Chapter 9 - Kaiden #2
I turn around. She’s sitting with her knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, her face half-hidden by her hair. She’s not crying. She’s past crying. She’s in the place after crying, the empty place, the place where the pressure has released and what’s left is just…quiet.
I don’t think about what I do next. I reach for her. Pull her onto my lap. She resists—a token resistance, her hands pushing against my chest for about two seconds before the fight goes out of her and she collapses against me like a building with its foundation removed.
She’s shaking. Small, involuntary tremors that I can feel through the thin fabric of my shirt.
I wrap my arms around her and hold on—tight, immovable, the way I hold things I’m afraid of losing—and she buries her face in my chest and lets out a sound that isn’t a sob.
It’s worse. It’s the sound a person makes when they’ve been holding something for so long their body has forgotten how to let go.
“I shouldn’t have pushed you,” I say into her hair.
“No.” Her voice is muffled against my chest. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I’m—”
“Don’t say sorry.” She pulls back just enough to look at me.
Her face is wrecked—swollen eyes, red cheeks, mascara smeared into her temples.
She looks like a girl who’s been through a war and is still standing, barely, through stubbornness alone.
“I’m so fucking tired of hearing people say sorry.
Sorry is a word people use to make themselves feel better about doing nothing. ”
I shut my mouth. She’s right. Again. She’s always right, and it’s the most infuriating and attractive thing about her.
I brush the hair off her face. Tuck it behind her ear. My fingers trace the line of her jaw, and she lets me—doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away. Just watches me with those exhausted green eyes, waiting to see which version of me is going to show up next.
I kiss her forehead. Then her temple. Then the damp skin beneath her eye where the tears tracked. Light. Barely there. The softest my mouth has ever been against another person’s skin.
She makes a sound—small, involuntary, somewhere between surprise and surrender.
I lean down and press my lips to hers. Not hard. Not hungry. Not the way I’ve imagined kissing her a hundred times—rough, claiming, the kind of kiss that leaves bruises. This is something else. This is a question. A quiet one.
She doesn’t kiss back. Not at first. Her lips are still, and for two terrible seconds I think I’ve made the worst mistake of my life.
Then her hand comes up to the side of my face, and her mouth softens, and she kisses me back with a gentleness that cracks something open in my chest that I didn’t know was sealed.
We stay like that. Not deepening it. Not escalating. Just mouths together, breathing each other in, her hand on my face and my arms around her body and the dark room and the quiet house and the weight of everything that happened today sitting in the bed beside us like a third person.
She pulls back. Looks at me. I can’t read her expression and I don’t try.
“Don’t say anything,” she whispers. “Just…stay. Until I fall asleep. Then go.”
I lie down. She lies beside me, her back against my chest, my arm over her waist. Her body is still shaking, but slower now. Less urgent. The tremors of someone who’s coming down from something terrible and is finding, reluctantly, that there’s solid ground underneath.
Her breathing slows. Her body gets heavy against mine. She’s asleep in less than five minutes, which tells me how exhausted she is—no one falls asleep that fast unless their body has been running on fumes.
I don’t go.
I know she said to leave. I know I should. But her hand found mine in her sleep—her fingers lacing through mine without conscious thought, like her body trusts me in ways her mind won’t allow—and I can’t bring myself to pull away.
I lie there in the dark and I don’t think about what this means.
I don’t try to name it. I just hold the girl who asked me to kill her and feel her breathe, and the noise in my head—the constant, churning static that’s been there since I was eleven—goes quiet.
Not gone. Just…quiet. Like it’s listening too.
I fall asleep holding her.
It’s the first time in years I don’t dream about anything at all.
Morning. I wake up alone. The bed beside me is cold. She’s been gone for a while.
I find her downstairs in the kitchen, fully dressed in yesterday’s uniform, drinking coffee my mother made. She doesn’t look at me when I walk in. Just stares at the mug like it contains the answers to questions she hasn’t asked yet.
My mother gives me a look—the look—and then conveniently excuses herself to “check on something upstairs.”
We’re alone. Cat takes a sip of coffee. Sets the mug down. Still doesn’t look at me.
