22. Xander #2
Kaiden reaches the door first. Slams it open. The sound that comes out of his mouth when he sees what’s inside is not a word. It’s something older than language—the primal recognition of a boy whose girl is in danger and whose body is moving before his brain gives permission.
Cat is fighting. In the middle of the empty warehouse floor, she is physically fighting a man twice her size—one of Reece’s guys, left behind as backup.
Cat’s fists are up. Her stance is wrong—wide, unbalanced, the fighting stance of a girl who learned to punch from watching, not training.
But she’s swinging anyway. Because Catherine O’Farrell does not know how to be still when someone is trying to hurt her.
She has survived Garrett and Jon and Alastair and she is not going to let some nameless thug in a warehouse be the thing that finally breaks her.
Kaiden is across the room in three strides. He doesn’t punch the guy—he removes him. Grabs him by the back of the neck and throws him sideways with a force that sends the man skidding across the concrete floor. Iz is there immediately, pinning him. Ryan calling the cops on the approach.
And in the corner—
Daisy. Standing behind Penny. The gun pressed against the back of Penny’s head.
Penny is on her knees. Hands behind her back.
Tied again—duct tape on her wrists. Her face is wet with tears.
Her body is shaking. But her eyes—her eyes find mine across the warehouse floor and they are not the eyes of a girl who has given up.
They are the eyes of a girl who is terrified and alive and waiting for someone to do the thing that needs doing.
Daisy’s hand is shaking. The gun vibrating against Penny’s skull.
Daisy’s eyes are everywhere—darting from me to the door to the cops pulling into the lot outside.
She’s high. The pupils blown wide. The sweat on her forehead.
The jaw working, grinding, the rhythmic clench of a girl whose body is running on chemicals and adrenaline and the absolute certainty that this is the end of something and she doesn’t know how to make it end well.
Danny steps forward. Past me. Past Kaiden. Into the space between the boys and his sister. “Daisy.”
His voice is not the Danny voice. Not the quiet one, not the observer, not the boy who communicates through silence and the spaces between words.
This is Danny stripped. Raw. The voice of a little brother looking at his big sister and seeing the person he grew up worshipping dissolving in real time.
“Daisy, put the gun down. Please.”
She shakes her head. The gun trembles against Penny’s skull. “I can’t. I can’t, Danny. If I put it down, they’ll arrest me. They’ll send me away. I can’t go to prison. I can’t—”
“You’re my sister.” Danny’s voice breaks.
Cracks open like an egg. Everything inside spilling out—the grief and the love and the fury and the helplessness of a boy who has been watching his sister destroy herself for months and could not stop it and is now watching her hold a gun to the head of one of the only people he loves as much as her.
“You’re my big sister, Dais. You taught me how to ride a bike.
You drove me to school when Mom was too hungover that one time.
You snuck me ice cream when Dad said no.
That’s who you are. Not this. Not a girl with a gun in a warehouse. Put it down. Please. I’m begging you.”
Tears are streaming down Daisy’s face. Her arm is shaking so badly the gun is rattling. She looks at Danny—really looks at him, past the drugs and the fear and the twisted loyalty to a man who used her like a tool. She sees her little brother. Standing in a warehouse. Crying for her.
“I fucked up, Danny. I fucked up so bad. Reece—he told me if I helped him, he’d get me clean. He said we’d leave together. Start over. And I believed him because I wanted to believe something so badly that I let him turn me into—” Her voice dissolves. “Into this.”
“Then stop being this. Right now. Put the gun down and come home.”
“I can’t come home! Don’t you understand? I helped him, Danny! I watched him hurt people. I drove the van. I held the gun. I’m not a victim—I’m part of it!”
The gun swings. Away from Penny. Toward Danny. The room freezes. Every boy. Every cop in the doorway. The world contracting to a single point: Daisy Rorke aiming a gun at her little brother.
Danny doesn’t move. Doesn’t flinch. He stands there—eighteen years old, tears on his face, his hands at his sides—and looks at the barrel of his sister’s gun and does not step back.
“Dais. Please.” Whispering now. The volume of a prayer. “Please don’t do this. I love you. Mom loves you. Dad loves you. Del loves you. We can figure this out. Just put it down.”
Daisy’s face crumbles. The gun drops an inch. Two. Her arm giving out—not from choice but from the weight of the weapon and the drugs and the grief and the absolute exhaustion of a girl who has been running on Reece’s fumes for so long that her body has nothing left to run on.
