Chapter 23 - Kaiden
Cat is trying to steal my coffee.
This is not a new development. Every morning since she moved into my room—our room—she reaches across the kitchen island with the casual confidence of a girl who has decided that my possessions are her possessions and is not interested in negotiating the point.
My hoodies. My side of the bed. My coffee.
“Get your own,” I say, pulling the mug out of her reach.
“Yours tastes better.”
“It’s the same coffee from the same machine.”
“Doesn’t matter. Stolen coffee is superior.”
She snags it while I’m mid-sentence. Drinks. Grins at me over the rim with the particular smugness of a person who wins every argument by refusing to acknowledge it was an argument.
My mother sets plates down. Eggs, toast, fruit—the Saoirse Monaghan morning infrastructure.
Thomas is at the end of the island with his own coffee and the newspaper, performing the particular morning ritual of a man who has not yet surrendered the physical paper despite his daughter repeatedly telling him there’s an app for that.
Callum is on his phone. Low voice. Lawyer things. The background hum of consequence that’s become the soundtrack of our mornings.
Cat leans into me. Her head on my shoulder for a second—just a second, the brief contact of a girl who is learning that not every touch needs to be a lifeline. Some touches are just…touches.
Normal. We’re learning to do normal. It’s harder than surviving.
Thomas looks up from the paper. “You two have plans today?”
“School,” Cat says. “Where we go every day. Because we’re students.”
“The sarcasm is noted, princess.”
My mother sits. “How’s Xander? I haven’t seen him since the party.”
The question lands in the kitchen like a dropped plate. I set my fork down.
“I don’t know. He’s not answering texts.”
My mother exchanges a look with my father. The look that means “we know something the kids don’t.”
My phone buzzes in my hand.
Iz: Coming to your house. X is with me. Something is very wrong.
That's all. No details. Iz doesn't text without details unless the details are too bad for a screen. I show Cat. She sets her coffee down.
Ten minutes later, Iz walks through the front door with Xander's arm over his shoulder.
X looks like someone used him for target practice.
Split lip. Bruised jaw. Knuckles shredded raw—the skin peeled back, dried blood in the crevices.
A cut above his left eye that's still seeping.
His shirt is stiff with blood—not all his, maybe, but enough of it.
He's upright because Iz is holding him upright. Without Iz, he'd be on the floor.
My mother gasps. Thomas stands from the island. My father comes out of his office. Iz deposits Xander in a kitchen chair. X slumps. Doesn't speak. His eyes are open but they're not seeing this room—they're somewhere else. Somewhere that left marks.
"What happened?" My father. Calm. The voice he uses for emergencies.
Iz shakes his head. "I don't know. He showed up at my door thirty minutes ago. Wouldn't tell me anything. Just kept saying he needed to be somewhere that wasn't his house."
Cat is already moving. Warm water. Washcloth. She kneels in front of Xander and starts cleaning the blood from his face with the steady, practiced hands of a girl who knows this choreography from the other side.
I stand over him. My chest is tight. This is my brother—not by blood but by six years of shared fields and shared darkness and the particular bond of boys who grew up knowing that the adults in their lives weren't always safe.
Seeing him like this—broken, bleeding, silent—triggers something in me that's less anger and more terror.
"X. Talk to me. Who did this to you?"
Nothing.
"Xander." I kneel beside Cat. Get in his eyeline. "Who did this."
He blinks. Focuses on me. The emptiness in his eyes cracks just enough to let something through—not sadness. Exhaustion. The bone-deep kind that comes from fighting something you can't beat.
"I did it to myself."
The kitchen goes quiet.
"What do you mean, you did it to yourself?" Cat asks. Her hands still working on his face, but slower now.
"There's a place. In Bridgeport. Underground. You show up, you fight, you get paid if you win. Cash. No questions." His voice is monotone. Reciting. "I've been going for a few weeks."
"Underground fights." My father's voice has changed. The calm replaced by something harder. "You've been going to underground fights."
"I needed to feel something."
"Feel what?" I ask. "What do you need to feel that requires getting your face beaten in?"
Xander looks at me. The crack in the emptiness widens and what spills out is raw.
"Anything. Anything that isn't—" He stops.
