Chapter 12 - Catherine
My father is reading the newspaper when I come downstairs.
Same precise crease. Same coffee at two o’clock on the placemat.
Same ritual. Except this morning there’s a third person at the kitchen island, and his name is Kaiden Monaghan, and he’s eating scrambled eggs off our good china like he’s been having breakfast here his whole life.
My mother catches my eye from the stove. The look she gives me is pure conspiracy—the look of a woman who has already decided she approves and is simply waiting for the rest of the family to catch up.
“Kaiden offered to drive you,” she says. “Since your car’s still at the shop.”
My father folds the front section. Sets it aside.
Picks up his coffee and takes a slow sip before looking at Kaiden over the rim—the specific, unhurried appraisal of a man who is a father first and a politician second, and who knows exactly how much those two identities overlap when a boy is sitting at his kitchen island.
“I appreciate the punctuality,” he says. “You ate breakfast with us. You’re driving my daughter. I want to be clear about something.”
Kaiden sets his fork down. Meets my father’s eyes. “Yes sir.”
“I don’t know what’s happening between you and Catherine.
And right now, I’m choosing not to ask.” My father’s voice is measured.
Not cold—deliberate. Every word selected the way a lawyer selects words.
“But I know what happened this week. The photos. The locker. Your house. Her room.” He pauses.
Lets the weight of the last two words settle.
“So I need you to understand that my daughter has been through things that most adults couldn’t survive.
She doesn’t need more chaos. She needs stability. Can you offer that?”
The kitchen is very quiet. My mother has stopped stirring.
I’m standing at the counter with loose leaf tea in one hand and a suddenly useless travel infuser in the other, frozen, watching my father ask Kaiden Monaghan—the bully, the king, the boy who had his hand around my throat in a library two weeks ago—if he can offer his daughter stability.
Kaiden holds my father’s gaze. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t perform. Just looks at him with the steady, unflinching directness that I’ve learned is what Kaiden looks like when every mask is off.
“I can’t promise I won’t make mistakes, sir. But I can promise that I will never intentionally hurt her again. And I can promise that anyone who tries to will have to go through me first.”
My father studies him for a long beat. Then he nods—once, short, the nod of a man who’s reserving judgment but choosing to extend a provisional trust.
“Drive safe. Bring her home in one piece.” He stands. Folds his newspaper under his arm. Kisses my mother on the cheek. Stops beside me on his way to the garage and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“You deserve good things, princess,” he says. Low. Just for me. “Make sure he’s one of them.”
He leaves. The garage door opens and closes. My mother lets out a breath she’s apparently been holding since the conversation started.
“Well,” she says, pouring herself more coffee. “That went better than expected.”
I look at Kaiden. He looks at me. The kitchen shrinks to the size of the space between us, and everything from last night—the crying, the confession, his mouth on my skin, his voice in the dark saying “somebody who understands what it costs to survive”—floods the air like something you can taste.
I blush. The ice princess does not blush, and yet.
Kaiden drops his eyes to his plate. The corner of his mouth twitches. “Your dad is terrifying.”
“He carried me out of a burning house. He fought a man twice his size on our kitchen floor. He’s the reason I’m alive.” I pour hot water into the infuser. “Terror is his love language.”
My mother laughs. Kaiden almost smiles. Something in the room shifts—a degree of warmth, a fraction of ease—and I think: this is what normal looks like. Or the closest I’ve been to it in years.
We finish eating. I kiss my mother. Walk with Kaiden through the gate to his garage.
The Skyline sits gleaming under the overhead lights, and the sight of it still does something to me—not the status, but the knowledge that his hands took this machine apart and rebuilt it.
That matters more than anything he’s ever said to me.
We get in. He starts the engine. The RB26 turns over with that signature inline-six rumble—deep, mechanical, the kind of sound that lives in your chest.
Silence. The loaded kind.
I look at the dashboard. The boost gauge. The aftermarket gauges on the A-pillar.
“You’re running a single turbo setup,” I say.
His head turns. “What?”
“The boost gauge. Reading higher than stock. You swapped to a single. T04Z?”
He stares at me. Then at the road. Then back at me. “Holset HX40. Better spool.”
“Holset on an RB26? Unconventional. Custom piping?”
“Fabricated it myself. Three weekends. Forty hours.”
“What’s it making? Five hundred?”
“Five-forty at the wheels. Pump gas. Could push higher on E85 but I don’t trust the fuel lines yet.”
