Chapter 15 Kaiden #4
She grabs the photograph. Holds it. Her hands are shaking so badly the paper vibrates.
“And he’s—he’s a Pennington.” The words coming out in pieces. Shrapnel. “He’s Jon’s brother. I was—I was in their house. I sat at their dinner table. I shook his father’s hand. I let Jon—I dated Jon and his brother was the one who—”
She drops the photo. Both hands over her mouth. The sound she makes behind them is not a scream and not a cry—it’s the sound of a body trying to reject information the way a stomach rejects poison. Primal. Involuntary.
“Alastair knew.” She’s pacing now. Fast. Erratic. Her hands in her hair, pulling. “Jon’s father knew. He knew what his son did to me because his son IS the person who—and he still—he pushed Jon to date me. He put me in a house with the family of the man who—”
She stops. Looks at me. And the moment she truly understands—the moment the connection finishes forming—I watch something inside her die and something else be born in its place.
“Kaiden.” My name in her mouth sounds like it’s being torn out by the roots. “He—after what he did to you—the basement—he went to Connecticut and he found me. He left you and he found me. The same person. The same—”
She runs. Not to the door. To the bathroom. I hear her hit the floor before the door swings shut. The retching. The violent, guttural sound of a body evacuating everything it contains because the nervous system has hit overload and the only response it has left is purge.
Thomas is already moving—the father’s instinct, the man who carried her from the fire. He’s at the bathroom door in three strides.
I should go. Every instinct screams to go to her. My legs are trying to stand.
They won’t.
The basement is here. In this kitchen. The smell of concrete and sweat and fear flooding my sinuses. I know it’s not real—I know I’m in my parents’ kitchen—but my body doesn’t know. My body is twelve. Garrett’s hands are on me. The camera is recording. He’s laughing.
And now I know that the same hands touched her.
The same laugh filled her room. The same monster who taught me what pain feels like taught her the same lesson.
He walked out of my nightmare and straight into hers.
Left me bleeding in a basement and drove to Connecticut and found a twelve-year-old girl in a book club and did it again.
Worse. For longer. With more precision, because by then he’d had practice.
He practiced on me. And then he perfected it on her.
The thought breaks something fundamental.
Not a wall. Not a defense. Something structural.
Load-bearing. The thing that has been holding the architecture of Kaiden Monaghan upright since I was twelve—the belief that what happened to me was contained, sealed, a single terrible event in a single terrible room—crumbles, and what’s underneath is this: it wasn’t contained.
It was a rehearsal. Everything he did to me was practice for what he would do to her, and the knowledge is so monstrous that my body simply stops processing.
My hands are on the counter. I’m still on the stool. My father’s hand is on my arm. “Kaiden. Stay with me.”
I can’t. I’m twelve. The door is locked. He’s on the other side. The camera—
“Kaiden. You’re in the kitchen. You’re home. Look at me.”
I blink. My father’s face. The photographs on the island. Through the bathroom door, the sound of Thomas’s voice, low and broken, saying “Princess, I’m here. Daddy’s here.”
I stand. The room tilts. “I need to go to her.”
“You’re having a flashback—”
“I need to go to her.” Flat. Robotic. The survival operating system.
The bathroom. Thomas is on the floor beside Cat.
She’s pressed against the wall, knees to her chest, her body shaking with the particular violence of a person whose stomach is empty but whose nervous system won’t stop sending the eject signal.
Her eyeliner is running. Black tracks down her face. The armor, finally, breached.
Thomas looks up at me and his expression—the father’s expression, the man who has just learned that the family he trusted with his daughter was run by the man who destroyed her—is pure devastation.
I sit on the floor. Beside Cat. My back against the tub. My hands are shaking so badly my ring clicks against the tile.
She lifts her head. Looks at me. Her face is grey. Wet. Destroyed. And when she sees me—really sees the state I’m in, the shaking, the thousand-yard stare, the boy sitting beside her while his own body replays the worst three days of his life—her face crumbles.
“I’m here.” My voice breaks. “I’m here. With you.”
“The same person did this to both of us.” She’s crying—not the controlled tears, the raw kind, the marrow kind. “The same hands. And then he—after you—he went and found me. He practiced on you and then he perfected it on me.”
She said it. The thought I had. The exact thought. Because we think the same things because we were broken the same way because the same man held the hammer.
Thomas stands makes a sound. A father’s sound. The sound of a man learning that his daughter’s abuser had a body count that started before her.
My father appears in the doorway. Phone in hand. “Darla is on her way. Fifteen minutes.”
Darla. Iz’s mom. Dr. Darla Amara Walsh. The Doctor and therapist. The woman who put me back together after the basement and who offered to take Cat on. The person my father calls when something is too big for parents and too urgent for a scheduled appointment.
I put my arm around Cat. She comes—boneless, shaking, pressing her face into my chest. Thomas watches his daughter fold into me and doesn’t object.
Doesn’t pull rank. Just stands there in the bathroom with us and lets the boy who was broken by the same man hold his daughter, because right now the only person in the world who understands what she’s feeling is me.
We sit. Two broken people on a bathroom floor. Two fathers in a doorway. The photographs still on the kitchen island. The truth still settling like fallout.
Cat’s hand finds mine. The grip is crushing—her knuckles white, mine white, two people drowning who found each other in the water and know that letting go means going under alone.
