4. Xander #3
I cross the room in two strides and rip him off the bed by his collar.
His phone flies out of his hand and hits the wall.
I throw him to the floor and my fist connects with his face before he can get his arms up—once, twice, the wet crack of knuckle on cheekbone that I know better than my own heartbeat.
He screams. Tries to cover his face. I grab his hand, pin it, and hit him again.
“She’s fucking drugged, you piece of shit! She can’t even see straight and you’re taking pictures?”
Kole scrambles free. Blood pouring from his nose. He grabs his phone from the floor and bolts—out the door and down the hallway.
I turn to Penny.
She’s still on the bed. Her dress hiked up.
Her eyes unfocused. The smile is gone now—replaced by confusion, the slow dawn of a girl whose brain is trying to process what’s happening through a chemical fog.
I pull her dress back down. Gently. The tenderness that lives underneath all the violence—the thing I can’t kill no matter how hard I try.
I move her up to the pillows. Pull the blanket over her. Close the door. Come back and lie down beside her. Not touching. Just near. Close enough that if she reaches out, I’m there.
She reaches out.
Her hand finds my chest. Her head follows—rolling onto my shoulder, her face pressing into the fabric of my shirt.
She sniffles. Her fingers trace patterns on my sternum—absent, automatic, the muscle memory of a girl who used to fall asleep on my chest in the treehouse when we were kids and the world was small enough to fit in a wooden box between two trees.
“I miss him,” she murmurs.
I look down at her. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at her own hand on my chest, at the friendship bracelet on her wrist, at the faded threads she’s been wearing for eleven years.
“Who?”
“My best friend.” She lifts her wrist. Shows me the bracelet like I’m a stranger.
“See? We made these when we were seven. In the treehouse. He chose yellow because he said yellow was the color of the sun and the sun never gives up. And I chose teal because it was the color of the ocean and the ocean is stronger than anything.” A tear rolls down her cheek. “But he’s gone now.”
My heart folds in half.
She doesn’t know it’s me. The drugs have blurred the room, the face, the voice. She’s talking to a stranger about the boy she lost. I should tell her. I should say “Penny, it’s me. I’m right here.”
Instead I say: “Where did he go?”
Because I need to hear it. I need to hear what I’ve done from the mouth of the person I did it to.
“Gone.” She shivers. Presses closer. “Turned into someone I don’t recognize.
Cold. Heartless. He used to be so gentle—you should have seen him when we were little.
He’d carry bugs outside instead of stepping on them.
He’d cry during sad movies and pretend he had allergies. He was the best person I knew.”
“What happened to him?”
“Everything. His dad. His mom. The things that happened when we were thirteen.” She traces the bracelet with her finger.
“He saved me once. From something bad. He was so brave, and it broke something inside him. He looked at me different after that. Like I was something fragile he was afraid to touch.”
“Maybe he was afraid of hurting you.”
“That’s the stupid part.” Her voice cracks. “Him being away is what’s hurting me. I need him. I need him more than ever and he doesn’t even know. I’m lost. I’m so lost and so tired of pretending I’m not.”
She cries. Not the performance kind—the real kind. The kind that comes from the place where the pills can’t reach, the basement underneath the basement, where the truths you can’t medicate live in the dark and wait for you to get quiet enough to hear them.
I stroke her hair. The teal streaks soft between my fingers. She calms, slowly—the crying tapering to sniffles, then silence, then the deep, even breathing of a girl who has been carried to sleep by chemicals and exhaustion and the safety of being held by someone, even if she doesn’t know who.
I look down at the bracelet on her wrist. Then at the one on mine. Teal and yellow. Eleven years. The sun and the ocean.
I’m right here, Penny. I’ve always been right here. I just forgot how to show you.
I close my eyes. Make a promise to the dark: tomorrow, I will walk away from Penny MacHale. For real this time. Because staying near her is killing her, and killing her is the one thing I will not do.
I fall asleep with her head on my chest and her tears drying on my shirt and the faded bracelet pressing between our bodies like a prayer neither of us knows how to say.