The tension drains out of his shoulders as he talks about wastegate springs and intercooler sizing and the fuel system upgrades he’s planning for winter. His hands move on the wheel—animated, expressive. This is Kaiden in his element. Not the king. Not the bully. The boy in the garage.
“How do you know that shit?”
“My father restored a ’72 Chevelle when I was eight,” I say. “I’d sit on the garage floor and hand him tools and he’d explain everything. By ten I could rebuild a carburetor. By twelve I was reading service manuals for fun.”
“For fun.”
“Some girls read romance novels. I read Haynes manuals. Don’t judge.”
He laughs. Real, surprised, the kind that transforms his face. “You’re the first person at that school who’s known what a Holset is.”
“I’m the first person at that school who knows a lot of things. They’ll catch up eventually.”
He grins. Reaches over and squeezes my hand on the console—quick, brief—then puts it back on the shifter. The silence that follows is the good kind.
He parks and the Edgewood lot fills around us—BMWs, Range Rovers, Teslas, the occasional Mercedes SUV that costs more than most people’s houses. The Skyline looks like a weapon among sedatives. Kaiden kills the engine. We sit.
“I don’t know what this is,” he says. “Us. I don’t have a word for it.”
“Me neither.”
“So we don’t name it.”
“We don’t name it.”
A beat. The lot is filling. Students are walking past the car. In thirty seconds we’ll open these doors and become public, and everything we’ve been to each other in the dark will have to survive the daylight.
Kaiden turns to me. His hand comes to the side of my face—slow, deliberate, his thumb tracing my cheekbone. I hold still. My breath catches. Outside the tinted windows, the world keeps moving.
“One thing,” he says. “Before we go in.”
He kisses me. Not gentle. Not polite. His hand slides from my cheek to the back of my neck and pulls me in, and his mouth is on mine with an urgency that tastes like the conversation with my father and the weight of last night and the particular desperation of a boy who’s about to share something with a hundred and fifty strangers that he’s not ready to share with himself.
I grab the front of his shirt. Pull him closer.
The center console digs into my ribs and I don’t care.
His tongue slides against mine and I make a sound that the ice princess would never authorize, but the ice princess is offline and what’s running the show is the girl who fell asleep in his arms and woke up wanting his mouth before she wanted coffee.
He pulls back. His lips are wet. His eyes are dark.
“We’re going to be late,” I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone who’s just been kissed in the front seat of a Skyline, which it has.
“Worth it.”
We get out. Walk toward the arch. The moment my feet touch stone, the armor assembles. Spine straight. Chin level. Expression: polished neutrality. The ice princess, fully operational.
Kaiden walks beside me. Not touching. Present. The boys are at the arch. Iz sees us first and breaks into a grin so wide it threatens to split his face.
“Morning, Cat.” He falls into step on my other side, bumps my shoulder with his. “You look like you didn’t sleep. Good ‘didn’t sleep’ or bad ‘didn’t sleep’?”
“Mind your business, Isaac.”
“That’s a good ‘didn’t sleep.’ I can tell. Your cheeks are doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The pink thing. The thing they do when Kaiden’s within five feet of you and you’re pretending you don’t notice.”
“I will end you, Isaac.”
He laughs—his real laugh, the one that’s too loud for a hallway and too warm for the Elite’s reputation—and throws his arm around my shoulders for exactly two seconds before Kaiden’s hand appears on the back of Iz’s collar.
“Arm off.”
Iz raises both hands in surrender, still grinning. “Relax. She’s my friend, not my date. There’s a difference.”
“There’d better be.” But Kaiden’s mouth twitches, and the tension is performative—the comfortable ribbing of boys who’ve known each other long enough to know exactly where the lines are and how close they can stand to them.
Two boys I haven’t been formally introduced to fall into step behind us.
The tall one with the perpetual five o’clock shadow and the quiet intensity—Danny.
And the one with the easy grin and the expensive watch and the posture of someone who peaked athletically and academically and doesn’t bother being modest about it—Ryan.
Iz catches me looking and takes charge. “Cat, meet the other two idiots. Danny —don’t let the silent thing fool you, he’s the smartest person in this group after you. And Ryan —he’s our…” He pauses. “What are you, Ry? Our tech guy? Our hacker? Our morally flexible information specialist?”
Ryan shrugs. “I prefer ‘digital entrepreneur.’”