Chapter 19
Ryan shows me the address on his laptop screen, and for a second I don’t move. The numbers and letters sit there—ordinary, clinical, a pin on a digital map—and my brain can’t reconcile the banality of an address with the magnitude of what’s at the other end of it.
Then I’m moving. Phone to my ear. My father’s voice. “We found it. Forty minutes north. Ryan has the address.”
“Police are being notified now. Kaiden—listen to me carefully. You do not go in. You let the officers handle entry. Am I clear?”
“Clear.”
I’m not clear. I’m lying to my father for the first time in my life, because there is no version of reality in which I sit in a car while Catherine O’Farrell is inside a building and I am outside of it.
Three cars. Five boys. One father. The Skyline leading, Ryan navigating from the passenger seat, his laptop open, the blue glow of the screen the only light in the cabin.
Behind us: Iz in the passenger seat of Thomas’s Porsche 911.
Xander in his Range Rover with Danny, driving with a focus that scares me because Xander unfocused is reckless and Xander focused is something else entirely.
The drive takes thirty-four minutes. I know because I watch the clock the way a drowning person watches the surface—every second measured, every second a second she’s still in there.
The road narrows. The trees close in. No streetlights. The headlights carve tunnels through the October dark, illuminating bare branches and gravel and the particular rural emptiness of a place designed for isolation.
Ryan’s voice: “Next left. Quarter mile. The driveway is unmarked.”
I kill the headlights. Pull off the road. The other cars follow. We sit in the dark at the mouth of a dirt driveway that disappears into the trees. Through the branches, maybe two hundred yards ahead: light. A single window on the ground floor. The faintest glow.
Police sirens in the distance. Getting closer. Two minutes out. Maybe three.
Thomas opens his car door. “I’m not waiting.”
He’s out. Walking. Not toward the house—toward the tree line that flanks the driveway. Moving through the woods the way a man moves when his daughter is inside a building and mathematics no longer applies.
I follow. Because of course I follow.
The boys are out of their cars. Iz grabs my arm. “Kaid. The cops—”
“Stay here. All of you. Cover the exits. If someone comes out, you don’t let them leave.”
Xander’s voice, low: “If Pennington comes out that door, I’m not stopping him. I’m ending him.”
“Just don’t let him leave.”
I move through the trees. The undergrowth is thick—dead leaves and fallen branches, the kind of terrain that announces every footstep. Ahead of me, Thomas is a shadow against shadows, moving with a silence that surprises me for a man his size.
The farmhouse materializes through the trees.
Old. Two stories. The kind of New England property that was beautiful in 1850 and has been decaying since.
Clapboard siding peeling. A stone foundation visible at the base—fieldstone, the same kind Cat described in her nightmares about the first basement. The one Garrett used.
Same family. Same kind of building. Same playbook.
The sirens are closer. A minute. Maybe less. A door opens. Not the front—the side. A figure emerges. Moving fast. Running. The particular running of a person who has heard the sirens and is making a calculation about escape velocity.
Jon Pennington. In the porch light for one second before he hits the tree line. Heading for the back of the property. Heading for the dark.
My body doesn’t decide. It moves. The same instinct that made me kiss Cat in the hallway, the same wiring that bypasses thought and goes straight to action. I break from the trees at a dead sprint.
Jon doesn’t see me until I hit him.
The tackle takes him off his feet—my shoulder into his midsection, both of us hitting the ground hard, the impact driving the air out of him in a grunt that I feel through my whole body.
We roll. Dead leaves. Gravel. His elbow catches my jaw.
I don’t feel it. Adrenaline has turned my nervous system into a single-purpose machine: hold him down.
I get on top of him. Pin his arms with my knees. And I hit him.
Not the calculated restraint from the locker room.
Not the measured force from the hallway.
The real thing. The thing that lives in the basement of my wiring—the violence that Garrett installed and that I’ve spent six years trying to contain.
I let it out. My fists on his face, his chest, anywhere I can reach, and each impact carries the weight of everything—the photographs, the torment, the bruises on Cat’s face that I haven’t seen yet but know are there because I know what his family does to people they trap in basements.