She shoves Penny. Forward. Hard. Penny tumbles toward me and I catch her—my arms around her, pulling her behind me, the tape still on her wrists, her face pressing into my chest, the sound she makes not a word but a sound, relief and terror braided together.
Cat. From across the room. Something flies—a piece of debris, a chunk of concrete, thrown with the aim of a girl who survived the Penningtons and has been in enough dangerous rooms to know that the moment a hostage is released is the moment you act.
It hits Daisy’s hand. The gun clatters. Skids across the floor.
“YOU PSYCHOTIC BITCH!” Cat screaming. Kaiden holding her back. Cat fighting his arms. “She was going to sell us, Danny! This was all a setup! Your sister was going to hand us to Reece like merchandise! So don’t you dare stand there crying for her!”
Danny: “She’s my SISTER, Cat!”
“AND WE’RE YOUR FAMILY! Penny and I—we’re your family too! And your sister held a gun to Penny’s head and you’re acting like she’s the victim?”
Daisy scrambles for the gun. On the floor. Her hands reaching. The cops in the doorway are moving but they’re ten steps too far and Daisy’s hand closes around the grip and she lifts it—not at Danny, not at Cat.
At herself.
The gun against her own temple. Her face a ruin of tears and snot and the mascara she put on this morning when she still thought Reece’s plan would work.
Her hand shaking so badly the barrel rattles against her skull.
“I’m sorry, Danny. I’m so sorry. I can’t—I can’t fix this. I broke everything. I broke us.”
Danny moves. Toward her. Arms out. “Daisy, NO—”
The cops are screaming. “DROP THE WEAPON! DROP IT NOW!”
Daisy’s finger tightens. The trembling stops. For one second—one single, terrible second—her hand goes still. The decision made. The coin landing.
She turns the gun. Away from herself. Toward Cat. The survival instinct overriding the surrender—the drugs telling her brain that the girl screaming at her is the enemy, not the mirror.
The shot comes from the doorway. One officer. One round.
Daisy drops.
The sound of a body hitting concrete is a sound you never forget. It doesn’t echo. It doesn’t ring. It thuds. The heavy, final percussion of a person becoming an object.
Danny screams.
Not words. Sound. The raw, throat-shredding wail of a boy watching his sister fall.
He runs—toward her, past the officers who try to stop him, past Cat who is frozen, past everything.
He drops to his knees beside her. His hands on her face.
On her chest. On the blood that is spreading across the concrete in a pattern that looks like nothing and means everything.
“DAISY! DAISY, NO! WAKE UP! PLEASE WAKE UP!”
His hands are red. His face is red. He’s pressing on the wound—CPR, compression, the desperate muscle memory of a boy who took a first aid class in ninth grade and is applying it to his sister’s chest while her eyes go fixed and the blood keeps coming and nothing he does is enough because nothing anyone does is enough when a bullet has found its target.
Ryan is beside him. Not pulling him away—kneeling with him. Ryan’s hands on Danny’s shoulders. Just there. The way Ryan has always been there—shadow, companion, the boy who follows his best friend into every room, even the rooms where the floor is covered in blood.
EMTs push through. They reach Daisy. The flurry of gloves and gauze and the controlled urgency of professionals assessing a wound.
They move Danny aside—gently, firmly—and Danny fights it, fights them, because leaving her side means admitting this is real and real means his sister is bleeding out on a warehouse floor and he is eighteen years old and this is not supposed to be his life.
Danny turns. His face—blood, tears, the devastation of a boy whose world just fractured along a line he didn’t know existed. He looks at Cat. At Penny. At me.
“This is your fault!” At me. The words aimed like the gun his sister held. “All of you! If Penny hadn’t—if you hadn’t brought Reece around—my sister would be—”
“Danny.” Kaiden. Stepping between us. Not defending—containing. “This isn’t—”
“She was going to let Reece rape us, kill us.” Cat.
Her voice is raw but steady. The ice princess emerging from the shock because Cat O’Farrell does not let grief erase facts.
“Danny, I’m sorry about your sister. I am.
But she held a gun to Penny’s head. She drove the van.
She was part of Reece’s operation. Not a hostage—a participant.
And I know that hurts. I know it’s the worst thing I could say right now.
But you need to hear the truth because the truth is the only thing that’s going to survive tonight. ”