Broken Rich Girl: A Dark Academy Bully Romance Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  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

  More by Bella King

  Broken Rich Girl

  A Dark Academy Bully Romance

  Bella King

  Copyright © 2019 by Bella King

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Darkness broke into my life like a thousand spiders hatching beneath the floors,

  Crawling out into the night to surround me while I slept.

  I woke up to a nightmare, unable to fall back asleep.

  This was my new reality.

  Cold, careless, crude… and deadly.

  And then there was Trent.

  Someone should have warned me about finding the man of my dreams at a boarding school for criminals.

  I was broken, so he was able to sneak through the cracks like poisonous smoke.

  There was nothing I could do.

  There was no hope.

  And then, my best friend took her own life.

  Maybe I was next.

  The knife in my hand was starting to look good against my wrists.

  The hands on my neck were starting to arouse me.

  I wanted to fall,

  And that’s what happened.

  Introduction

  Eight months in the county jail or a year at Bayside Academy.

  I should have chosen jail.

  Three months into school at Bayside, the only friend I had made there killed herself. They found her body lying in a crumpled heap with her legs bent at odd angles from the fall. She jumped off the school building and fell to her death. Some say she was pushed.

  I didn’t know what to believe, but I wouldn’t have been surprised by either scenario. Bayside drives people insane. The students here hardly ever get a moment of peace because the school is run by a vicious group of boys that called themselves the Killers.

  It was a stupid name, in my opinion, and I refused to refer to them as such. I knew the names of a few of them, but I knew nearly everything about the leader of the group. His name was Trent, and he was the worst of the worst at Bayside Academy.

  Normally, I would have stayed far away from a man like Trent, but he didn’t allow me to. He sought me out, watched me, confronted me in the halls after class, and made damn well sure that I knew he was always close by.

  Trent. What a douchebag. He was gorgeous, but I didn’t let that cloud my judgment. Bright blue eyes, disheveled brown hair, and a square jaw weren’t enough to make me swoon. I wasn’t into guys like that. I liked them proper and put together, or at least that’s what I told myself. Trent was anything but proper.

  Bayside didn’t have a uniform code, but that didn’t stop me from looking nice. Trent, on the other hand, wore a white t-shirt and ripped blue jeans almost exclusively every day. There was a southern vibe to the way he handled himself, but he didn’t have an accent. I was always curious about where he was from, but I didn’t want to ask. I gave him the silent treatment as much as I could.

  Trent was a thug like the rest of the guys here. Even the women were nasty, but Trent was a bad piece of work. I was surprised that someone like him even ended up at Bayside, considering that most of the students here were in for much lesser crimes.

  Bayside was built on thieves, gangsters, and various other young adult delinquents who couldn’t conform to regular society yet. The school was made to correct their behavior, but we all know what happens when a bunch of criminals get thrown into the same place together – Chaos erupts, and people go from bad to worse.

  Was I a delinquent? No, and that’s why I became such a huge target for Trent and his gang. I was at Bayside because I was trying to help my father. I hadn’t realized that the reason my family was so rich was that he was part of the mafia. Half of the time, I was used as a drug mule without even knowing it.

  On the occasion that I got in trouble for it, he had packed my bags full of drugs and sent me across the country to visit one of my many uncles for the weekend. As it turned out, the man I was sent to visit wasn’t my uncle. He also wasn’t the contact that my father believed him to be. It was an undercover federal agent, and I got busted with a few pounds of schedule one narcotics.

  Imagine my surprise when I walked into the house, and there were guns pointed at me from all directions. What was supposed to be a nice weekend turned into a nightmare that I had yet to wake up from. My father ended up in prison with a hefty sentence of thirty years, and I was given a choice between one year at Bayside Academy and eight months in jail. I made the wrong choice.

  I had grown up in wealth, which set me far apart from the other students at the school. I didn’t rub it in or boast about it, though. I kept my pretty mouth shut and pretended to be like everyone else. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to hide a proper education and an entitled upbringing. It quickly became known around the school that I was the rich girl, and that’s where the trouble began.

  Chapter 1

  “Fuck off, you little punk,” Trent said, shoving another student in the hallway with excessive force.

  The student who he had shoved landed on his ass and slid across the smooth linoleum floor like a hockey puck on the ice. He scrambled up to his feet and fled the scene as soon as he came to a stop at another person’s feet.

  Trent grinned, dusting off his hands like he had just disposed of some garbage into the trash bin. Then, he turned to me. “As I was saying, you look like you need my protection.”

