Broken Empire A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance - Callie Rose Page 0,45

clicked the picture and was taken to the alumni page of a school called Stonewall Academy, which was located in Haven Falls, Georgia. The text that ran alongside the image wasn’t all that helpful, but I exited out and then typed in “Adam Pierce Haven Falls”. As the results loaded, I scanned them, my heart beating a little faster as I realized I’d finally found the right Adam Pierce. Haven Falls must’ve been his hometown, where he’d gone to school before meeting my mom and her friends in college.

He must’ve had a generally unremarkable childhood, because I couldn’t find all that much information about him… except an obituary for his parents. They’d both died in a car wreck when he was nineteen years old, already away at college.

I chewed my lip so hard it drew blood as I scanned the text quickly.

His parents had died too?

Just like my mom.

Just like Mason’s mom.

It didn’t mean anything. People died all the time—it was the price everyone paid for living. There was no reason to assume any connection between his parents’ death and either mine or Mason’s. But that didn’t stop my stomach from twisting into knots as I found another picture of Adam Pierce and squinted at my phone, staring hard at the image.

There still wasn’t a lot of information available about him beyond these little snippets, and I didn’t know how or when he’d met the Princes’ parents.

But a new thought began to trickle into my brain as I rolled over onto my stomach, still gazing at the screen as I abandoned my stretches.

The dark hair, the straight nose, the angled jawline… they all looked so familiar.

I’d always been able to see myself in pictures of my mother, to find my features in her face. But the longer I stared at the picture of Adam Pierce, the more I started to think I could see myself in his image too, though his eyes were a soft brown, not the green-flecked hazel I shared with my mom.

And I knew she’d known him back then. I had photographic evidence that Adam Pierce had been in her life when I was just a little girl. There were no pictures of my dad from that time, although I’d assumed it was just because my mom had hidden her relationship with him. Jacqueline would never approve of blue-collar “trailer trash” like Leo Parker.

But maybe there were no pictures of the man I’d called “Dad” my whole life because he hadn’t even known my mom back then.

Maybe he hadn’t been in my life at all until she arrived in Sand Valley.

I stared down at the picture of the dark-haired man’s handsome, smiling face for so long that my vision blurred and the image went fuzzy.

Adam Pierce, who the fuck are you?

Chapter 13

Over the next two weeks, I worked as hard in my sessions with Scott as I did on my schoolwork. The final semester at an elite preparatory academy was no joke, and all the teachers were already ramping up the difficulty of the tests and assignments.

Finn’s grades had been steadily improving—even in math, which I had nothing to do with. Nothing had happened between us since the day he’d found me in the dance studio, but our study sessions every weekend were infused with a heavy dose of sexual tension.

He seemed… easier around me too, as if something had clicked into place between us and things just made sense now.

Elijah was the same, but Cole and Mason were almost the complete opposite, and it made me seriously question Finn’s proclamation that the Princes were mine to claim if I wanted them.

The raven-haired boy and the boy with the brown hair and aristocratic features were both such fucking mysteries to me sometimes. I wished I could crawl inside their heads and see their thoughts, because they both had a tendency to shut down when they were feeling strong emotions—which I knew they were almost all the time these days.

Cole still had to go home every weekend, but he refused to talk about what it was like there. I never saw marks on him, and I knew he was happy to see Penny, but I hated that his dad was controlling him like that.

And Mason?

Fuck. I didn’t know what the hell his problem was.

Something had been slowly building inside him, like pressure building in a closed pot, ever since I had punched Adena.

The kids at school had finally gotten bored of her tired material, so she’d stopped dragging