The front door opens. Footsteps. Darla’s voice—calm, professional, the particular tone of a woman who has been called to emergencies before and knows that the first thing you do is lower the temperature. She appears in the doorway. Takes in the scene. Doesn’t flinch.
“Okay.” She kneels. Eye level with us. “Kaiden. Catherine. Can you both hear me?”
I nod. Cat nods. Darla’s hand goes to Cat’s wrist—not the cuts, the pulse point. Checking. Professional.
“There was a revelation,” her father says from the doorway. “About the identity of—”
“Callum told me on the phone.” Darla’s voice doesn’t change.
Doesn’t waver. She looks at Cat. Then at me.
“You’re both experiencing acute trauma responses.
What your bodies are doing right now—the shaking, the nausea, the dissociation—is normal.
It’s your nervous system trying to protect you from information it can’t process yet. ”
“I need to stay with her,” I say.
“You’re staying. Nobody’s separating you. But I need you both to try something for me. Can you feel the floor under you?”
I press my hand flat against the tile. Cold. Solid. Real.
“Name something you can see.”
“Cat.”
Darla almost smiles. “Something else.”
“The…the towel rack. The light. My dad.”
“Good. Catherine?”
Cat lifts her head. Her eyeliner is destroyed—black rivers down her cheeks, the sharp wings dissolved into something raw and human. She looks at Darla with the expression of a person surfacing from very deep water.
“Kaiden’s heartbeat,” she says. “I can feel it. Under my ear.”
“That’s good, sweetheart. Stay with that. Both of you.”
Darla works. Calm, methodical, the particular competence of a woman who has spent her career in the space between crisis and recovery. She talks them through grounding. She checks vital signs. She asks questions in a voice that doesn’t demand answers but creates space for them.
My mother arrives. I hear the front door, the running footsteps, my father intercepting her in the hallway. Murmured words. Then she appears in the doorway and I see her face take in the scene—her son on the floor, the girl in his arms, the two fathers standing helpless, the therapist kneeling.
“Kaiden.” Her voice breaks on my name.
And that’s when I finally break. My mother is the key that opens the lock I’ve been holding shut. The moment she says my name—not “Kaid,” not the nickname, but “Kaiden,” the way she said it when I was twelve and she held me in the hospital—the last structural support gives way.
The sound that comes out of me is the sound from the basement. The one from the third day. When Garrett left the room and I was alone in the dark and I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe and my body decided that if nobody was coming, it would just stop.
That sound. The twelve-year-old boy’s sound. Coming from my eighteen-year-old mouth in my parents’ bathroom while my mother drops to the floor and wraps her arms around me and Cat presses her face into my chest and the two of us break together.
Because the man who destroyed us is the same man. And we found each other without knowing. And the thing that drew us together—the pull, the obsession, the way our damage speaks the same language—was never coincidence. It was him. Written in our wiring. Encoded in our scars.
My mother holds us. Darla monitors. Thomas stands with his hand over his mouth and tears on his face.
My father stands in the doorway with the phone still in his hand, and I know he’s already calling lawyers, already planning the war, because that’s what Callum Monaghan does—he fights.
He fought to get me out of the parking garage and he fought to seal the records and he’s going to fight to bring the Penningtons down, because now it’s not just his son.
It’s his son and the girl his son loves and two families and God knows how many other children that Garrett Pennington destroyed under different names in different towns.
The breaking slows. Sobs become shudders. Shudders become tremors. Tremors become stillness.
Cat lifts her head from my chest. Looks at me. Her face is destroyed—swollen, raw, the eyeliner in black rivers, the ice princess so far gone she might never come back. But her eyes are present. She’s here. In this room. With me.
“You found me,” she whispers. “Of all the people in the world.”
“We found each other.”
“Because of him.”
I press my forehead to hers. Close my eyes.
“No. Not because of him. Despite him. He broke us the same way and instead of destroying us, it’s the reason we recognized each other. He didn’t give us this. We built this from the wreckage. This is ours. Not his.”
She’s quiet. Then, barely a breath: “Ours.”
“Ours.”
Darla stands. “I’m going to be here for a while. Both of you are going to need monitoring tonight. Is there somewhere comfortable we can move to?”
My mother wipes her face. “The den. I’ll make it up.”
We stand. Slowly. Cat’s legs aren’t reliable. Thomas takes one arm. I take the other. We walk her to the den—the room where we listened to our parents fight through walls this morning, which feels like it happened in a different century.
My mother brings blankets. Darla brings her bag. Thomas sits in the armchair and doesn’t leave. My father makes calls from the hallway in the low, dangerous voice that means the politician has been entirely replaced by the man with the plan.
Cat and I lie on the couch. The same position. Her back to my chest. My arm over her waist. Her hand holding mine against her stomach.
The room is quiet. Darla sits nearby, reading, available. Thomas is asleep in the chair—or pretending, giving us the grace of privacy.
Cat’s voice, barely audible. “Kaid.”
“Yeah?”
“We’re going to destroy them.”
Not a question. Not a hope. A statement. Delivered in the voice of a girl who killed a man in a burning kitchen and is entirely capable of doing worse.
“Yeah,” I say. “We are.”
She presses back into me. I hold on. The den settles.
The house settles. Outside, the October dark is absolute.
And somewhere in the silence—between the truth and the war that’s coming—two people who were broken by the same monster hold each other in a room full of people who love them, and the word neither of them has said sits in the dark between their bodies like a living thing.
Growing. Taking up space. Waiting to be said.