  He was trying to coerce me into paying for his gang’s protection, using an innocent guy who had been minding his own business just a few feet away from us as an example of what he could do to a threat. It was disgusting behavior, and I wasn’t going to play along with it.

  “I don’t need your protection, Trent. If anything, I need to be protected from you,” I said, crossing my arms.

  Trent stood on his toes and peeked at my cleavage, smirking as though I were showing it to him on purpose.

  I uncrossed my arms and groaned. “Can you just leave me alone?” I asked.

  “Sorry, but that’s how the Killers operate,” he replied coolly.

  The Killers. I couldn’t think of a more inaccurate name. I doubted any of them had killed a person before. They were a bunch of small-time criminals, extorting students, and harassing women like me. I hated Trent and his whole gang.

  “Come on, I know you have the money for it, rich girl,” Trent continued, taking on a tone of mockery. He assumed that because I was born into wealth that I still had it.

  News flash – my father was in prison, and the money was all gone. I was dead broke.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not rich,” I insisted, trying to maintain the façade of
being like everyone else. It was technically the truth now, but nobody was going to believe it.

  “You are rich, Samantha, and I want a piece of it. It’ll be worth it for my services,” he insisted.

  “Even if I had money, I wouldn’t give it to you,” I retorted, turning my shoulder to him.

  Trent bit his lip, his mind working out a clever response. He would have looked sexy as all hell like that if he weren’t such an asshole. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t look at him directly.

  “You know, your little friend, Emily, would have benefited from my protection. It’s a shame what happened to her,” he said, the words flowing out of his mouth like a foul poison.

  That was a low blow, and he knew it. I was still devastated from Emily’s suicide, and Trent had hopped onto the rumor that she had been killed in hopes to profit from it. Using her death to get money from people was sickening and made me hate him even more.

  I wanted to punch him in the gut, but I knew my hand would probably just bounce off his abs. The man was built like a demigod, and he must have wasted half his life in the gym to get that way. It was no wonder he was so stupid.

  “Don’t you dare talk about Emily,” I said, trying to control my anger.

  Trent shrugged. “I’m just telling it like it is. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  I shook my head. “You’re pathetic.”

  “Emily was pathetic, actually,” Trent said, making matters worse. “She could have been strong with the Killers’ protection, but she didn’t want it either.”

  I was done listening to his nonsense. I didn’t even know why I had given him my time in the first place after he had pushed that student down the hall. Trent was a monster and nothing more.

  I turned around and charged in the opposite direction of him. He had been blocking my way to my next class, but I knew another way to get there. Thankfully, the school was just a giant loop, and I could get around anyone if I needed to. I learned that during my first week when I had to maneuver around a fight that was taking up the entire hallway.

  Bayside Academy was a special kind of crazy, and I was still getting used to it. I had never had to cope with the kind of people I was meeting here. I was used to straight-A students with wealthy parents who gossiped about the neighbor’s car even though it was worth half a million dollars. At the time, I had thought that was petty, but I would go back to it in a heartbeat after seeing the types of things that happened at Bayside Academy.

  I wasn’t interested in getting pulled into the various social circles here. Emily had been the only reasonable person whom I had met at this school, and now she was gone. It was like having to live in the darkness, finally finding a light, then having it stomped out after a few minutes. I hated Bayside even more after that happened.

  I hurried down the cheaply made hallway toward my next class. I would have to be faster going this way because it was much longer. Bayside was a fairly large school, housing several states worth of criminal young adults who hadn’t finished high school. When you get caught up in the legal system, it makes it kind of difficult to do that. Everyone here was between 18 and 20 years old, including me.

  I finally arrived at my class, just a few seconds before the lecture started. I slipped into an unoccupied metal chair at the front of the classroom, one of the only ones free, and pulled out my notebook and pen. I was one of the only students at this school who took notes. Most people couldn’t be bothered to look at the teacher during class.

  The back rows of the classroom were mainly reserved for the people who would snap your neck if you took it from them. I had seen students fight over them before, but I never wanted to be back there. Sure, the teacher couldn’t see or hear you as well, but you’d also not be able to see or hear the teacher either. How could you finish school at Bayside if you flunked?

  I was starting to see the point in not paying attention, though. The more classes I went to, the more I realized how low quality the education I was receiving was. It was meant to get students up to a functional level, but nothing more. The standards were the lowest possible for a school catering to criminal youth. They weren’t interested in teaching you anything beyond the basics.

  I often wondered if the teachers were even qualified to teach. They dressed like prison guards and lectured us like they were reciting from a manual. Some of them even carried guns holstered on their hips, as though a student would lurch at then to attack during class. I had never seen it happen, but maybe the guns were the reason why I hadn’t.

