Chapter 15 Kaiden #2
“This is about to become a conversation between parents, and you don’t need to hear it.” My mother’s voice is kind but absolute. The voice she uses when she has made a decision and the decision is final. “Kaiden. Go with her.”
I look at Cat. She looks at me. The fury is still there, but underneath it—the exhaustion. The particular bone-deep tiredness of a girl who has been fighting this battle since she was twelve and doesn’t have another round in her.
We go. Down the hall. Into the den. The door closes behind us, and through the walls, we can hear the conversation escalate—Thomas’s voice rising, Fiona’s breaking, my father’s going flat and dangerous the way it does when the politician disappears and the man who carried his son out of a parking garage takes over.
Cat sits on the couch. I sit beside her. She leans into me and I put my arm around her and we listen to our parents fight about us through the walls of my house, and there is nothing we can do about any of it except hold on.
Twenty minutes. The voices rise, fall, rise again. At one point Fiona is screaming—not words, just sound, the particular scream of a woman who has been holding too many secrets for too long and can’t hold them anymore.
Then a door slams. The front door. Hard enough to rattle the pictures on the hallway wall. Silence.
My mother appears in the den doorway. Her expression is composed but her eyes are red. “Your mother has gone to the Cape house for a few days,” she says to Cat. Her voice is carefully neutral. “Your father is staying. He’s going to call a family attorney about the Pennington situation.”
Cat nods. Doesn’t speak.
“Sweetheart.” My mother comes in. Sits on Cat’s other side. Takes her hand. “Your mother loves you. She made terrible decisions under terrible pressure, but she loves you. This is going to take time to sort through, and it’s going to be ugly, but it’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that,” Cat says. Small.
“No,” my mother says. “But I know what it looks like when a family is fighting to survive, and yours is fighting. That counts.”
Thomas appears in the doorway. He looks like he’s aged five years in twenty minutes. He sees Cat on the couch between my mother and me, and something in his face crumbles—not into tears, into the particular collapse of a man who has failed to protect his daughter and knows it and can’t fix it.
“Princess.” His voice breaks on the word. “I’m so sorry.”
Cat stands. Crosses the room. Wraps her arms around her father and holds on, and Thomas O’Farrell—the politician, the campaign builder, the man who communicates through the absence of hostility—puts his face in his daughter’s hair and cries.
I look away. Some things aren’t for me to witness. My mother puts her hand on my knee and squeezes.
The morning continues. The Cape house absorbs Fiona. The lawyers get called. The machinery of consequence begins to turn. And in the den of the Monaghan house, a father holds his daughter and a boy watches from the couch, and the four of us sit.
Iz and Xander show up around eleven. They let themselves in—Iz has had a key to our house since seventh grade, the same way I have keys to all of theirs. Small-town infrastructure. The physical evidence of a friendship that predates everything else.
Iz walks into the kitchen, sees the aftermath—my mother making more coffee, my father on the phone in his office, Cat sitting at the island staring at nothing with a mug she hasn’t touched—and reads the room in under a second.
“Bad morning?”
“Cat’s mom left for the Cape. The Penningtons have been blackmailing her family. And we’re just…sitting here.”
Iz sits down across from Cat. “How are you doing?”
Cat looks at him. “I’m here.”
“That’s enough.” He reaches across the island and taps her hand once. Their thing. The checking-in gesture.
Xander leans against the fridge. Arms crossed. Processing. “Pennington senior is blackmailing the O’Farrells,” he says. Not a question. Laying out the facts like chess pieces. “Using what—sealed records?”
“The fire. The shooting. Everything Cat’s family buried. Alastair has the information and he’s been using it to control Fiona.”
“That’s why she kept pushing Jon,” X says. “She wasn’t choosing him. She was complying.”
“Yeah.”
Danny and Ryan arrive twenty minutes later. Ryan has his laptop. Danny has a folder. They sit at the island and the six of us form the particular configuration that means business: elbows on surfaces, voices low, the energy of people building a case.
Ryan opens his laptop. “So. I’ve been digging into Pennington senior’s financials. The company is hemorrhaging money. Same pattern as before—the same kind of debt spiral that led Garrett to kidnap Kaid. Alastair needs a lifeline, and Thomas O’Farrell’s political connections are it.”
“He’s leveraging the blackmail to get Thomas to support his business interests once he’s governor,” Danny says quietly. “It’s not about Jon and Cat. Jon is just the tool. This is about political leverage.”
