Chapter 20
The beeping comes first. Thin. Electronic. The particular frequency of a heart monitor that exists in hospitals and nightmares. My brain can’t decide where I am.
The basement. Dirt floor. Fieldstone. Jon’s boots. The bleach. I’m still there. I never left. The rescue was the dream and this is real and the beeping is—
No. No beeping in the basement. The basement dripped. This beeps. Different.
The fire. I’m in the fire. The beam is on me and the smoke is in my lungs and the beeping is the smoke detector screaming and Jack is in the hallway and the gun is in the closet and—
No. Because there is no heat from the fire, no screams.
The gun is gone. Jack is gone. Jack is dead. I killed him. But the beeping—
Hands on my arm. I rip away. The motion sends a lightning bolt through my left side—the ribs, the broken ones, protesting with a savagery that makes my vision white.
But the hands are there and hands mean danger and my body is running the program it’s been running since I was twelve: fight. Move. Escape.
I try to sit up. Can’t. Something is tethered to my hand—tubing, an IV. Wires on my chest. The beeping accelerates. My breathing goes ragged. The room is wrong—too bright, too clean, the walls aren’t stone, the floor isn’t dirt—
A voice. Through the static.
“Shh, Kitty Cat. It’s me. It’s just me. You’re safe now.”
The voice doesn’t belong in the basement. Doesn’t belong in the fire. The voice belongs to a boy who holds me in the dark and cleans my wrists and falls asleep listening to me breathe, and the sound of it reaches through the panic like a hand through water and pulls.
I open my eyes.
Fluorescent lights. White ceiling tiles. The heart monitor beside me—the source of the beeping, my pulse rate displayed in green numbers that are too high. An IV pole. A hospital bed. And beside the bed, in a plastic chair pulled so close it’s touching the mattress rail, Kaiden.
He looks terrible. Unslept. His hair unwashed. The same clothes from—whenever. I don’t know how long it’s been. His knuckles are bandaged—split, I can see the bruising around the gauze. His eyes are red and raw and looking at me with an intensity that borders on worship.
A nurse pushes between us. Then another. Hands checking the IV, the monitors, my vitals. Someone says “get the doctor.” Someone adjusts something that makes the beeping slow.
My father appears. I don’t know where he was—the hallway, the bathroom, the chair in the corner. He’s at the bedside now, his hand finding mine, his face a ruin of exhaustion and relief.
“Hey, princess. You’re awake.”
“Penny.” The first word out of my mouth. Not “where am I” or “what happened.” The name of the girl who was on the mattress beside me in the dark. “Is Penny okay?”
My dad nods. Fast. “Penny’s home. Released yesterday. Drugged but no lasting physical damage. She’s been calling the hospital every hour asking about you.”
The relief is so acute my whole body sags. Penny is alive. Penny is home. The girl I drew fire for—the girl who threw herself between me and Jon’s boots—is home.
“How long?” I ask.
“Two days,” he says. “You’ve been sedated for pain management. The doctors reduced it this morning and you’ve been surfacing for a few hours.”
Two days. Two days of hospital bed and IV drip and heart monitor and the people who love me sitting in plastic chairs waiting for my eyes to open. Two days gone from my life, added to the catalogue of time stolen by the Penningtons.
Kaiden is hovering behind the nurses. They’ve pushed him back—standard protocol, making room for medical staff—but his eyes haven’t left my face. His hand is half-extended, reaching for mine through the gap between the nurse and the bed rail.
“Let him in,” I say. To the nurse. To the room. “Please.”
The nurses part. Kaiden steps forward. Takes my hand. The contact—his warm fingers around my cold ones—sends a signal through my entire nervous system that overrides the pain and the fear and the disorientation. Tether. Anchor. Home.
“Hi,” he says. His voice cracks on the word.
“Hi.”
He doesn’t say anything else. Just holds my hand and looks at me and lets his face say what his mouth can’t, which is everything.
She comes in twenty minutes later.
Not rushing. Not frantic. Walking with the careful, measured steps of a woman who knows she’s entering hostile territory and has no idea how to navigate it.
My mother is wearing clean clothes and done makeup and the particular composure of a person who has spent two days rebuilding their exterior while their interior collapses.
My dad sees her. Goes rigid. Doesn’t look at her. Fixes his eyes on the wall behind my bed with the particular intensity of a man who is choosing not to look at his wife because looking would require a response and the responses available to him right now are all violent.
The room goes quiet. The heart monitor beeps. The air conditioning hums. Nobody speaks.
