Chapter 15 Kaiden
Iwake up first. The guest room at Xander’s is bright with early sun—the curtains are sheer, the kind rich people use when they don’t actually want privacy, and the light falls across the bed in long gold bars.
Cat is beside me on her stomach, one arm thrown over my chest, her face turned toward me, her dark hair spread across the white pillowcase like spilled ink.
She’s already awake. Her eyes are open. Watching me.
“Hey,” she says. Quiet. Morning-voice. The voice that exists before the armor goes on and the ice princess boots up.
“Hey.”
We lie there. Looking at each other in the kind of silence that doesn’t need filling. The pool hums outside. Somewhere in the house, a door opens and closes—one of the boys, probably Iz, probably heading for the bathroom. The normal sounds of a house waking up.
Her fingers trace the tattoo on my chest. The one over my heart—the blackwork piece I got at sixteen, the one nobody knows the meaning of except me and now her.
Her touch is light. Absent. The kind of touching that happens when a person is thinking about something other than what their hands are doing.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“That this is the first time we’ve woken up without a crisis attached to it.”
She’s right. Every other morning has come after something—the nightmare, the fight, the cutting, the confession. This one is just…morning. Sun through curtains. Two people in a bed. Nothing on fire.
“How does it feel?”
“Weird. Nice. Like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“No shoes dropping today.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can promise the next ten minutes.”
She looks at me. The trace of a smile. Her hand moves from the tattoo to my jaw, and she pulls me down and kisses me, and the kiss is slow and warm and tastes like sleep and honesty and the particular sweetness of a person who has decided, consciously, to be present in this moment instead of bracing for the next disaster.
The kiss deepens. Her hand slides down my chest, my stomach, my hip. My body responds to her the way it always does—immediately, completely, like a system switching to a higher power mode. I roll toward her. My hand finds her waist, slides up the black t-shirt, palms the warm skin of her ribs.
She arches into my hand. Pulls back from the kiss just enough to breathe against my mouth. “Kaid.”
“Yeah.”
“The ten minutes.” Her eyes are dark. Half-lidded. The green gone nearly black with want. “I want to use them.”
I pull the t-shirt over her head. Skin on skin in the morning light, and the sight of her—the scars, the freckles, the burn tissue across her ribs catching the sun like topography—does the thing it always does.
Guts me. Levels me. Makes me want to put my mouth on every inch of her body and never come up for air.
I take my time. Kiss her throat. Her collarbone. The space between her breasts where her heartbeat is fast under my lips. She gasps—soft, involuntary—and her fingers tighten in my hair.
Lower. Stomach. The burn scar I’ve kissed before. The thin line on her hip she hasn’t told me the story of. I kiss it anyway. She shivers.
I pull her shorts down. She lifts her hips to help. No underwear—she slept without them, which means she was either too tired to care or planning for exactly this, and either way the result is the same: my mouth on her thighs, her body tensing, her hand in my hair pulling.
I take my time. Tongue flat against her, slow, the way I’ve learned makes her hands shake.
She’s vocal in the morning—less controlled than at night, the defenses not fully assembled yet, and the sounds she makes are unfiltered and raw and go straight to the part of my brain that wants to make her make them louder.
She comes on my mouth with my name on her lips—just “Kaid,” broken and breathless—and I work her through it until her hand pushes my head away and she’s trembling.
I move up her body. She reaches for me—impatient, grabbing my waistband, pushing my boxers down. Her hand wraps around me and I groan into her neck.
“Inside me,” she says. Not asking. “Now.”
I push into her. Slow. Watching her face—the way her mouth falls open, the way her eyes squeeze shut and then open because I told her once to look at me and she hasn’t forgotten. Green on grey. Her hands on my shoulders. The morning light turning her skin gold.
We move together. Not the desperate, frantic thing from the car—something different. Slower. Deeper. The kind of sex that happens when two people aren’t running from something but are actually, for once, just here. Present. Choosing each other in the daylight instead of the dark.
My hand finds her throat. She nods before I ask. I close my fingers—light, measured, the pressure she’s taught me she needs—and her walls clench around me so tight my vision blurs.
“You’re beautiful,” I say. Rough. Wrecked.
Because she is—not the polished, curated beauty she performs at school, but the real kind.
The kind that has scars and bed hair and morning breath and is still the most devastating thing I’ve ever seen.