  So, as I sat at the front of the class and began to write notes down in my thin spiral notebook, I let my mind wander from the lecture every so often. Trent had reminded me once again about Emily, and her untimely death. From everything I knew, it was a suicide, but the nibbling doubt in the back of my head wanted me to believe differently.

  After all, Emily never deserved the hand she had been dealt. She had opened up a lot to me in the short time that I had known her. Abusive foster homes, street life, and drugs had all pulled her toward a life that she was desperate to escape from. Bayside had been a step in the wrong direction, despite what the brochure said about it being a place of rehabilitation. Bayside Academy was a glorified prison, and nothing more.

  Emily wanted to escape from the life she was handed, but not like this. She had dreams and goals outside of Bayside, and it seemed so unreasonable for her to end her own life.

  Then again, she was depressed, and I knew it. Other people bullied her, and it made things so much worse. I knew it was suicide, but Trent’s suggestion otherwise brought back that glimmer of doubt that kept sitting in my head.

  I looked back up at the teacher, who was scribbling something with chalk on the board. I thought we were through using chalk in classrooms, but apparently not. Bayside wasn’t well funded, and it was glaringly obvious when I began to attend classes.

  I squinted. Fuck, even at the front of the classroom, I was having trouble seeing the board properly. I needed glasses, but bayside was strict about anything that could be sued as a weapon. Apparently, glasses fell into that category, so they provided their own. I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the thick, malleable plastic frames they provided.

  If I wanted to endure unbearable bullying, then I would wear those glasses. I would gain vision but lose everything else. It wasn’t worth it. Squinting would have to do for now.

  “Does anyone have any questions?” The teacher asked from the front of the room with a voice so dry you would have thought he was literally dying from boredom.

  Nobody answered, but I still wanted to know what he had written on the board. The letters were too small for me to see.

  I raised my hand.

  The teacher looked at me, giving me a smile that more closely resembled a grimace, and pointed at me to speak.

  “What’s that say on the board there?” I asked, pointing at the small words.

  He shook his head. “Not funny. Detention.”

  “What?” I asked, taken aback. That was a serious question. Did he think I was joking around?

  “Are you deaf too, ma’am? Detention. Go. Now,” he said, making a shoo motion toward the door.

  A few of the other students snickered as I gathered up my belongings, turning red in the face as I left. Even when I tried, things were getting worse. It was ridiculous that I was being sent to detention over not being able to see the board, but I was afraid to argue. The teacher would probably handcuff me and escort me to detention instead.

  I knew where the detention center was. There were bright red signs in the hallway pointing toward it. Getting sent to detention was a normal occurrence for the students here, and this wasn’t the first time for me. Right when I arrived, they had me escorted to detention over a jar of peanut butter in my bad. It was banned because of potential nut allergies, but I was never informed of this until I arrived at Bayside.

  I didn’t have an escort to detention this time, but the teacher probably assumed I wou
ld obey him. The punishment for skipping detention was solitary confinement, so most students didn’t risk it. This school was fucked up.

  Chapter 2

  I approached the sign-in desk for the detention center with my lips pursed. I stood awkwardly in front of the lady at the front until she acknowledged me.

  “Name?” She requested in a monotone voice.

  “Samantha Briar,” I answered.

  The woman typed it into her computer, the ancient tan keyboard clacking loudly with every keystroke. She looked up at me and squinted. “So, this isn’t your first time. I’m required to inform you that over three trips to detention in a month results in solitary confinement for two days.”

  Great. They had told me this the first time, but I had forgotten. I had better not get in trouble again this month, or I was screwed. Solitary was nothing to scoff at. I heard they didn’t even have beds in there.

  I nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

  She grunted, then looked back at her computer, pressing a few keys and then standing up from her seat. A keychain jingled on her hip as she retrieved the key to the detention cell. I followed her to the back of the lobby, where a large metal door separated the rest of the school from the detention area.

  Memories of my first day came flooding back as she turned the key and unlocked the door, ushering me into a sparsely populated room with nothing but a few metal tables and a single security camera mounted in the ceiling corner. This was where I had met Emily.

  “Samantha,” a deep voice said cheerfully as the metal door closed behind me.

  My heart sank when I heard the voice. It was Trent. I turned to see him walking toward me with outstretched arms, as though he intended to hug me. Gross. I took a step back as he came close to me.

  “What? No hugs?” He teased, putting his arms down.

  “Leave me alone,” I said, the realization that I would be spending the remainder of the day with him sinking in. I would have preferred solitary confinement over this. I was now in a psychological torture chamber with my worst enemy.