“About last night,” she says. Her voice is controlled. Clinical. The ice princess reconstructed overnight, every crack sealed, every fracture plastered over. “That doesn’t happen again. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about it. We go back to whatever we were before.”
“What were we before?”
“Nothing.”
The word sits between us on the counter. I lean against the opposite side and fold my arms because I need something to do with my hands that isn’t reaching for her.
“Who’s Jack, Cat?”
Her hand tightens on the mug. The knuckles go white. She still doesn’t look up.
“Stop.”
“You were screaming his name in your sleep. You were begging him not to—”
“I said stop.” She finally looks at me. The green eyes are hard, flat, empty—the eyes of someone who has sealed every door and thrown away every key and is daring me to find another way in. “You don’t get to know that, Kaiden. You haven’t earned it. You may never earn it. Drop it.”
I want to push. Every instinct I have says push—corner her, crack the wall, force her to give me the thing she’s protecting. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done.
Instead, I nod. “Okay.”
She blinks. Whatever she expected, it wasn’t that.
My parents shove us both into my car for school because Cat’s is still at the shop. We drive in silence. She stares out the window. I stare at the road. The space between us is dense with everything we’re not saying.
When I park, she reaches for the door handle.
“Cat.”
She pauses. Doesn’t turn.
“What you said last night. About putting you out of your misery.” I keep my voice level. Try to. “Did you mean it?”
Silence. Long enough that the engine ticks three times. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
She opens the door. Gets out. Walks toward the school without looking back. I sit in the car with my hands on the wheel and my chest full of something I can’t name and don’t know what to do with.
The boys are at the archway. I walk over and Iz takes one look at my face and says, “What happened.”
I tell them. Not all of it—not the kiss, not the way her hand found mine in the dark. But the nightmare. The name. The throat. What she said when I told her I could snap her neck.
Do it. Put me out of my misery. You’d be doing me a favor.
The silence that follows is the heaviest thing I’ve ever felt between the five of us.
Ryan stares at his shoes. Danny rubs the back of his neck. X just shakes his head. Iz is the first to speak.
“I found some things about her past.” His voice is careful. Measured. “It was buried deep. Like, professionally buried. But I got pieces.”
“Tell me.”
“The house fire in North Jared. The O’Farrells’ old house. It wasn’t accidental. It was arson. And there was a body. A man. Gunshot wounds.”
The parking lot goes quiet. The bell hasn’t rung yet. Students drift past us, oblivious, complaining about homework.
“Gunshot,” I repeat.
“Three rounds. That’s all the report said before the record goes sealed. Someone killed a man in that house, Kaid. And then someone with a lot of power made sure nobody would ever find out the details.”
I think about Cat’s voice in the dark. “Please don’t hurt her. I won’t tell. I’ll take it back.”
Jack.
“It’s bigger than we thought,” Iz says. “She’s not just dealing with a bad breakup or shitty parents or some standard rich-kid trauma.
Whatever happened to her—whatever this Jack person did—it’s the kind of thing that gets sealed by courts and buried by lawyers and turns a twelve-year-old girl into someone who asks a boy to kill her without blinking. ”
Xander speaks up. “Penny mentioned some stuff too. At my family’s thing. She didn’t give details but she said Cat carries things that most people don’t survive.”
“Since when are you and Penny talking?”
“Don’t change the subject.” He looks at me.
“Kaid. Whatever you’re doing with her—games, obsession, whatever you want to call it—you need to understand what you’re dealing with.
This girl has been through something that would have destroyed most people.
She’s still standing. Don’t be the thing that finally knocks her down. ”
The bell rings. We head inside. I don’t respond to X because I don’t have a response. He’s right. They’re all right. Every single one of them is telling me to walk away, and every single cell in my body is screaming to do the opposite.
I see the crowd before I see the cause.
A cluster of students in the hallway near the main stairs, all looking at their phones, all making the same face—that particular expression of scandalized delight that means someone’s private life has just become public property.
Then I see Cat.
She’s backed against the lockers near the water fountain, and Jon Pennington is standing over her with his bandaged nose and his fury and his phone held up like a weapon.
