Chapter 10 - Catherine
Imake it to the back corner of the library before my knees give out.
The table I claimed on my first day is still here.
Same window. Same angle toward the exit.
But the girl who sits down at it now is not the same girl who mapped this building’s exits in August. That girl was armored.
Intact. This girl is sitting with her hands flat on the table because if she lifts them, everyone will see them shaking.
My body is on display. Every scar I’ve spent my life hiding—the burns from the fire, the cuts from the blade, the map of every terrible thing that’s been done to me and every terrible thing I’ve done to myself—is on a screen.
On every screen. In every pocket of every student at Edgewood Preparatory Academy.
I can feel them looking. Through walls. Through floors. The particular radiation of collective attention—pity, curiosity, revulsion, delight—pressing against me from every direction.
Penny finds me. She comes around the bookshelf at a near-run, slightly out of breath, her face cycling through emotions so fast they blur.
“Cat. Oh my God.” She drops into the chair across from me. “Are you okay? Stupid question. You’re not okay. I saw—I saw the post.”
“Everybody saw the post.”
“Who did this?”
I don’t answer. I’m looking at the table. At my hands. At the wood grain that I’ve memorized over weeks of sitting here pretending this school can’t touch me.
“Cat. How did you get those scars? The—the burns?”
I shake my head. “I can’t. Not today. I can’t do this today, Penny.”
She reaches across the table and takes my hand. Holds it. Doesn’t push. Footsteps. Heavy. Fast. Coming through the library like they own it.
Kaiden rounds the bookshelf and I see him before he sees me—disheveled, blazer open, hair like he’s been running his hands through it. His eyes find mine and he moves toward me like gravity.
Penny is on her feet. Between us. Her body a wall.
“No,” she says. “You do not get to talk to her right now.”
“I didn’t do this, Penny. I swear to God I—”
“I don’t care.” Penny’s voice is ice. “You’ve done enough. Whether you posted those photos or not, you started this. The garden picture. The games. All of it leads here. You lit the match, Kaiden. You don’t get to act surprised that the house is on fire.”
I stand. Move around Penny. Look at Kaiden. He looks wrecked. Genuinely wrecked—not performing it, not wearing it as a costume. His eyes are red. His jaw is tight. His hands are clenched at his sides like he’s holding himself together by force.
Part of me wants to believe him. The part that felt his hand on my back in the kitchen. The part that fell asleep to the rhythm of his breathing. The part that kissed him in the dark and felt something crack open that had been sealed for years.
But that part lost today. The evidence won.
“I don’t trust you,” I say. Quiet. Not angry. Worse than angry. Finished. “This is exactly what you promised to do. Break me. Knock me down. Show the school who’s king. Congratulations, Kaiden. You win.”
“Cat—”
“You held me while I cried. And then someone in your house photographed me in my underwear. Those two things exist in the same night. Figure out which one is the lie, because I already have.”
I walk out. Penny is right behind me. The hallway is a gauntlet of eyes and I walk through it without looking at any of them because I learned a long time ago that the only way to survive public humiliation is to pretend you’re somewhere else entirely.
The bathroom. Penny follows me in. I collapse against the tile wall and slide to the floor, and she sits beside me, and for a while we just exist there—two girls on a bathroom floor in a school that costs fifty thousand dollars a year, surrounded by marble sinks and brass fixtures and the particular cruelty of privilege.
“Come on,” Penny says eventually. “We’re leaving.”
“We can’t just—”
“Watch me.”
She pulls me up. We walk through the side exit to the parking lot. Get in her car. She starts the engine and pulls out before I’ve finished buckling my seatbelt, and Edgewood Prep shrinks in the rearview mirror, and for the first time all day, I take a full breath.
“Where?” Penny asks.
“Home. The security system should be set up by now. I just need to be somewhere that’s mine.”
She drives. The new gate is there when we pull up—wrought iron, attached to the stone walls, a security guard in a uniform who checks my name and waves us through. My father’s doing. Callum’s resources. The infrastructure of safety, bought and installed overnight.
I walk into my house and it smells like home—my mother’s candles, my father’s coffee, the particular warmth of a space that knows you—and the familiar walls and the familiar silence wrap around me and I stand in the foyer for a long moment just breathing it in.
Mine. This is mine. Nobody can touch me here.
