Chapter 2 #2
There it is. The thing I’ve been hearing in different variations since I was fourteen and first told a guidance counselor what I wanted to do with my life.
The slight emphasis on gender like it’s a handicap I haven’t accounted for.
The implication that ambition in a female body is something quaint rather than legitimate.
I let the silence hold for a beat. Then: “I’ve already been accepted to MIT’s School of Engineering. Early admission. I also have standing offers from Caltech and Georgia Tech, though I haven’t decided yet.” I pause. “If that helps clarify things.”
Someone near the window makes a sound that might be a laugh pressed through closed lips. Burke’s expression doesn’t change, but a vein in his temple twitches.
“We’ll see, Miss O’Farrell.”
I sit down. Behind me, Kaiden’s voice, barely audible: “Told you. Too good for everyone.”
Something cracks in the wall I keep so carefully maintained. Not the insult—I can handle insults. It’s the fact that he watched me stand up for myself and interpreted it as arrogance. That he saw a girl refuse to be diminished and called it stuck up.
I turn in my seat. Slowly. So he knows this isn’t reactive. This is chosen.
“My intelligence has nothing to do with what’s between my legs. Every man in this room who assumes otherwise is telling me more about his limitations than mine.”
I hold his gaze. He holds mine. Something passes between us that I don’t have a word for—not anger, not attraction, something live and electric that makes the air between our desks feel charged.
Xander’s mouth is hanging open. Kaiden’s expression has shifted into something I can’t read, and the inability to read him is what unsettles me most. I can read everyone.
It’s a skill born from necessity—when you spend years studying the face of a predator for micro-shifts in mood, you get very good at reading faces.
Kaiden’s is the first one in a long time that doesn’t decode.
I turn back around and fix my eyes on the board. My hands are trembling. I press them flat against the desk until they stop.
Burke spends the rest of the period droning about the syllabus in a monotone that suggests he wrote it once in 1987 and has been photocopying it ever since.
I take meticulous notes anyway—not because I need them, but because the act of writing steadies something in me that the confrontation shook loose.
When the bell rings, I’m out of my seat before the sound fades. I need distance. From Burke, from Kaiden, from the strange humming feeling that’s been living under my skin since he pulled my hair and I almost—
No. Stop.
Jonathan is in the hallway. Waiting. Arms crossed. Expression already tight.
Kaiden brushes past me on his way out, close enough that his shoulder grazes mine. He dips his head toward my ear—not touching, but near enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath.
“See you this weekend, Kitty Cat.”
He and Xander disappear into the stream of students. A cluster of girls near the lockers tracks them with the kind of open, hungry attention that would be embarrassing if any of them had the self-awareness to notice.
I turn to Jon. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. He invited me to some party. I said no.”
“Good.” He starts walking. Fast. Not looking to see if I’m keeping up. “That’s not the kind of thing you should be involved in, Catherine. Those parties are out of control. My parents worked hard to get you into this school. You need to be making smart choices. Good friends.”
He says it like he’s reciting terms and conditions. Like my enrollment at Edgewood came with fine print he expects me to honor.
“Jon. I said no. I don’t go to parties. You know that.”
He stops. Turns. The hallway is thinning out as students file into classrooms, and in the growing quiet, his voice carries more weight than he probably intends.
“Just remember what’s at stake. This school is for the best. Don’t throw it away.”
He kisses my cheek—dry, perfunctory—and walks away.
I stand alone in the hallway. The fluorescent light buzzes overhead, and I count the tiles between my feet and the nearest exit. Fourteen. I’d need three seconds to reach it at a full sprint.
Stop counting. You’re safe. This is a school, not a—
“For what it’s worth, you don’t have to listen to a single thing that guy says.”
I startle. Isaac—Iz, the one who’d been eating the apple under the archway this morning—is leaning against the doorframe of the nearest classroom, arms folded, watching me with an expression that looks uncomfortably close to understanding.
“I heard the whole speech,” he says. “The my-parents-pulled-strings, make-good-choices routine, Cat. Classic Pennington.”
“It's Catherine. And I don’t need commentary from the peanut gallery.”
He laughs—short, genuine, not performative. “Fair. But I’m going to call you Cat, because Catherine is way too many syllables for a Tuesday morning.”
“It’s two syllables more. You’ll survive.”
“Cat.” He pushes off the doorframe and points at me as he walks backward into the classroom. “Get used to it.”
He disappears inside, and I’m alone again. The hallway stretches in both directions—stone walls, polished floors, the faint smell of wood and old money that seems to live in the bones of this building. Somewhere outside, a crow calls. The radiator nearest me ticks, ticks, ticks.
I walk to my next class. I sit down. I open my notebook and begin writing, because writing is control and control is survival and survival is all I’ve known for so long that I’ve forgotten what living feels like without it.
But the problem with control is that it only works on things you can predict.
And Kaiden Monaghan is not predictable. He pulled my hair like a child on a playground, and instead of revulsion—instead of the cold, dead shutdown that every other unwanted touch triggers in me—I felt something move.
Something warm and startled and alive, buried so deep I’d forgotten it existed.
That terrifies me more than anything he could actually do.
Kaiden thinks he’s the most dangerous thing at Edgewood Prep.
He thinks his little crew and their little hierarchy and their little power games are the pinnacle of darkness.
I almost feel sorry for him. He has no idea what real darkness looks like—the kind that doesn’t posture or perform, the kind that moves through your house at night and speaks in a voice you trusted.
The kind that leaves marks you have to hide under long sleeves for the rest of your life.
He wants to break me. Fine. Let him try.
You can’t shatter something that’s already been broken and rebuilt from the ground up. You just end up cutting yourself on the edges.