Chapter 15 Kaiden #3
My hand on her thigh. Not sexual—grounding. The weight of my palm saying “you’re here, I’m touching you, you’re real.” I’ve learned that touch is what keeps Cat in her body when her mind wants to vacate. She puts her hand over mine. We drive.
The day is a performance. Both of us performing.
Cat puts the ice princess on in the parking lot like a uniform over a uniform. The eyeliner does its work—those black wings framing her green eyes like a warning label. Students look. Students always look. But today the look says “don’t.”
I stay close. Closer than usual. Hand on her back between classes. Knee against hers. Arm around her in the hallway—not possession, just contact. Physical reminders that she’s not floating.
She leans into it every time. The tiny shift of weight. The unconscious trust.
Third period. Jon. He’s been avoiding us all morning—head down, bandaged face, moving through the school with the hunch of someone who got beaten by a girl at a party and hasn’t recovered. The bruises from Cat’s fists are vivid.
But Pennington pride is a poison.
We’re at Cat’s locker. She’s swapping books. I’m beside her, one hand on the small of her back because I can’t stop touching her today and I’ve stopped trying.
Jon rounds the corner. Sees us. Stops. I watch the calculation behind his bruised eyes. Cost-benefit. Approach or retreat. The rational part almost wins.
His ego wins. It always wins with the Penningtons.
“Catherine.” Loud enough to be public. “Your mother called mine this morning. Crying. Asking for help. Seems like your family is falling apart.”
Cat’s hand freezes on the locker.
“Is that what happens when you choose the wrong people?” He walks closer. The smirk spreading despite the bruises. “Your dad’s campaign is finished. Your mom’s gone. And you’re standing in a hallway wearing some bully’s sweatshirt like a—”
I push off the lockers. Between them. Hand flat on his chest, walking him backward. Not hitting. Pushing. Teachers in the hallway. Last thing Cat needs is me expelled.
“Walk away.”
“Or what? Hit me again? Prove her mother right about you?”
Mr. Callahan—history, built like a former linebacker—appears at the end of the hall. “Break it up! Now!”
Jon leans around me. “Your mom told my father everything, Catherine. The sneaking out. The sex. She said you’re out of control.”
Cat steps around me. I try to block her but her hand is on my arm—firm. “Let me.”
She walks up to Jon. Close. The distance that says “I am not afraid of you.”
“My mother is being blackmailed by your family. She’s not making choices. She’s being controlled. The way your brother tried to control Kaiden. The way you tried to control me. The way your father controls everyone.”
Jon’s smirk dies.
“I don’t break, Jon. I’ve been broken and rebuilt so many times I’m stronger than the original. So keep pushing. Keep running your father’s errands. Because I am done being afraid of Penningtons.”
The smile she gives him—the cold, razor thing—makes the hallway go silent.
Callahan reaches them. “Pennington, Dean’s office. Now.” Hand on Jon’s shoulder. The unmistakable grip of a man who played Division I and isn’t in the mood.
Jon goes. Escorted.
Penny appears. “That was the most terrifying and beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed. I need it tattooed on my body.”
“Penny.”
“Right. Breathing. You okay?”
“No.”
“Honest. Love it. Text me if you need extraction.”
She squeezes Cat’s hand. Disappears. I put my arm around Cat and we walk to class and she leans into me the entire way.
Last bell. I’m at her locker before she is.
I lean against the wall and watch her come down the hallway. The uniform. The Vans scuffing marble. The eyeliner still sharp after eight hours because Cat applies it like a tattoo—permanent, unyielding. Backpack on one shoulder. Hair falling across her face.
I’ve had girlfriends. If you can call them that—girls I kissed at parties, took to dances, slept with and ghosted because staying required a vulnerability I wasn’t capable of.
Girls who were beautiful and willing and who I treated like disposable because if I kept them at arm’s length, they couldn’t reach the places that were broken.
None of them did this.
This thing where she walks down a hallway in Vans and a school uniform and my entire body rearranges itself around her gravity.
Where the sight of her makes the noise in my head go quiet—not gone, just…
listening. Like even the worst parts of me recognize that she’s more important than their usual chaos.
I’m possessive. I’ve always been possessive—the wiring from the basement, the need to hold because holding means it can’t be taken.
But with Cat, the possessiveness has mutated.