Penny and I order tacos. We sit on the kitchen floor because the counter stools feel too formal and the dining table feels too adult and the floor is where you sit when you’re seventeen and your life is falling apart and you need to be as low to the ground as possible.
She doesn’t ask about the scars again. She puts on Ashes of the Kings and turns the volume up until the bass rattles the glasses in the cabinet, and we eat tacos with our backs against the island and our legs stretched out on the tile, and she tells me about a boy she used to love.
“Xander,” she says, staring at the ceiling.
“We grew up together. Literally—our mothers were best friends, so we were in the same crib before we could walk. He was my person. We went to concerts together, stayed up all night talking about music, built playlists for each other like letters we couldn’t write out loud. ”
“What happened?”
“The Elite happened. Kaiden happened. They formed their little brotherhood, and suddenly X had a new family, and I was the girl who used to matter.” She shrugs, but the shrug is too practiced to be casual.
“One day we were inseparable. The next, I was going to shows alone and he was at parties with girls who didn’t know the difference between a B-side and a bonus track. ”
“Have you talked to him about it?”
She snorts. “You don’t ‘talk’ to those boys. You either fall in line or you get left behind. I chose left behind.”
We’re quiet for a while. The music screams. The tacos disappear.
“Do you really think Kaiden took those photos?” she asks.
I pick at a piece of lettuce on the floor. “Who else could have? I was in his house. In his guest room. There’s a balcony off that room—he showed it to me when he walked me up.”
Penny doesn’t answer right away. She’s chewing on something that isn’t food—a thought, a memory, some piece of the puzzle she’s not sure she should share.
“I knew them all when they were kids,” she says finally.
“Kaiden was sweet, Cat. Like, genuinely sweet. Something changed when he was twelve or thirteen. I don’t know what.
But the boy who used to bring me daisies from his mother’s garden turned into…
whatever he is now. And I keep hoping that kid is still in there somewhere. ”
“Maybe he is. But the person he is now posted a picture of me from a private party, and now someone has posted my body on the internet. At some point, hoping isn’t enough.”
She nods. Can’t argue with that. Neither can I. My father calls around six. They won’t be home until late. The gate code is on the fridge. Everything is safe now, princess.
I hang up and look at Penny and we have the kind of evening I haven’t had since before the fire—pizza, a movie, music so loud the neighbors could complain if we had neighbors closer than half a mile.
Normal. Uncomplicated. The kind of night where you forget, for a few hours, that your body is on the internet and a boy held you while you slept and your therapist’s number is in your phone for exactly this kind of emergency.
Penny leaves at ten. I lock the doors. Set the alarm. Check it twice. Check the windows. Check the back door. Count the locks. Count them again.
Upstairs. Shorts. Tank top. Bed. I pull the covers up and stare at the ceiling and wait for sleep the way you wait for a bus that might not come.
You’re okay. You’re home. Nobody can get in. You’re safe.
I close my eyes and attempt to sleep.
A creak. The particular creak of the third step from the top—the one my father keeps saying he’ll fix and never does. I know every sound this house makes the way a sailor knows the sounds of their ship. That creak doesn’t happen by accident. Someone is on the stairs.
I’m awake instantly. Not groggy—sharp. My body goes from sleep to full alert in under a second because my nervous system was rewired years ago and the upgrade doesn’t come with a snooze button.
I sit up. My hand finds my phone on the nightstand. My thumb hovers over 911.
My bedroom door opens and Kaiden stands in the doorway. Dark jeans. Black hoodie. Breathing hard, like he’s been standing outside working up the nerve.
The fear turns to fury so fast my vision whites at the edges.
“What the fuck.” I’m out of bed. On my feet. “Get out of my house. How did you get in?”
“Emergency code. Our families share one for—”
“I don’t care. Get out. Now. Before I call the police.”
He doesn’t move. He stands in my doorway with his hands at his sides, and he doesn’t look like the king of Edgewood Prep.
He doesn’t look like the boy who wraps his hand around my throat or posts photos of me on the internet.
He looks like a person who has driven himself to the edge of something and doesn’t know how to step back.
“I spent four hours searching my house,” he says. “My dad and I ripped apart every room. The guest room, the hallway, the bathroom—we found a device, Cat. A small camera, mounted on the balcony outside the guest room window. Wireless. Broadcasting to an external receiver.”
The words land one at a time, each one heavier than the last.