Chapter 9 - Kaiden
Ican’t sleep.
I’ve been staring at the ceiling for two hours, running the day on a loop—the video of Jon’s hand connecting with her face, the bruises on her arm, the scars underneath, the sound of her fighting with her parents through the kitchen wall.
Her mother saying “not in someone else’s home” while her daughter’s wrists bled the evidence of a pain nobody in that room knew how to touch.
The house is quiet. The kind of quiet that old houses specialize in—radiators ticking, floorboards settling, the wind pressing against the windowpanes like something trying to get in.
My parents went to bed an hour ago. Cat’s parents are in the guest suite downstairs.
The hallway between my room and Cat’s is dark.
I roll onto my side. Close my eyes. Try to shut my brain off the way I do before games—controlled breathing, empty thoughts, the mental equivalent of turning down the volume.
That’s when I hear it.
A sound through the wall. Muffled. Rhythmic. At first I think she’s on the phone, talking low so nobody hears. Then the rhythm breaks and the sound gets louder—a whimper, then a choked cry, then words. Fragments of words, tangled and desperate, the voice of someone who’s not awake.
I sit up. Press my ear to the wall.
“—don’t, please—I won’t tell—please don’t hurt her—”
My blood goes cold.
“—I’ll take it back, I’ll take it all back, just leave her alone—”
The voice is small. Young. Not seventeen—younger. Whatever she’s dreaming about has pulled her back to a time when she was a child, and the child is begging someone not to hurt her mother.
A scream. Short, guttural, cut off like a hand went over her mouth.
I’m in the hallway before I’ve made a conscious decision. Bare feet on cold hardwood. Her door isn’t locked. I open it and close it behind me and the room is dark except for the streetlight coming through the window, and Cat is on the bed, tangled in the sheets, thrashing.
Not dramatic thrashing. Not movie thrashing.
The small, trapped movements of a person whose body is trying to fight but can’t—arms pinned at her sides by sheets she’s wound herself into, legs kicking weakly, head turning side to side.
She’s drenched in sweat. The lacrosse shirt I gave her is soaked through, clinging to her body, and her hair is plastered to her face and neck.
“Please,” she says. Not loud. The whisper is worse than the scream. “Please, Jack. I’ll be good. I won’t tell anyone. Just don’t—please don’t touch—”
Jack.
A name. Spoken in the voice of a child. Begging.
My hands are shaking. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been in a room with someone having a nightmare like this—not the kind you wake up from and laugh about, the kind that lives in your body, the kind your nervous system replays like a recording that never stops.
I pull the blankets down. She’s curled into a fetal position, arms crossed over her chest, fists clenched. Her face is wet—tears and sweat and something desperate. She looks small. Impossibly small for a girl who walks through Edgewood Prep like she’s made of steel.
I get into the bed.
It’s not a decision. It’s not calculated. It’s the dumbest thing I could possibly do, and I do it anyway, because she’s shaking and crying and saying a name that makes every hair on my body stand on end, and I can’t stand in this room and watch it happen. I physically cannot.
I wrap my arms around her from behind and pull her against my chest. Tight.
The way you’d hold someone who was falling—not romantic, not sexual, just containment.
She goes rigid for a second—every muscle in her body locking up—and then the rigidity breaks, and her breathing hitches, and the thrashing stops.
She’s still for a long moment. Then her eyes open.
I clamp my hand over her mouth before the scream comes—feel it hit my palm, hot and panicked, her body jerking against mine.
“It’s me,” I say. Low. Steady. “It’s Kaiden. You were having a nightmare. You’re in my house. You’re safe.”
Her eyes are wild. Dilated. Not seeing me yet—still seeing whatever was behind her eyelids. Her nails dig into the back of my hand. I don’t pull away.
Slowly, the focus comes back. The wildness recedes. She sees my face. Registers where she is. And the look that replaces the terror isn’t relief.
It’s fury.
She rips my hand off her mouth. “What the fuck are you doing in my bed.”
Not a question. A statement wrapped in enough venom to kill a horse.
“You were screaming, Cat. Through the wall. I could hear—”
“Get out.”
“You were begging someone not to hurt your mother. You said a name. Jack. You—”
“Get. Out.”
She’s pressed against the headboard now, as far from me as the bed allows.