Cat’s jaw tightens. “My relationship was a political transaction.”
“To the Penningtons, everything is a transaction,” Iz says. “They’re not a family. They’re a corporation.”
Xander straightens. “So what’s the move. We have the camera evidence from Kaid’s house. We have the blackmail angle. We have Jon’s pattern of physical abuse. What else do we need?”
Ryan grins. The grin that means he’s already three moves ahead.
“Ally got us something interesting. She’s been working a job for the Pennington household—event planning for Alastair’s charity gala.
She found documents in his home office. Financial records.
Communications. Things that connect Alastair directly to the surveillance at Kaid’s house. ”
“Ally O’Toole is working for the Penningtons?” Cat asks.
“Ally O’Toole,” Ryan says, “is the most underestimated person in Edgewood. People see the quiet girl with the good grades and they assume she’s harmless. She’s not. She just knows how to be invisible when it’s useful.”
There’s something in his voice when he talks about Ally. Something that goes beyond professional admiration. I file it.
“We take this to my dad,” I say. “All of it. The financial records, the camera evidence, the blackmail, the abuse documentation. He’ll know which lawyers to call. This isn’t us playing detective anymore—this is real.”
Iz nods. “Real and dangerous. Alastair Pennington doesn’t lose gracefully. When he figures out we’re building a case, he’s going to push back. Hard.”
“Let him,” Xander says. Quiet. The particular quiet that means Xander Anderson has made a decision and the decision involves violence if necessary. “We’ve been waiting years for this. For what he did to Kaid. For what he’s doing to Cat. It ends.”
The five of them look at me. Waiting. Because this is my call—it’s always been my call, even when I didn’t want it to be. The boys follow my lead not because I’m the loudest but because they trust me to see the whole board.
Cat’s hand is on mine under the island. Small. Warm. Present.
“It ends,” I say. “Tomorrow. We give everything to my dad. And then we watch the Penningtons burn.”
Danny closes the folder. Ryan closes the laptop.
The meeting adjourns. But nobody leaves—they just shift from strategy to presence, the boys spreading through the kitchen with coffee and conversation, the particular comfort of people who have been each other’s safety net for so long that being together is its own form of shelter.
Cat sits in the middle of it. Still quiet. Still processing. But not alone. Not carrying it by herself. Six people in a kitchen, and for the first time, all six of them are pointed in the same direction.
Monday morning. Cat’s house.
Thomas answers the door in khakis and a button-down—the O’Farrell version of casual. He looks better than yesterday. Still tired, still carrying the particular weight of a man whose wife just left for the Cape, but showered. Functioning.
“Morning, Kaiden. She’ll be right down.”
I hand him the second iced coffee. He almost smiles. “The way to her heart.”
“So I’ve been told, sir.”
Cat comes down the stairs. School uniform—plaid skirt, white button-down, green and gold striped tie hanging loose, the Edgewood blazer over her arm because she doesn’t put it on until she has to.
Black Vans instead of the regulation flats because Catherine O’Farrell follows the dress code exactly to the line and not one millimeter past it, and the Vans are technically black footwear which technically complies.
But the thing I notice—the thing that tells me she got up this morning and chose to function—is the eyeliner.
Sharp. Black. The precise, lethal wing that she applies like war paint.
Cat without eyeliner is Cat without armor.
Cat with eyeliner is the ice princess in full operational mode, and today she drew it on like she was sharpening a blade.
She sees me and something shifts—not a smile, not quite, but the easing of something that was clenched. The recognition of a person who is reliably, consistently here.
I grab her waist. Pull her in. Press my mouth to the side of her head. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Her voice is muted. Volume turned down. But the eyeliner is on, which means she’s fighting, and that’s enough.
Thomas clears his throat. “Go to the Monaghans’ after school, princess. Just in case your mother comes back. I’d rather you not be here alone.”
Cat nods. Kisses his cheek. The silence between them has a new texture—not the old ice, but the careful tenderness of two people learning to stand in the aftermath.
We head out. The Skyline fills the cabin. Cat leans her head against the window. Eyes closed. Retreating. I take her hand. Kiss her knuckles—the ones still bruised from Jon’s face.
“Stay with me today. Don’t go inside your head.”
“I’m trying.”
“Then I’ll keep pulling you back.”