6. Xander
Itried to follow her.
I was out the bathroom door three seconds after she left, but Penny moves fast when she’s running from something, and she’s been running from everything since October.
By the time I hit the parking lot, her SUV was already ripping out of the exit, tires squealing on the wet pavement, the door barely closed.
I stood in the January cold in my school uniform with blood on my knuckles and her tears still damp on my shirt and watched the taillights disappear and felt the helplessness of a boy who has been given every opportunity to hold on and has chosen, every single time, to let go.
Now I’m in my car. Parked at the old playground.
The one at the end of our street—the one Penny and I used to walk to after school when we were small enough that the world was a three-block radius and happiness was a swing set and a pink backpack full of snacks she’d packed for both of us.
Goldfish crackers. Apple slices. Those little cheese-and-cracker packs with the red stick.
She always brought enough for two because she knew I wouldn’t have anything from home, because Lucian didn’t believe in snacks and Adeena wasn’t allowed to pack me anything without his approval.
The swings are empty. January. Nobody brings their kids to the park in January. Just me—eighteen, bleeding, sitting in a parked car staring at a playground where a girl used to share her crackers with a boy who didn’t know yet that he’d grow up to break her.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I am a coward.
My phone rings. I look down, hoping—the particular, pathetic hope of a boy who has been cruel and is waiting for the object of his cruelty to call and absolve him.
Not Penny. Alice.
Alice MacHale. The woman who taught me to bake bread.
Who hung my drawings on her refrigerator next to Penny’s.
Who let me sleep in the guest room on nights when Lucian was too loud and Adeena was too quiet and the Anderson house felt like a coffin for people who were still breathing.
Alice, who has known me since the day I was born—literally born, because Penny and I were delivered ten minutes apart in rooms next to each other at Edgewood General, and our mothers held us side by side in the maternity ward and made a joke about destiny that turned out not to be a joke at all.
I answer. “Alice. What’s going on?”
She’s crying before she speaks. Not the controlled kind—the ragged kind. The breathing-between-sobs kind. The sound of a mother who has lost track of her child and is trying to hold herself together while the worst-case scenarios multiply in her head.
“Xander—she’s not answering. We’ve called her a dozen times.
Gideon called the school and they said she left.
Cat doesn’t know where she is. Nobody knows where she is.
Her phone is going straight to voicemail and she called me an hour ago and said she wasn’t coming home and I don’t—I don’t know what to do, Xander. I’m scared. I am so scared.”
The crying gets worse. I can hear Gideon in the background—his voice low, steady, the public relations specialist managing a crisis that isn’t public but is the most important one of his life.
He’s on the phone too. Probably calling Callum.
Probably calling Arthur. Probably building the network of parents that activates when one of their kids goes dark.
“Alice. Listen to me.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
The mask—the one I use for fights, for Lucian, for the cage.
The one that covers the fact that my chest is caving in because Penny is missing and I’m the reason.
“I know where she is. I think I know where she is. I’m going to get her right now. ”
“Where?” The word is so desperate it barely has shape. “Xander, where is my daughter?”
“I’ll bring her home. I promise. Thirty minutes.”
“Please.” She says it the way Penny says it—broken, raw, the word stripped to its bones. “Please bring my baby home.”
I hang up. Stare at the playground. The empty swings moving slightly in the wind, the chains creaking—a ghost of the sound they used to make when two kids sat on them and talked about nothing and didn’t know they were building the foundation of something that would survive everything the world threw at it.
I know where she is. I’ve known since she walked out of the bathroom.
The same way I know where the pills are in my backpack and where the fights are on Friday nights and where my mother’s feet were in the closet.
Some knowledge lives in the body, not the brain.
And my body knows that when Penny runs, she runs to the thing that makes the noise stop. Right now, that’s Reece.
I call him. The pretense is simple—the same pretense I’ve used a dozen times. The language of the transaction.
“Yo.”
“Hey, man. I need a fix.”
“Come through.”
He hangs up. Quick. Casual. But in the half-second before the call ends, I hear it—muffled music.
A girl’s laugh. Not just any girl’s laugh.
