Broken Empire A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance - Callie Rose Page 0,84
and flopped onto the couch, letting out a frustrated groan.
Maybe I could hire a detective or something once I got access to more of my inheritance.
But should I? If whoever did this went to such lengths to stay hidden, maybe they had a reason.
I couldn’t even hold onto that thought for ten seconds before curiosity rose up to drown it out again. Maybe they didn’t want me to find out, but I wouldn’t let that stop me from trying. As I’d learned over and over again since entering this world, there were strings attached to everything—and I had a right to know what hidden corners these particular strings disappeared into.
Rolling over onto my stomach, I grabbed my phone from the table, suppressing a smile as I read a text from Finn bitching about how boring their field trip was.
Then I pulled up my camera app and swiped the screen several times to jump back to previous pictures. As I’d worked with Erin, I had documented a few forms before we sent them in, so I could reference the info later if I needed to. It was mostly stuff I’d filled out myself, so I didn’t have a lot of hope that there would be anything on the documents that might reveal who had hired her.
But my other option for how to spend the rest of the day was studying, and I didn’t mind taking an excuse to avoid that for another few minutes.
I swiped idly through the pictures, flipping over onto my back and hooking my leg over the back of the couch.
Then I stopped.
Swiped back to the previous image.
My head came off the cushion as I squinted at the screen, and then I drew my fingers across it to zoom in on the image.
I’d taken a picture of several forms spread out across the grungy coffee table at Mina’s house. The bottoms of the documents were cut off by the frame of the picture, but at the top edge of the image, most of Erin’s phone had ended up in the shot.
There was a message open on the screen, and at the bottom, an address.
An address in Roseland.
My heart lurched in my chest, and I tilted the screen to try to get a better view. The image was blurry when it was zoomed in like this, so it was hard to make out the street name, but I was sure the listed city was Roseland, California.
I sat up, grabbing a piece of paper and bending over the coffee table, writing out every possibility I could think of for what the address might be. The numbers were easier to read, partly since there were fewer options for those.
Typing quickly, I went down the list, plugging each possible street name and number into my phone and seeing if anything came up. On the third try, I got a match for an actual address in Roseland, and when I Googled that address, my brows scrunched together.
“What the fuck?”
I switched back to the photo one last time, but the more I looked at it, the more certain I was that the address I’d typed in was correct.
Shaking my head in confusion, I pulled up my texts and sent a message to Cole.
ME: Hey, you home right now? I was looking for information about Adam Pierce, and I found something really weird.
I flopped back into a slouch against the cushions, staring at the screen and willing him to respond. Fortunately, it didn’t take him long.
COLE: Yeah. I’m home. What’d you find?
ME: Nothing about Adam Pierce… yet. But I think I figured out who paid that lawyer to help me get access to my trust.
COLE: Who?
ME: Your parents.
There was a beat before he responded again, making me wonder if he’d dropped his phone. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had. It made no fucking sense to me at all. Unless maybe they were just clients of Erin’s in some other capacity? That would be a pretty damn big coincidence.
COLE: What?
ME: Yeah, that’s what I said. Do you know anything about it?
COLE: No.
COLE: Come over. We can go through my dad’s study and see if we can find anything. I’ll text the guys.
ME: Okay.
Fuck. That would mean I’d have to drive, something I hadn’t done in months—hadn’t wanted to do. I was physically capable of it by now though, and I really didn’t want to wait for the other Princes to come back and pick me up.