Something warm moves across my stomach.
I open my eyes. Morning light. Danny’s guest room.
The bed. And Penny—asleep, curled against me, her dress ridden up, her bare skin against mine where my shirt has lifted.
The contact is electric. Tender. Agonizing.
The cruelty of waking up next to someone you love and knowing you don’t deserve to be there.
A throat clears.
I whip my head. Kaiden. In the corner. Arms crossed. His face a controlled storm—not explosive, not yet. Calculating. The Kaiden face that means he’s deciding which version of this conversation we’re about to have.
“Morning,” he says. Flat.
“It’s not what it looks like.”
“You’re in bed with an unconscious girl who was drugged at a party. Tell me what it is, then.”
I ease myself away from Penny without waking her. Sit on the edge of the bed. Run my hands through my hair. Speak quietly—barely above a whisper, because she’s three feet away and this conversation is not for her. Not yet.
“Kole had her in here. She was out of it—the shit Reece gave her. Kole was undressing her. Taking pictures on his phone. Kissing her. She couldn’t even keep her eyes open.”
Kaiden’s jaw tightens. “Kole Hobbs. I’m going to—”
“I already handled Kole.” I show him my knuckles. Fresh blood. “He ran. The point is—I couldn’t leave her alone in here. So I stayed. Nothing happened, Kaid. I swear on my mother.”
He studies me. Weighing the oath. Weighing the boy saying it.
“How deep with Reece.” The whisper drops even lower. His eyes flick to Penny, making sure she’s still under. “You said she has a tab. How deep are you.”
I exhale. The truth is a weight I’ve been carrying alone for months and the relief of handing it to someone—even partially—is so enormous it makes my chest ache.
“I owe him. I’ve owed him since three days after my mom died.
It started with pills—Percocet, to make the noise stop.
Then the money ran out and he offered me the fights.
The fights were supposed to clear the debt.
But he keeps adding shit—fees, percentages.
The number never goes down. And now he’s got Penny too. ”
Kaiden’s face changes. Not anger—something worse. Disappointment. Pain. Pain of a boy who has stood beside his best friend for six years and is learning, in real time, the depth of what was hidden from him.
“You’re using too.” Not a question.
“Yeah.”
“The same shit?”
“Yeah.”
“For how long.”
“Since October.”
The silence between us is so dense it has mass. Kaiden presses his palms together. Touches them to his lips. The gesture of a person who is processing something enormous and choosing his next words with surgical care.
“We’re going to fix this,” he says. Low.
Controlled. The voice of the leader, the organizer, the boy who looks at a mess and starts building a plan.
“But I need you to understand something, X. You should have told me. Months ago. You should have told me the day it started. That’s what I’m for. That’s what all of us are for.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like you’ve been carrying this alone on purpose because you think you deserve to suffer.”
The accuracy of the statement makes me flinch. Before I can respond, Penny stirs.
She shifts. Groans. Her body registering gravity and light and the hangover of whatever was in that pill before the mind catches up. Her eyes flutter open. Close. Open again. She blinks at the ceiling. At the room. At me.
Confusion. Fear. The wide-eyed disorientation of a girl who doesn’t know where she is or how she got here.
I move to her. Slow. The way you’d approach a spooked animal—low, unthreatening, making yourself small despite being six-two and covered in someone else’s blood.
“Hey. Easy, baby.” My voice drops to a register I didn’t know I had—soft, steady, the voice of a person who is trying to be kind and discovering he still remembers how. “You’re okay. You’re at Danny’s house. You’re safe.”
Her eyes find mine. Wide. Searching. Trying to match the voice she’s hearing with the face she’s seeing and the version of Xander Anderson she’s been living with for months, and the two things don’t compute.
“Xander?”
“Yeah. I’m right here.” I take the water bottle from the nightstand. Put it in her hands. Cup my fingers around hers to steady the trembling. “Slow sips, sweetheart. Slow. That’s it. Good girl.”
She drinks. Small sips. Her eyes don’t leave mine.
