Cruel Rule (Royal Oaks Prep #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

JADE

Five months earlier….

“I can’t go. You don’t understand.”

My voice cracked on the last word. My mother’s pacing had worn a trench into the carpet, but it wasn’t helping either of us. Her hands trembled. Her lips pressed together like she could hold in her fear if she just tried hard enough.

“I can’t homeschool you, Jade,” she said finally, sitting on the edge of my bed. Her voice was frayed. Tired. “Your father and I both work.”

“I can’t face them. Any of them.” I stared at the ceiling like it might offer an escape. “Not after… all of it.”

She reached for me, smoothing my hair, stroking my back like she used to when I was little and sick with nightmares. Her shoulders curled forward under the weight of something too heavy for either of us to carry.

It wasn’t her fault.

It wasn’t mine either.

I was just the punchline in someone else’s joke.

High school catfishing. Cyberbullying. Humiliation posted and reposted a thousand times. My face, my body, my life—twisted into a meme by kids I’d shared lunches and bus rides with.

The school district lawyered up before I’d even wiped the mascara off my cheeks. I’m sure the group behind the fake Instagram account did too.

But us? My family?

Hiring an attorney just to get the names of the people who did this to me wasn’t in my parents’ budget—or anywhere near their reality.

“Fine,” my mom said quietly, pressing a kiss to my temple. “Stay home today. We’ll think of something.”

The tears I’d been holding back finally slipped free. So did hers.

I’d always hated Whitney. Ever since fifth grade, when she told everyone I smelled like “off-brand shampoo” and that my parents “weren’t Ivy.”

I didn’t even know what that meant back then. Neither did half the third-grade class. But she said it like a curse, and from that day forward, she had it out for me.

The day she called me “discount Visco girl” just because I didn’t have a Hydro Flask in 2019 should’ve been my first warning. Whitney and her crew didn’t need a reason. Just a target.

And now?

Now I was radioactive.

The worst of it wasn’t even the fake messages or the doctored screenshots.

It was the account.

They made an OnlyFans using my face.

Stolen pictures from my Instagram. My face, my body—spliced together with someone else’s skin in ways that made me want to crawl out of my own. They edited everything. Perfectly. Horrifically. They made it look real.

It was beyond cruel.

It was criminal.

But when we went to the police, it was like we hit a wall wrapped in red tape. They said they were “doing what they could.” They said taking the account down was “complicated.” That it had been reported. Flagged. Reviewed.

That didn’t stop the screenshots from spreading like wildfire.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw it—the username, the fake bio, the blurred-out previews with my face slapped across them like I’d chosen this. Like I’d done it for attention. For money.

Like I deserved it.

My parents tried. They did. But we didn’t have the kind of money that buys lawyers who make problems disappear overnight. We weren’t from old blood or private equity. We couldn’t afford a PR team or a threat of litigation.

So we waited.

And I hid.

They told me to “stay offline.” Like that could undo the damage. Like silence would fix it.

But silence only made it worse.

I didn’t sleep that night.

Just laid there, face pressed into the pillow, eyes raw, heart hollow. Every creak in the house felt like it echoed the silence on my phone. No texts. No apologies. Just the buzzing void of being canceled, erased, and picked apart.

By morning, I didn’t even pretend to get ready for school.

I stayed in bed, numb and weightless, until I heard the quiet knock at my door.

My mom came in first, followed by my dad. He looked like he hadn’t shaved. She had that kind of tired in her eyes you don’t sleep off. They sat at the edge of my bed, their hands clasped between them. Whatever this was, they’d practiced it.

“We’ve been talking,” my dad said. His voice was gentler than I’d heard in weeks. “About what happens next.”

I stared at them, barely blinking.

“You need a clean slate,” my mom whispered, brushing hair off my cheek like she used to when I was little. “A real one.”

My heart thudded, slow and unsure. “What does that mean?”

“It means… your Aunt Susan reached out,” she said. “She lives in Rhode Island now. She’s on the board of the Women’s League out there. Knows everyone.”

“She’s got a friend,” Dad added. “A secretary at a private school. Royal Oaks Prep. They might be able to pull some strings. A full scholarship,” Mom said. “I didn’t tell Susan the details just that you’ve had a rough go and need fresh ocean air.”

I blinked hard. “What?”

“It’s not official yet, but it’s moving fast,” she said. “The police are still working on getting that account shut down. It could take weeks. Months. We can’t wait. You can’t wait. You need to get away from this place—from everything that happened here.”