His voice is low enough that only she can hear, but his posture—the lean, the looming, the way he’s using his body to wall her in—broadcasts everything.
I’m across the hallway before I finish processing what I’m seeing. I hit Jon in the shoulder with enough force to send him staggering sideways, plant myself between them, and turn on him with my back to Cat.
“What the fuck did I tell you, Pennington.”
He straightens up. His nose is swollen, packed with gauze, the bruising spread under both eyes. He looks like shit. He doesn’t seem to care.
“Relax, Monaghan. I was being a good boyfriend and checking on her.” He smirks. “You’re the one who made her cry this time. Not me.”
I turn. Cat’s eyes are red. Tear tracks on her cheeks. She’s holding her phone in a white-knuckled grip, and when I reach for it, she shoves it in my face.
The screen is open to GlossX. An anonymous post. Multiple photos.
Cat in her bra and underwear. Taken from an angle that suggests a doorway or a window—partially obscured, voyeuristic, the framing of someone who’s watching without being seen.
Her body is exposed. And on her body—her torso, her ribs, the tops of her thighs—scars.
Burn scars. Puckered, textured, the unmistakable topography of skin that was once on fire.
Alongside them, the thinner lines. The deliberate ones.
Every scar she’s spent her life hiding. Every mark she covers with long sleeves and high necklines and the careful, exhausting architecture of concealment. All of it, on a screen, for every student at Edgewood Prep to see.
The caption reads: “Edgewood’s Ice Princess isn’t so perfect after all.”
My stomach drops. Actually drops—the physical sensation of free fall, of the ground opening up.
“Cat.” My voice sounds wrong. “I didn’t do this.”
“They were taken at your house, Kaiden.” Her voice is shaking but her eyes are steady. Steel. The eyes of someone who’s being destroyed in real time and has decided to watch it happen standing up. “I was in your guest room. In your house. Nobody else had access. Nobody else could have—”
“I didn’t take those photos. I didn’t post them. I swear to you—”
“Your gut told you right, Cat,” Jon says from behind me. Smug. Satisfied. A vulture who’s been circling and has finally found the carcass. “You should never have trusted him.”
Cat looks at me. Looks through me. The expression on her face isn’t anger. It’s worse. It’s the look of a person who let herself believe—for one night, for a few hours in the dark—that someone was safe, and is now watching that belief collapse.
“Stay the fuck away from me, Kaiden.”
She pushes past me and walks—doesn’t run, walks, because Catherine O’Farrell does not run from anything—toward the library, and the crowd parts for her, and the hallway watches, and I stand there with Jon Pennington smirking six feet away and my boys frozen behind me and the image of Cat’s scarred body burned into my phone screen and my brain and every part of me that thought I was starting to understand what it means to give a shit about another person.
Iz appears at my shoulder. “You didn’t do this.” Not a question.
“No.”
“But someone in your house did.”
I look at him. He looks at me. The same thought arrives in both of us at the same time. Someone was in the Monaghan house last night with access to the guest room hallway. Someone who wasn’t family.
“The break-in,” I say. “At the O’Farrells’. What if it wasn’t just about scaring her. What if someone got in to plant something—a camera, a phone—and then followed her here.”
Iz’s jaw tightens. “Pennington.”
I look down the hallway to where Jon was standing. He’s gone. Slipped away while we were talking, like the coward he’s always been.
“Find him,” I say. “Find him and find out what he did. And find Cat. Make sure she’s—”
I stop. I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Make sure she’s okay? She’s not okay. Make sure she’s safe? I’m the person she’s least safe around. Make sure she knows I didn’t do this? She won’t believe me. Why would she?
I’ve given her no reason to trust me. I’ve given her every reason not to.
And now someone has taken the most vulnerable, private, protected parts of her body and put them on the internet, and she thinks it was me, and I can’t even be angry about that because I’m the one who taught her that cruelty is what she should expect from me.
I head to class. Sit down. Open a textbook. Stare at words that don’t form sentences. All I can see is her face. Not the anger. The thing underneath it. The thing that looked at me and said: “I should never have trusted you.”
Not because she’s wrong. Because she almost wasn’t.