Broken Empire A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance - Callie Rose Page 0,7

against my ribs.

It wasn’t over. Not my life, not the possibilities of the future. Nothing was played out to the end yet.

I’m still here, aren’t I?

My heart was still beating.

I was still breathing.

Nothing I’d encountered had broken me for good so far, and this wouldn’t either.

Finn held me for a while longer, and I felt his body relax a tiny bit as mine did too. When he released me, all the Princes dragged the nearby chairs into a tight grouping around the bed. Mason sat on my right side, closest to my head, and he reached out to grasp my hand in both of his.

“Do you remember what you told us yesterday, Princess?” he asked. His voice was strained, and I could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

I shook my head. Everything since the accident was still fuzzy. I remembered seeing their faces hovering above me, remembered the sound of his voice and Cole’s whispering back and forth late at night. But the specifics were a blur.

“You said you tried to stop. And you couldn’t.” His tone was hard, and angry agitation seemed to churn under his skin.

My voice was raspy when I spoke, but my words didn’t slur like they had before.

“Yeah. I tried to press the brake. It felt… soft. And then, nothing. Like there was nothing connected to it. I pressed on it as hard as I could—”

I broke off, my gaze shifting back down to my shattered leg. It’d been that press that had transferred the shock of the impact from the car to my leg. In trying to save myself from spinning out, I had basically guaranteed the outcome that’d come to pass.

Mason’s grip on my hand didn’t tighten, but I could feel his fingers go rigid. Then he said, “Tal, that shouldn’t have happened. It was a brand new fucking car. It shouldn’t—wouldn’t—have happened if someone didn’t plan for it. Someone set this up. I’m fucking sure of it.”

My gaze whipped up to meet his, my stiff neck protesting the quick movement with a flare of pain. “What?”

But my shock began to fade almost before I finished speaking the word.

It made sense.

It was practically the only thing that made sense.

Someone had tried to kill me.

Chapter 4

“Who?” I whispered.

Maybe that was a dumb question too, but my brain wasn’t functioning at full capacity yet. My gaze shifted around the tight circle of faces, taking in each of the Princes. They all looked grim, and none of them had spoken up to contradict Mason’s assertion that someone had deliberately sabotaged my car.

Elijah shook his head, his hazel eyes glittering with anger. “We don’t know for sure. Your car was totaled, so there probably isn’t any way to even prove there was tampering. But we have an idea.”

An idea.

I let that sink in for a second, and then I let out a choked, almost hysterical laugh.

There was only one person I could think of who hated me enough, and who had such wild disregard for my life, to try something like this.

“Adena,” I muttered.

She and her minions had jumped me during my first year at Oak Park, and after my return, she’d shoved me backward down the steps of Craydon Hall. Even though I’d escaped that incident with nothing more than some painful bruises and a traumatizing flashback, it could’ve been much worse than that.

“Yeah. Fucking Adena Davenport.”

Finn’s lips practically curled back from his teeth in a snarl, and Cole’s face had taken on the eerily blank expression it got when he was trying to control strong emotions.

“But—” I sucked in a breath. My tears were drying on my cheeks; I hadn’t even bothered to wipe them away. “That’s fucking crazy. Something like that—she had to have been trying to kill me. There’s no way she could’ve thought that was just a prank. Could she?”

“There’s not a single thing I’d put past her at this point,” Mason said darkly. “And it doesn’t matter what she thought would happen. What did happen was that you almost died. If she’s responsible for this, I’ll fucking bury her.”

An uncomfortable feeling stirred in my gut. I couldn’t really argue with his sentiment, but it struck too close to home, making me wonder what he’d said about me back when he’d somehow held me responsible for my mother’s cruelty toward his.

God. Would it ever stop?

This vicious cycle of attack and revenge, attack and revenge?

Or was it a one-way ticket, and once you hopped on the train, the only way off