Jon tries to cover his face. Tries to curl. His nose breaks under my knuckle—for the third time, the cartilage giving with a wet crunch that should horrify me and doesn’t.
“WHERE IS SHE.” Not a question. A demand delivered through blood and fists. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER.”
Hands on my shoulders. Pulling. Officers. Two of them. Strong. “Sir! Sir, we need you to—”
They pull me off. Jon stays on the ground.
Not unconscious—curled, bleeding, making sounds that aren’t words.
An officer kneels beside him. Cuffs go on.
Jon is rolled onto his stomach in the dead leaves, his face in the dirt, and I stand over him breathing like I’ve run a marathon and my hands are bleeding and I don’t care.
I don’t care about anything except the building behind me and the girl inside it.
The front of the house is chaos now. Police vehicles, lights strobing blue and red against the clapboard siding. Officers at the front door. The battering ram. The door comes off its hinges and they flood in, tactical flashlights cutting the dark, voices calling “clear” room by room.
Thomas is already inside. He went in with the first wave—nobody stopped him, or if they tried, he didn’t notice. A father’s mass is its own force of entry.
I hear it before I see it: shouting from inside. Not police commands—rawer. Thomas’s voice, a sound I’ve never heard from him—guttural, animal, the roar of a man who has found something in a basement that has destroyed whatever composure he had left.
Then: Alastair. Brought out the front door by two officers.
His hands cuffed behind his back. His suit jacket torn.
A bruise forming on his temple—Thomas got to him before the police could intervene.
His expression is…nothing. Blank. The particular emptiness of a sociopath who has been caught and is already calculating the legal strategy.
He doesn’t look at me as they walk him past. I want him to. I want him to see the face of the boy he tried to destroy at twelve who is standing in his driveway at eighteen watching his empire collapse. But Alastair Pennington doesn’t give people that satisfaction. He gives them nothing.
Then: Fiona.
She comes through the front door not in cuffs but flanked by officers.
She’s crying—not the performative kind, the destroyed kind.
Mascara down her face. Her clothes wrong—too nice for a farmhouse, the Cape Cod cashmere and designer jeans that look obscene against the backdrop of police lights and a basement where her daughter was beaten.
She’s talking—fast, fragmented, the words tumbling out in the particular cadence of a person trying to explain something they can’t explain.
“I didn’t know—he told me she’d be safe—I didn’t know they were hurting her—please, you have to believe me, I would never—”
An officer guides her to a cruiser. Not arrested.
Not yet. Held. The legal distinction between witness and suspect still being determined.
She sees me. Our eyes meet across the chaos of the driveway, and what I see in her face is not the cold woman from the kitchen arguments.
It’s horror. The particular horror of a mother who has just been shown the full scope of what her compliance enabled, and the knowledge is breaking her in real time.
I don’t have room for Fiona right now. Later. The legal system can sort her out later.
An EMT runs past me. Then another. Then a stretcher, moving fast, heading for the basement entrance. The medical urgency of their movement—the speed, the terse communication, the equipment being readied—tells me everything about the condition of whoever they’re going to retrieve.
I move toward the house. An officer stops me. “Sir, you can’t—”
“That’s my—” My voice breaks. The word I was going to say—girlfriend, person, the girl I love—doesn’t come out. “She’s mine. She’s in there and she’s mine.”
The officer looks at me. At my bleeding knuckles. At my face. At whatever he sees in my eyes that makes him step aside. I go in.
The basement stairs. Steep. Wooden. The smell hits me before the sight does—damp earth, bleach, blood, the chemical tang of whatever they injected her with. The smell of a room where terrible things have happened.
I descend. Each step a decision. Each step bringing me closer to whatever I’m about to see.
The basement. Fieldstone walls. Dirt floor. A single bulb swinging overhead. An EMT on his knees beside a figure on the ground, and Thomas standing three feet away with his hand over his mouth and tears streaming down his face and his whole body shaking.
Cat.
She’s on the dirt floor. On her side. Her wrists zip-tied behind her back—an EMT is cutting them now, the plastic falling away to reveal skin that’s been rubbed raw and bloody. She’s in a black t-shirt that’s wet and stained. Her face—
Her face.