There’s something happening on her face—layers of emotion passing across it like weather, confusion giving way to something softer, something that looks like the way she used to look at me before everything went wrong.
Trust. The old, instinctive trust of a girl whose body remembers what her mind has been trying to forget: that the safest place she’s ever been is near me.
“Why are you—” She looks at the bed. At Kaiden in the corner. Back at me. “Why are you being nice to me?”
“Because you need me to be.”
She blinks. Tears fill her eyes. One falls. I catch it with my thumb—gentle, the pad of my finger against her cheekbone—and she closes her eyes and leans into my hand and for three seconds the war between us goes quiet.
Then the door opens and the war resumes.
Danny. Ryan. Iz. Filing in with the energy of boys who have been briefed on something bad and are arriving to assess.
Danny’s face is grim. Ryan is already on his phone.
Iz’s eyes go immediately to Penny—to my hand on her face, to the bed, to the dress, to the whole picture—and his expression shifts from concern to something harder.
Penny sees them. The softness evaporates. The mask slams back into place.
“What—why is everyone—” She pulls away from me.
Pulls the blanket up. Her eyes wild, darting between faces, the cornered-animal look of a girl who is piecing together last night from fragments and doesn’t like what the fragments are forming.
“What happened? Why am I in this bed? Where’s Kole? He was supposed to—”
“Kole is gone,” I say. Firm. “He wasn’t taking you home, Penny. He was taking pictures of you while you were unconscious.”
Her hand goes to her mouth. The color drains from her face.
Iz crosses the room. Kneels beside the bed. His hand on her arm—gentle, steadying, the soft touch of a boy who has been filling the space I abandoned and is not going to step aside just because I’ve decided to show up.
“Hey. Look at me.” His voice is low. Warm. The voice he uses for her now—the one that makes my jaw clench and my fists curl and the animal in my chest roar. “You’re safe. Nobody hurt you. X got to you in time. Okay?”
She nods. Small. Looking at Iz the way she used to look at me—like he’s the solid ground in a room full of shaking floor.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.” Iz stands. Extends his hand. “Danny’s bathroom has everything you need. Take a hot shower. We’ll be right here.”
I step forward. “I’ll take her—”
“I’ve got her.” Iz doesn’t look at me when he says it. His hand stays extended toward Penny. The message is clear: you lost this privilege. I didn’t.
The anger flashes. Hot. Immediate. Rage. The rage of watching another man do the thing you should be doing for the person you love, and knowing he’s doing it better because he didn’t spend the last three months proving he doesn’t deserve to.
Kaiden’s hand lands on my shoulder. Heavy. Grounding. The grip that says “sit the fuck down” without words.
“She can shower by herself,” Kaiden says. Calm. Definitive. The voice that ends arguments before they start. “Iz, show her where the bathroom is. Then come back and sit down. Both of you. We have shit to discuss.”
Iz takes Penny’s hand. Walks her to the door. She glances back at me over her shoulder—one look, brief, loaded with everything she can’t say in a room full of people. Gratitude. Confusion.
The door closes behind her. The shower starts. Through the wall, the sound of water—and underneath it, if you listen hard enough, the sound of a girl crying where she thinks nobody can hear.
I hear it. I always hear it.
I sit on the bed. Put my head in my hands. Kaiden, Danny, Ryan, and Iz form a semicircle around me—the Elite Five minus one, the formation we’ve held since we were twelve, minus the member who is currently dissolving under hot water in the next room.
Kaiden clears his throat. “Talk. All of it. From the beginning.”
I lift my head. Look at my brothers. The four boys who have held me up through everything—through Lucian, through Garrett, through Adeena, through the cage.
The four boys I’ve been shutting out because admitting I need them feels like admitting I’m weak, and weakness in Lucian Anderson’s house was the thing that got you hit.
I take a breath.
“I need help,” I say. And the sentence—three words, seven syllables, the hardest thing I’ve ever said—cracks open the door I’ve been holding shut since October, and behind it is everything I’ve been drowning in, and for the first time, I don’t drown alone.