Penny’s laugh. The real one. The one the pills unlock when they smooth out the sharp edges and make the world feel safe enough to let joy back in, even when the joy is chemical and the safety is a lie.
I put the car in drive and head toward Reece’s house.
Penny’s SUV is in the driveway.
I see it as soon as I turn onto Reece’s street—the black X5 parked at an angle, driver’s door not fully closed, the particular haste of a girl who was shaking too hard to park straight and too desperate to care.
Seeing it here—in front of this house, on this street, in this part of town where the money stops pretending to be clean—makes something in my stomach turn to concrete.
I park behind her. Get out. The house looks the same as always—the peeling clapboard, the cracked steps, the boarded window that Reece never fixed because fixing things implies permanence and Reece Hall operates on the assumption that he’ll need to leave quickly.
Music bleeds through the walls. Not loud—this isn’t a party.
It’s a gathering. The kind of casual chaos that Reece curates for people who need things and are willing to pay for them in currencies that aren’t always cash.
I walk in.
The living room is hazy with smoke. A handful of people I vaguely recognize—older, most of them.
Dropouts. Dealers. The ecosystem that orbits a man like Reece.
They nod at me as I pass. A few say my name—“good fight last week, X”—and I nod back without stopping because the fight is the last thing on my mind.
I find them on the couch.
Reece is in the center. Daisy on his left—curled into him, eyes glazed, the hollowed-out compliance of a girl who stopped being a person and started being an accessory so gradually that nobody noticed the transition. And on his right—
Penny.
She’s high. I can see it from across the room—the looseness in her body, the way she’s leaning into the couch cushions like they’re holding her up instead of her holding herself.
Her school uniform is rumpled—the blazer off, the tie gone, the top two buttons of her white shirt undone.
Her shoes are on the floor. Her legs are curled under her.
She looks small. She looks like a child at a party she wasn’t invited to.
Reece’s arm is around her shoulders. Not unusual—he does this.
The arm. The casual, proprietary drape of a man who positions himself as protector while actively being the threat.
But his hand—his hand isn’t casual. His fingers are tracing patterns on her collarbone, just below the undone buttons of her shirt.
Slow. Deliberate. The particular patience of a man who is mapping territory he intends to claim, and who has learned—from Daisy, from practice, from the specific predatory intelligence that makes Reece Hall dangerous in ways that a fist alone can’t be—that the way you own a person is not through force but through increments.
A touch here. A button there. The slow erosion of boundaries until the girl can’t remember where her body ends and his access begins.
Penny isn’t stopping him. She’s not registering it—the pills have taken her to the place where touch is just sensation, not meaning, and sensation is all she wants because meaning hurts and the whole point of the pills is to stop the hurting.
But I register it. I register every centimeter of Reece Hall’s fingers on Penny MacHale’s skin and the image burns into my retinas alongside the closet and the rope and the bare feet and every other image that lives in the gallery of things I cannot unsee.
I cross the room. Grab Penny’s arm. Pull her up off the couch.
Reece’s hand drops. He looks up at me with the smile—the Reece smile, the one that says “I know something you don’t” even when he doesn’t.
“Easy, X. She came to me. I didn’t go looking for her.”
“Don’t touch her.”
“She’s a customer. Customers get the full experience.”
My free hand balls into a fist. Every muscle in my body is begging—begging—for the permission to swing.
But Reece’s people are in this room. Three of them at least. And Penny is high and unsteady and if this turns into a fight she’s in the middle of it, and I will not—will not—put her in another room where men are being violent while she’s unable to protect herself.
“We’re leaving.”
Reece shrugs. “Her tab’s growing, X. Somebody’s gotta cover it.”
I pull Penny toward the door. She stumbles—her socked feet catching on the carpet, her body swaying against mine. I catch her. Hold her up. Guide her through the smoke and the bodies and out the front door into the January cold.
She blinks in the daylight like she’s surfacing from underwater. Looks at me. The chemical glaze clearing just enough for recognition.
“Xander?”
“Get in the car.”
She does. Not because she agrees. Because she’s too high to argue and her body still responds to my voice even when her mind knows better.
I pull out my phone. Text Iz.