Not “you’re mine because I say so” but “you’re mine because I would burn this building to the ground if someone looked at you wrong. ”
Obsessive. Dark. Consuming. The kind of feeling that should send a person to therapy—and I’m already in therapy, and my therapist would have a lot to say about the way I can’t sleep unless she’s beside me, can’t eat unless I know she’s eaten, can’t focus on anything unless I’ve touched her in the last ten minutes.
It’s not a crush. A crush is light and temporary.
This has roots in the same soil that grew the damage—the basement, the wiring, the way my body learned at twelve that closeness requires force.
Cat didn’t fix the wiring. She speaks the same language.
She’s the first person who’s ever heard my body’s fucked-up dialect and responded in kind.
She reaches me. The smallest shift—not a smile, but the space where one would go. I pull her in. Mouth against her forehead. She sighs—the weight of the entire day in one exhale—and leans into me.
“Let’s go home,” she says.
Home. She means my house. And the word—the easy, unconscious way she uses it—does something to the thing in my chest that’s been growing.
We walk to the car. Get in. Drive.
My father is in the kitchen when we get inside. So is Thomas.
That’s the first wrong thing. Thomas O’Farrell should be at his office. Instead, he’s sitting at our island with a glass of water he hasn’t touched, and his face has the particular grey of a man who has received information he can’t metabolize.
My father is standing. Not reading the newspaper.
Not on his phone. A folder open in front of him.
His face matches Thomas’s—the color of wet cement.
He looks up and his eyes go to me, then to Cat, then back to me, and what’s in them is something I’ve seen exactly once before: the night he carried me out of the parking garage.
Horror. The specific horror of a parent who has discovered something about their child’s suffering that they didn’t know.
“Dad? Mr. O’Farrell?”
Thomas stands. His chair scrapes back. “Princess. Come sit down.”
“What’s happening?” Cat’s voice changes—the armor engaging, the eyeliner suddenly looking less like war paint and more like the last line of defense before something breaks through.
“Sit down,” my father says. “Both of you.”
We sit. Cat beside me. Her hand finds mine under the island—automatic, the tether.
“Danny and Ryan dropped off the Pennington research files this afternoon,” my father says. “Financial records. Surveillance evidence. Background. Thomas and I have been going through it for the last two hours.”
He pauses. His hand goes to his mouth.
“Ryan dug into Garrett Pennington’s sealed records from Switzerland. His institutionalization. His movements after release. His aliases.”
“Aliases?”
“Garrett was institutionalized after what he did to you, Kaiden. Two years. When he was released, he didn’t come back to Massachusetts. He moved to Connecticut.”
Cat’s hand tightens on mine.
“To a town called North Jared,” my father continues. His voice is stripped of every layer. “He changed his name. Built a new identity. Volunteered at a community center. Started a book club.”
The room goes very, very still. I feel Cat’s hand begin to shake before I hear her breathing change. My father reaches into the folder. Pulls out two photographs. Lays them side by side on the island.
The first: Garrett Pennington’s booking photo at nineteen. Dark hair. Narrow face. The dead eyes I see in my nightmares—the flat emptiness of a person who hurts people because it makes him feel something.
The second: a community-center headshot. A man in his early twenties. Hair bleached. Clean-shaven. Smiling. The kind of smile that makes lonely children feel seen. The kind that opens doors and closes traps.
The name underneath: JACK ROSE.
The world ends.
Not metaphorically. But everything stops in my world. The clock. The refrigerator. My breathing. The rotation of the planet. All of it suspends in the fraction of a second between seeing and understanding.
The same bone structure. The same jaw. The same deadness behind the eyes—visible even through the bleached hair and the different name and the smile rehearsed to look human.
Garrett Pennington is Jack Rose.
The boy who tortured me in a basement is the man who raped Catherine for four years.
We share an abuser.
Cat’s hand rips from mine. She stands. The stool crashes backward.
Her body has gone rigid—every muscle locked, her eyes fixed on the second photograph with an expression that isn’t shock.
It’s recognition. The nauseating, world-ending recognition of seeing a face that visited you in nightmares for years and finding it in a new frame.
“That’s Jack.” Her voice comes from somewhere outside her body. Disembodied. Wrong. “That’s…that’s him. That’s Jack.”
Thomas is on his feet. “Catherine—”
“That’s the man who raped me over and over.” Louder. The voice slamming back into her body with a violence that makes her frame shake. “That’s the man who drugged me and took pictures and told me he’d kill my parents if I told. That’s the man I shot three times in our kitchen.”