Arms crossed over her chest. The same posture she had in the nightmare—protective, defensive, small.
She’s trembling. The sweat on her shirt has gone cold and she’s shivering in it, but she’d rather freeze than accept the warmth of a body next to hers.
I should leave. Every rational thought in my head is screaming at me to get up, walk out, close the door, and never mention this again.
Instead I say: “Who’s Jack?”
Her face shuts down. Every door. Every window. Every crack in the armor sealed in an instant. The ice princess doesn’t descend gradually. She arrives fully formed, like a switch being flipped.
“None of your business.”
“Cat—”
“Why do you care?” Her voice is raw. Ruined. The voice of someone who’s been screaming in her sleep. “So you can use it against me? Post it on GlossX? Add it to your collection of ways to make my life hell?”
“That’s not—”
“You’re my bully, Kaiden.” She says it simply.
Like a diagnosis. “You have made it your personal mission to torment me since the day I arrived. You pull my hair. You post photos of me. You grab me and corner me and put your hands on my throat in libraries. And now you’re in my bed in the middle of the night asking me to trust you?
” She laughs. Hollow. Airless. “You don’t get to do that.
You don’t get to be both. You are cruel. ”
She’s right. She’s completely, devastatingly right. I have no defense. I have been exactly the person she’s describing, and the fact that I’m also the person who heard her screaming and couldn’t stay in his room doesn’t cancel out a single thing I’ve done.
I should leave. I don’t leave.
Something in me—something reckless and dark and too hungry to be governed by logic—reaches for her.
I take her wrists and pin them above her head against the headboard in one motion, and I shift my weight over her, and her eyes go wide, and I can feel her pulse hammering against my fingers where they circle her wrists.
“You want to see cruel?” My voice is low.
I barely recognize it. “You think you know what I am? You sit behind that wall of yours and you look at me like I’m something simple—a bully, a rich boy with anger issues, a game you’ve already solved.
But you haven’t solved me, Cat. You don’t know the first fucking thing about what lives inside me. ”
Her breathing is ragged. Her body is rigid underneath mine. But she doesn’t struggle. She looks up at me with those green eyes and she doesn’t flinch.
My hand leaves her wrists and finds her throat. Wraps around it. Not gently this time. Not the possessive-but-careful pressure from the library. Tighter. Harder. The kind of pressure that says I could hurt you and means it.
“I could make you come like this,” I say. “With my hand around your throat and your back against this headboard. Or I could squeeze until the light goes out. Those are the two things that live inside me, Cat. Side by side. All the time. And I don’t always know which one is going to win.”
I’m breathing hard. My hand is shaking on her throat. I’m scaring myself—the honesty of what I just said, the rawness of it, the fact that I meant every word.
Cat looks up at me. Her pupils are blown. Her chest rises and falls against mine. And then she says, in a voice that has no fear in it at all:
“Do it.”
I freeze.
“Snap my neck, Kaiden.” Her voice is flat. Dead. The voice of a person who has weighed the cost of living and found the math doesn’t work. “Put me out of my misery. You’d be doing me a favor.”
The words go through me like a knife through water—no resistance, just devastation.
I see her eyes—the green gone dull, the fight gone out of them, nothing left but an exhaustion so total it looks like peace—and every dark, angry, possessive, fucked-up thing I’ve been feeling for this girl collapses into a single, blinding point of horror.
I let go of her throat. Pull my hands away like her skin burned me. Roll off her and sit on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands.
My lungs aren’t working right. The air in the room is too thick.
“What the fuck, Cat.” My voice comes out broken. “What the fuck.”
She sits up behind me. I can feel her moving on the mattress but I can’t look at her. I can’t look at the face of a girl who just asked me to kill her and meant it.
“You can’t handle it,” she says. Quiet. Matter-of-fact.
Like she’s reading test results. “You think you’re dark, Kaiden.
You think your anger and your games and your little kingdom make you dangerous.
But you just flinched. The first time you saw something actually dark—actually broken—you couldn’t handle it. ”
She’s right. And she’s wrong. She’s right that I flinched.
She’s wrong that it means I can’t handle it.
I flinched because the girl I’ve been obsessing over just asked me to end her life with the same casual certainty she uses to answer calculus problems, and the ground underneath everything I thought I understood just disappeared.