Kings of Linwood Academy - The Complete Box Set: A Dark High School Romance Series by Callie Rose (sight word books .TXT) 📕

He knows I hate being alone around his parents, so he does what he can to be a buffer between them and me. I still don’t know quite why they’re allowing me to stay here when they clearly don’t like me much, but I think maybe it’s because they don’t want to be the family that kicked out the homeless, fatherless daughter of a suspected felon. It’s bad optics either way, but between kicking me out and letting me stay? Kicking me out is worse.

There’s a twenty-foot tall Christmas tree in the living room, and River’s parents are standing in front of it as we walk past. I try to give them a friendly smile when they glance up, but I don’t know why I bother. It never changes how they look at me at all.

It snowed two days ago, so there are fluffy white piles of the stuff everywhere. The walkway is clear though, and so is the driveway. I don’t tell River, but I’m a little nervous about driving in winter weather. I’ve never done it before. At least, not someplace that actually had a winter.

I’m sure I can handle it though. And it feels good to have the autonomy of a car again after the cops took Mom’s away.

River waits outside the front door until I drive off, and the GPS on my phone tells me how to get to Fox Hill Correctional Center. I know the bus route by heart, but not how to get there directly.

More snow starts to fall as I drive—big, fat flakes that swirl around in front of the windshield. I flick on the windshield wipers even though I don’t really need them yet, and I’m about halfway to the prison when the directions on my phone are interrupted by the sound of the ringtone. I glance down at it on the seat next to me, and my heart jumps.

Lincoln.

We’ve been mostly texting the past few days, so I don’t know what a call means. Maybe he’s just calling to wish me a merry Christmas.

Or maybe he’s finally found something.

I pull over to the side of the road and put my hazards on. There’s no way I’m talking on the phone and driving in the snow in someone else’s car. River might not subscribe to the “you break it, you buy it” principle, but I bet his dad does. And I definitely can’t afford this car.

My fingertips shake slightly as I pick up the phone, swiping the screen to answer before it can go to voicemail.

“Linc? What’s up?”

There’s silence on the other end of the line.

“Lincoln?”

I pull the phone away from my ear to make sure it’s still connected. It took me a while to answer. Maybe I just missed the call.

But no. His name is on the screen. The call went through.

“Linc?” My heart thuds in my chest. “Are you—”

“It wasn’t her.”

His voice is thick, full of emotions I can’t even begin to guess at.

“What? What are you talking about? Who wasn’t her?”

“The woman my dad knocked up. It wasn’t Iris. It was Paige. Our… last housekeeper. He got her pregnant and then tried to buy her off. But her rate kept going up. She showed up at our fucking house this morning demanding more money, saying if he didn’t cough up, she’d slander his name all over town.”

My mouth works, but no sounds come out. I’m trying to process everything I just heard, and now I know why Linc’s voice sounded so strange. I don’t know how to feel about any of this.

If his dad isn’t a murderer, that’s good.

But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s a liar and a cheater.

And if Samuel Black is innocent, if everything we thought tied him to Iris tied him to Paige instead, it means… we have nothing.

No lead on the man in the ski mask at all.

“Linc,” I rasp, my voice strained, “just because he knocked up that woman doesn’t mean he didn’t—with Iris too—”

“He was with Paige that night. Negotiating. It couldn’t have been him who killed Iris.”

The line goes silent again.

I think maybe I want to cry, but I’m too numb for any tears to fall.

We lost.

We’ve been playing the wrong game for weeks, focusing on the wrong thing, and in the meantime, my mom’s case has been advancing toward trial, the evidence against her piling up like the snow on the side of the road outside.

Fuck.

“Low.” Lincoln’s voice softens, and I know that even though his own family life just devolved into a shit-show, he’s worried about me. He knows that, on some very fucked up level, I was counting on the fact that his dad was guilty. “We’ll keep looking. We’ll go back to our list and start digging deeper. We will not let your mom stay in jail. We’ll fix this. I promise.”

A flash of white-hot anger flares inside me, making my stomach clench. But this time, it’s not directed at Lincoln or any of the kings of Linwood. I’m furious at the man who did this to my mom, who put the boys in an impossible situation with no good answers.

I hate that motherfucker.

“Okay,” I whisper.

A thin dusting of white has appeared on the road outside, and as my car idles by the curb, a snow plow trundles by in the opposite direction.

I swallow, forcing myself to sit up straighter. “Sorry about your dad. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He huffs a breath. “He might not be a murderer, but he’s still in a world of shit. She’s been blackmailing him for months. I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

Even as I say it, I don’t know quite what that means. It’s not like I can do much to help his dad unmake that bed. But I can help Lincoln get through it; and I think hearing the words does something, because his next breath is softer, more like a sigh.

“Thanks, Low. You going to see your mom?”

“Yeah. I’m on my way