie together, too shocked to move. My stepdad was already running to the bedroom, yelling at my mom not to open the door.
The heavy pounding came again, and they told us to open the door or they would break it down. My mom went over to let them in and the second the lock was turned they burst into the room. It seemed like there were hundreds of people streaming through the door, all carrying guns and dressed in black bulletproof vests, but I’m sure there were only about six—no way more people could have fit in our tiny apartment.
“GET ON THE GROUND!” they shouted at us and my mother and I immediately complied.
I lay down on the wooden floor as I felt my hands being jerked behind my back and the cold bite of metal as they put handcuffs on me, too tightly. I could hear shouting and a scuffle by the window. I was too scared of getting shot to turn my head, but I think my stepdad had been trying to jump out the window onto the fire escape when the police had rushed in. I heard him arguing and then his yelps of pain and a loud thud as he was thrown to the floor. He yelled at them not to look in his backpack and that he had his rights.
I remember it feeling all so surreal. It was like one of the movies my mom and I would watch, instead of real life. I remember finding the courage to look over at my mom who was on the ground by the front door, her hands also cuffed behind her back like I was. She was looking at me and the sight of her laying like that with a policeman aiming a gun at her back broke my heart. I’m sure she was thinking the same thing as she looked at me.
When we got to the station, they put us all in different rooms. Mine was bare except for a couch, a desk and a clock on the wall so I could see the minutes creep by. Two of the walls were mirrored, so I knew they were watching me and that I was in an interrogation room.
They left me in there for an hour by myself before I couldn’t take it anymore. No one had told me anything and my fear for my mom, and also my anger, outweighed my fear for myself. I went and knocked on one of the mirrors.
“Hellooo, is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” I said as I knocked again.
Almost immediately the door opened and in walked a middle-aged woman. By the way she carried herself I guessed that she was a detective, calm and self-assured.
“Hello, Ms. Addington?” she said as she looked down at the file in her hand.
“Baker. It’s been, Ms. Baker, for about five years,” I replied slightly impatiently.
“My apologies.” She smiled. “Have a seat?”
She motioned to the couch and I practically ran over to it. I was desperate for answers and wanted to start the interview as quickly as possible.
She pulled out the chair from behind the desk so she could sit across from me. It felt like she was moving at a snail’s pace and I was almost jumping out of my skin with impatience.
“Where’s my mom?” I blurted out, unable to hold back any longer.
We were put in different police cars so I hadn’t spoken a word to her since the police first pounded on the door.
“She’s fine. She’s in another holding room much like this one. She’s going to be questioned separately. My name is Detective Holmes. I understand that you are still a minor—”
“I’m almost eighteen,” I interjected defensively.
“Yes, almost. But the state still sees you as a minor which actually works to your advantage in this situation as you won’t be charged as an accessory in this case.”
“What case?? What are you talking about??” I had no idea what was going on and I felt like I was in the twilight zone.
“Madeline.” She looked at me with kindness and her voice was sympathetic when she told me, “Your parents have been arrested for distributing narcotics.”
My heart fell.
I wasn’t surprised, I wished I could have been surprised, but I wasn’t.
“My mom had nothing to do with it,” I said, staring down at my feet.
“The courts will decide that.”
My stepdad had started out as a great guy. My mom had met him about a year after my dad died, after the cancer diagnosis. He’d been caring and attentive that first year. He’d taken her to her appointments, stayed with her and held her hand, taken care of me when she was too sick to, just generally been a very loving and great guy.
My mom had had an incredibly stressful couple of years, what with her soulmate dying and being diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer shortly after—all with a young daughter to take care of by herself. He’d been exactly what mom had needed at that time and I wasn’t surprised when she married him after they had been together for only a year.
But once the ring was on his finger, he immediately started morphing into another person. He became moody, withdrawn and short-tempered. He started complaining bitterly about how little money they had even though when you marry a woman undergoing cancer treatment—who had little money to begin with, no family and no insurance—what else can you expect?
He started getting into drugs and it horrified my mom. She never left though. No matter how bad it got, she never left. The cancer treatments had really taken a toll on her and a lot of days she couldn’t even get out of bed. Finding the strength to leave him, get a new apartment, start a new life, take care of me, all without money and while being incredibly sick, was just impossible.
Another, darker, reason that she told me about once, about why she stayed with him—a reason that I made her stop in the middle of telling me about it because I just couldn’t bear to face it—was that if she died at least I would have someone. She was very sick. Having stage 4 breast cancer only about twenty percent of people make it to five years, she had survived over six and was on borrowed time. It was just her and I and she didn’t want to leave me alone in the world.
Mom had no family and had grown up in an orphanage. Her experiences there had made her determined to never let me fall into a place like that. My dad had had a family, a very influential and extremely wealthy one actually, but they didn’t approve of my mom and when he wouldn’t leave her, his family disowned him—and by extension me, even though I wouldn’t be born until later. I had never even met any of my dad’s family, not once.
My dad grew up having every advantage in the world. He had gone to the best schools, eaten at the best restaurants, been to the best hotels, grown up in palatial mansions, had everything he ever wanted, but when he had snuck away to slum it in a dive bar in the city, he met my mom and gave it all up just to be with her.
They moved to a small, run-down apartment in Queens and that was where they had me. We didn’t have a lot of money but I never remembered being poor; I remembered my childhood being happy and full of laughter. I’ve never seen two people more in love than my parents and I hoped that one day I could find someone who made me even half as happy as they made each other.
A knock on the door jarred me out of my memories.
“Yes?” I asked, assuming Detective Smith had come back to tell me not to pee on the carpet or som
ething else one of the drug-addicted kids he picked up off the streets would do.
The door slowly opened and in came Dean. I bolted upright into a sitting position.
“Did I disturb you?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said, slightly flustered as I tried to smooth down my long hair.
“He can be kind of rough.” He motioned over his shoulder with a jerk of his head. “Just wanted to make sure you were ok and not traumatized by the interaction.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure I’m traumatized, but not for that reason.” I tried to make a joke, but it fell flat.
Dean’s intense eyes narrowed in on me and his face got somber.
“Are you ok?” he asked me and I felt myself breaking down.
I had held it together for the past two days but when this guy, that I had just met, asked me that question I felt like he was seeing through all the bullshit walls I put up and was speaking directly to me. Hold it together, Maddy, he’s a stranger.
I nodded, buying time while I pushed down the emotions that were threatening to overwhelm me. I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I just need some time to myself, it’s been crazy these last couple days.”
He nodded and paused for a few seconds, observing me like he was looking deep into my soul, before he turned to go. I watched as the thick muscles of his back flexed beneath the thin material of his dark t-shirt. I was practically drooling. This guy brought out so many different emotions in me—from nervous breakdown to turned on in ten seconds.