“You’re so fucking beautiful and I don’t know what I did to deserve—”
She pulls me down. Kisses me. Hard. The words get lost in her mouth, which is maybe where they belong.
We finish together—or close enough that the difference is academic. Her body arches, my body follows, and for a few seconds the world is just the sound of two people breathing and the morning sun on tangled sheets and nothing else.
I collapse beside her. She rolls into me. Her face against my chest. Her breathing gradually slowing.
“Ten minutes,” she says.
“We went way over ten minutes.”
“You’re not hearing me complain.”
I kiss her hair. Pull her closer. Hold on. The morning continues outside the window. The world waiting. The shoes, inevitably, preparing to drop.
But not yet.
The shoe drops at nine-thirty.
We’re in my parents’ kitchen—Cat and I walked over from Xander’s after showering and changing into yesterday’s clothes, her still in my sweatshirt because she doesn’t have anything else and I don’t want her to. My mother is making coffee. My father is at the island with the newspaper.
The front door opens. Thomas O’Farrell walks in. Behind him, Fiona.
The temperature in the kitchen drops ten degrees. Cat goes rigid beside me. I feel it—the instant armoring, the ice princess assembling in real time, every wall going up at once.
Thomas looks like he hasn’t slept. His shirt is wrinkled—Thomas O’Farrell doesn’t do wrinkled—and his eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted.
He nods at my parents. Nods at me. His gaze settles on Cat with the particular intensity of a father who has been up all night trying to figure out how his family came apart.
Fiona looks worse. Makeup applied over tear tracks. Her composure is the kind that’s been glued back together and could shatter again at any moment. She stands behind Thomas like she’s using him as a shield.
“We need to talk,” Thomas says. “All of us.”
My father sets down his newspaper. My mother turns off the stove. The kitchen becomes a conference room.
“Catherine,” Thomas begins. “Your mother and I had a long conversation last night. About everything. About Jon. About what happened at the party. About—” He pauses. Chooses his next words carefully. “About things she should have told me a long time ago.”
Fiona’s hands are shaking. She’s gripping her own elbows, arms crossed, holding herself together.
“Jon’s father,” Cat says. Flat. “The blackmail.”
Thomas flinches. “You know.”
“Jon told the entire party last night. He said Mom was on her knees to the Penningtons. He said she told them everything about me.”
Fiona makes a sound—a choked, guttural thing. “I didn’t have a choice, Catherine. He had information—about the fire, about the shooting, about—everything. He threatened to leak it. To the press. To the campaign. To everyone. I was trying to protect this family.”
“By sending my abusive ex-boyfriend to drag me out of a party?” Cat’s voice is ice.
Absolute zero. “By telling me Kaiden was a bad influence while you were taking orders from the family whose son assaulted me? By threatening to send me back to the program every time I tried to tell you I was struggling?”
“That’s not—I wasn’t taking orders—”
“Then what were you doing, Mom? Because from where I’m standing, it looks exactly like a woman doing whatever the Penningtons told her to do.
Including pushing Jon on me. Including undermining every relationship I’ve built since we moved here.
Including making me feel like my own mother didn’t believe me. ”
Thomas steps forward. “Catherine. Your mother made mistakes. Serious mistakes. But she was being manipulated—”
“So was I!” Cat’s composure cracks. Not into tears—into fury. “For four years, Daddy! I was manipulated by a predator for four years while nobody noticed! And now my own mother is being manipulated by another family, and instead of fighting back, she’s handing them ammunition!”
Fiona breaks. Full tears. Her composure collapses like a building losing its supports.
“I was scared, Catherine! I was trying to keep us safe! Alastair Pennington has enough evidence to destroy your father’s career, to reopen the investigation, to make everything we buried public. I did what I thought I had to do!”
“Alastair,” my father says quietly. The name landing in the kitchen like a grenade. “Alastair Pennington is personally involved in this.”
“Callum—” Thomas starts.
“Alastair Pennington,” my father repeats, “whose son kidnapped and tortured my twelve-year-old boy for three days. That Alastair Pennington. Is blackmailing your wife.”
The kitchen goes silent. The kind of silence that has mass. My mother moves first. She crosses the kitchen, takes Cat by the arm—gentle, a mother’s grip, not a grab—and guides her toward the hallway.
“Come with me, sweetheart.”
“I’m not leaving. This is about me—”