I sat up slowly, the blanket slipping off my shoulders. My throat tightened.

“Jade, your grades are strong. You have the recommendation letters. The coursework. All you need now is… the will.”

They were asking me to leave everything.

My room. My school. My friends—what few hadn’t ghosted me. The entire mess of my life would be left behind like a crime scene.

I could almost feel the escape hatch cracking open beneath my feet.

I could run. Start over. Try to be someone whole again.

I swallowed hard. “When would I leave?”

My mom looked at me carefully. “In two weeks. Enough time to get things in order. Pack. Say goodbye.”

Two weeks to erase Ohio.

Two weeks to become the kind of girl who doesn’t get torn apart online.

Two weeks to find the courage to start over in a place where no one knew me.

Where maybe I could breathe again.

Spring melted into summer, and I began to heal.

Not all at once. Healing never works that way. But bit by bit, day by day, Rhode Island softened me.

After the meeting with that overworked, underpaid attorney—who managed to strong-arm the district into letting me finish the semester remotely—I packed up what was left of my life in Ohio and moved to the edge of the Atlantic.

Aunt Susan’s place wasn’t fancy. Nothing like the gray-shingled mansions and yacht clubs that dotted the Rhode Island coast. No—her little bungalow sat on top of a sloping hill that overlooked a jagged line of cliffs and sea-splashed rocks.

It used to be my great-grandfather’s fishing shack, and in some ways, it still felt like it.

The place creaked when it rained. The ceilings were popcorn and the AC rattled through window units that hummed like bees in their hive. There was painted wood paneling in every room—white and soft blue—and the scent of sea salt seemed baked into the floorboards.

But the view? That was something else.

Out the back door and down a cracked stone path was the edge of everything. Ocean. Sky. A horizon so wide it felt like freedom. The kind of view that made Ohio feel like a bad dream I could finally wake up from.

No Snap streaks. No DM notifications. No Netflix.

Just wind and water and the quiet hush of being left alone.

My aunt never married. Said she never needed to. She had three cats—Milo, Clementine, and Lord Sandwich—and more plants than furniture. Her garden was a riot of wildflowers, daisies, herbs, and potted tomato plants she spoke to like children.

She didn’t ask too many questions.

She gave me space, and warm cinnamon toast in the mornings, and a secondhand beach cruiser with a woven basket and a bell that I swore I wouldn’t use—until I did.

“Consider this your clean slate,” she said one morning, plucking a weed with purpose. “Use it or lose it.”

So I used it.

I finished the semester on a beat-up laptop from the local library, Zooming into classes I barely looked at, turning in homework on time and keeping my camera off. I didn’t engage. I didn’t explain. I just checked the boxes.

And when school was done?

I breathed.

I spent my mornings helping in the garden, my afternoons biking along the coast, and my evenings curled up on the sun-faded couch, reading books from the pile she kept by the fireplace. The salty tang of the ocean hung in the air, mixing with the smell of percolating coffee and tomato vines.

I got tan.

My hair lightened.

My skin broke out from sunscreen and sea breeze and finally—finally—started to freckle across the bridge of my nose.

It felt like time had slowed down on purpose. To let me catch up. To let me remember who I was before.

One evening, I sat on the porch, legs tucked beneath me, listening to the hum of cicadas and the pop of fireflies blinking over the grass. Aunt Susan brought me a glass of lemonade and sat down beside me in her paint-splattered jeans.

“You ever think about changing your name?” she asked, half-joking.

“All the time,” I said.

She grinned. “Something mysterious and fresh. Like Zadie. Or Quinn.”

I smiled into the glass. “Jade kind of suits me now.”

“Why’s that?”

I looked out at the ocean, calm and wide and endless. “Because I’m a little jaded.”

She let out a laugh that rolled easy like the tide.

And for the first time in months, I laughed too.

Rhode Island changed me.

Somewhere between the first time I dipped my toes in the Atlantic and the last time I checked Ohio’s weather out of habit, I became someone else.

Not completely.

But enough.

Enough that when I met Shani down at the beach—the rocky stretch of public shore just past the dunes, where the locals hung out after work—I didn’t feel like a shadow anymore.

She wore combat boots with her bikini and had a laugh like mischief and caffeine. She didn’t flinch when I told her my name was Jade Bryan.

"Bryan?" she repeated, squinting at me over her sunglasses. "That’s the most generic last name I’ve ever heard. There’s gotta be like twelve Bryans in every area code."