She stands at the foot of the bed. Her hands are clasped in front of her. Her eyes are on me—searching, assessing, the way you’d look at something you broke and are hoping someone else fixed.
“Catherine.” Her voice is steady. Rehearsed. She’s practiced this. “I need you to know that I didn’t understand what was happening. When Alastair said you would be kept safe, I believed him. I never would have—”
“Mom.”
She stops. The rehearsed speech derailing.
I look at her. At the woman who carried me for nine months and failed to protect me for the seventeen years since. Not with the fury from the kitchen fight. Not with the ice from the morning she left. With something worse. Something clear.
“This is the second time,” I say. My voice is calm.
The particular calm that comes from the other side of everything—the calm of a person who has screamed and fought and bled and been drugged and scrubbed with bleach and woken up in a hospital bed, and has arrived at a place past anger.
“The second time a Pennington hurt me. The second time you chose your image—your affair, your secrets, your self-preservation—over my safety.”
“That’s not—”
“The first time, you hid what Jack did to me for years. Protected the family name. Sent me to a program instead of getting me real help. Buried the fire and the shooting and the sealed records because the alternative was public. And when I needed you to fight for me, you fought for the image instead.”
My voice doesn’t rise. Doesn’t crack. The ice princess delivering a verdict.
“The second time, you had an affair with the father of my abuser. You let him manipulate you into defending Jon. You took his phone calls. You pushed me toward a boy whose brother raped me. And when his family kidnapped me and put me in a basement, you were there. You saw what they did. You tried to bring me water and they stopped you. And you sat on those stairs and you watched.”
Her composure is crumbling. The makeup can’t hold the fractures. Tears are forming but she’s fighting them because Fiona O’Farrell does not cry in public and a hospital room with her husband and her daughter’s boyfriend counts as public.
“I don’t want to see you,” I say. Simple. Final. “This isn’t rage. This isn’t dramatic. This is a decision I’m making as an eighteen-year-old who has the legal right to determine who is present in her hospital room. I don’t want you here.”
Silence. The monitor beeps. Thomas still won’t look at her.
She stands there. The composure finally breaks—a single tear, then another, the kind that fall silently because even in collapse she’s performing containment.
She nods. Once. Doesn’t argue. Doesn’t plead.
Just nods and turns and walks out of the room with the careful steps she came in with, and the door closes behind her, and nobody breathes for a very long time.
My father exhales. The sound of a man releasing something he’s been holding for days.
“I’m sorry,” he says. To me. To the room. To the universe that gave his daughter a mother who couldn’t hold the weight.
“It’s not your fault, Daddy.”
“Some of it is.”
“The parts that are yours, we’ll deal with. Later. Not today.”
He nods. Takes my hand. Holds it.
Dr. Patel arrives an hour later. My attending physician—young, direct, the kind of doctor who treats you like a person rather than a chart. He pulls the stool to the bedside and looks at all three of us—me, my dad, Kaiden.
“Catherine, you’re eighteen, so I’m giving you the full picture directly. Stop me if you need a break.”
I nod.
“Two fractured ribs—left side, fourth and fifth. The fourth shifted and lacerated the tissue surrounding your lung. Not a full pneumothorax but close. We’re monitoring. If it shifts further, we operate. For now, it’s stabilizing on its own.”
My dad’s jaw tightens. Kaiden’s hand squeezes mine.
“Chemical burns—bleach, applied with abrasive material. Your back, both arms, both legs, and your wrists. The wrists are the concern—the bleach and dirt entered the pre-existing wounds and caused infection. We’re treating with IV antibiotics.
The burns will scar, but we’ll discuss scar management options once you’re healed. ”
“More scars,” I say. Flat. “Add them to the collection.”
Dr. Patel doesn’t react to that. Keeps going.
“Concussion—moderate. Jaw contusion. Hypothermia on arrival—resolved. And the sedatives. They injected you with a veterinary tranquilizer—ketamine derivative, based on the bloodwork. Multiple doses. Your liver is processing it, and the panels are trending in the right direction, but we’re monitoring kidney function as well. ”
He pauses. The next part is harder. I can see him choosing his words. “Protocol requires that we run certain tests in cases of abduction. A pregnancy panel and a full STD screen. Both are standard regardless of what you report.”
My dad makes a sound. Kaiden’s hand goes rigid around mine.
“The pregnancy test came back negative,” Dr. Patel says. “The STD panel takes a few more days. We’ll update you as results come in.”