His hands are shaking. The shredded knuckles trembling against his thighs.
"I needed to feel anything that wasn't the thing I'm actually feeling.
And pain—getting hit, hitting back—at least that's real.
At least that makes sense. At least when someone is punching me in the face, I know exactly what's happening and why. "
"As opposed to what?" Cat says it quietly. Not pushing. Opening a door.
Xander's jaw works. His eyes go to the counter. The wall. The floor. Anywhere except the people looking at him. "My mom is dead."
The sentence drops into the kitchen like a stone into still water. The ripples hit everyone at once—my mother's hand going to her mouth, my father straightening, Thomas setting his mug down with a care that means his hands are shaking.
"Adeena?" my mother whispers.
Xander nods. Still not looking at anyone.
"Four days ago. She, uh—" Another stop. Another restart.
The words coming in fragments, each one costing something.
"She killed herself. Hanging. I found her in the closet.
Lucian called the coroner instead of the hospital because he—" His voice breaks.
Seals. Breaks again. "Because he said there was no point. She was already gone."
My mother is crying. Not the quiet kind—the audible kind, the kind that comes from a woman who knew Adeena Anderson, who brought casseroles to that house, who saw the slow erasure of a woman inside her own marriage and couldn't stop it.
"Four days ago," I say. My voice sounds like a stranger's. "X—you hosted a party two days ago. You stood in your house with a hundred people and music and lights, and your mother had been dead for two days."
"I needed noise. I needed the house full because when the house is empty it's—" He can't finish. His hands go to his face. The shredded knuckles pressing against his eyes.
Cat puts her hand on his knee. Just holds it there. "Why didn't you tell us?" she asks.
"Because then it's real. If nobody knows, I can pretend it's—I can pretend she's just—" He drops his hands.
His face is wet. Not crying in the way people usually mean—no sound, no sobbing.
Just water leaking from his eyes like a system overflowing.
"She's been dying for years. Lucian made sure of that.
The meds. The isolation. Keeping her locked in that house like a fucking—she was a ghost, Cat.
She was a ghost in her own house for years and nobody did anything and now she's actually gone and I—"
The front door slams open. Lucian Anderson.
He's bigger than I remember. Or maybe it's the fury that makes him look bigger—the particular inflation of a man who runs on rage and has found his target. He fills the doorway. His eyes find Xander immediately—locked, predatory, the gaze of a man who views his son as property that has strayed.
"Get up." His voice fills the kitchen the way a blow fills a room. "Get the fuck up and get in the car. Now."
Xander doesn't move.
"I said get up." Lucian takes a step forward. Callum moves—not fast, not dramatic. Just places himself between Lucian and the kitchen table. The line drawn without words.
"He's staying here, Lucian."
"He's my son."
"And he's bleeding in my kitchen. He stays."
Lucian tries to move around Callum. My father doesn't let him. Thomas stands—not between them, but close. A secondary wall.
Xander rises. Slow. The chair scraping. He looks at his father with an expression I've never seen on him—not anger, not fear. Disgust. The absolute, marrow-deep disgust of a son who has seen what his father is and can no longer pretend otherwise.
"I'm not going home with you."
"You don't have a choice."
"I'm eighteen. I have every choice."
"You're a child. And you're going to stop embarrassing this family by—"
"Embarrassing the family? Mom is DEAD, Dad! She's dead because she couldn't take another day in that house with you! She put that rope around her neck and cut herself because dying was better than being married to you! That's the family legacy! That's what you built."
Lucian's face changes. The rage goes cold. The particular temperature shift of a man who has been exposed and is about to retaliate with the only weapon he has left—cruelty.
"Your mother was weak." His voice is ice.
Deliberate. Every word chosen to wound. "She was always weak.
Weak and dramatic and desperate for attention, and when she couldn't get it anymore, she took the easy way out.
And frankly—" He looks at his son with an expression that is not fatherly.
That has never been fatherly. "If you're going to follow in her footsteps, do us all a favor and stop wasting everyone's time with these pathetic little fights and just do it properly. "
Saoirse sobs. The sound tears out of her—not a cry, a rupture. The sound of a mother hearing a father tell his son to kill himself. The kitchen explodes.