Chapter 23 - Kaiden #2
My father grabs Lucian by the shirt. Not the measured Callum Monaghan.
Not the politician. The man. The one who carried his twelve-year-old son out of a parking garage.
The one who threw Alastair Pennington against a wall.
He drives Lucian backward—through the kitchen doorway, into the hallway, toward the front door—with a force that makes the picture frames rattle.
"Get out." His voice is the one I've heard twice in my life.
Low. Flat. The frequency that means the conversation is over and the consequences are starting.
"Get out of my house. Do not come back. Do not call.
Do not contact your son until he chooses to contact you.
And if I ever—ever—hear you say anything like that to him again, I will destroy you.
Not politically. Not legally. Personally. Am I clear?"
Lucian stares at my father. For a moment I think he'll swing. His hands are fists. His body is coiled.
He doesn't swing. He sees what's behind my father's eyes and he knows—with the particular animal instinct of a predator recognizing another predator—that Callum Monaghan is not bluffing.
He leaves. The door slams. The house shakes.
My mother is still crying. Thomas has his arm around her. My father stands in the hallway, breathing hard, his hands trembling with the particular tremor of a man who just exercised extreme restraint and is still not sure it was enough.
Xander hasn't moved. He's standing by the kitchen chair, his face wet, his hands at his sides, staring at the closed door. The place where his father stood and told him to kill himself.
Cat goes to him. Puts her hand on his arm. "X. Sit down. Please."
He sits. She puts a glass of water in front of him. He doesn't touch it.
"Do you want me to call Penny?" she asks. Gentle. The gentlest I've heard Cat's voice outside of our bedroom.
The reaction is instant. Xander's head snaps up. His eyes—the wet, empty, broken eyes—go hard. The softness vanishes. What replaces it is something sharp and almost violent.
"No." The word comes out like a blade. "Don't. Don't call her. Don't text her. Don't say my name to her."
"X, she'd want to—"
"I said no." His voice rises for the first time. Not a shout—a snarl. The particular sound of a person protecting something by pushing it away. "Penny doesn't come near this. She doesn't see this. She doesn't know about the fights or my mom or any of it. Keep her away from me."
The way he says her name—Penny—is the most telling thing. Like the word is a live wire. Like saying it out loud will complete a circuit he can't afford to close.
Cat looks at me. I give the smallest shake of my head. Not now.
"Okay," Cat says. "No Penny."
Xander nods. Goes to the guest room. The door closes. My mother's crying fades into the sounds of my father's low voice comforting her in the hallway. Cat and I stand in the kitchen. The first aid kit still open on the counter. The untouched glass of water. The blood on the washcloth.
She takes my hand. "We help him," she says. Not a question.
"We help him."
Whatever comes next, Xander Anderson is not carrying it alone. Not in this house.
The next day. School. I’m walking to Cat’s last class when I hear them.
Two girls. Near Cat’s locker. Frannie Clarke and her shadow—the interchangeable friend whose name I’ve never bothered to learn. They’re leaning against the lockers with the particular posture of girls who are performing casual while being entirely deliberate.
“I heard she blackmailed him,” Frannie says. Loud enough to be overheard. Quiet enough to deny it if confronted. The particular volume of teenage cruelty. “Like, why else would Kaiden Monaghan be with… that. When he could have literally anyone.”
The friend nods. “All those scars. It’s honestly disturbing. You’re so much prettier, Fran.”
“Obviously. But it’s fine. He’ll get bored. He always gets bored. And when he does—”
I step out from behind the column. Close enough that Frannie walks backward into the locker.
Her face cycles through three expressions in under a second: surprise, fear, and the particular scramble of a person recalibrating their bravery now that the subject of their gossip is standing in front of them.
“Finish that sentence, Frannie.” My voice is low. Not raised. The particular volume that’s worse than yelling because it requires the listener to lean in, and leaning in means they can’t look away. “Finish it. ‘When he gets bored.’ Go ahead.”
“Kaiden, it was just—”
“Just what? Just girl talk? Just harmless? Just the thing you do every day outside my girlfriend’s locker because you think if you say it enough times, it’ll become true?
” I step closer. She presses flatter against the locker.
“Let me be very, very clear about something, Frannie. I’m not bored.
I’m not confused. And whatever happened between us—which was nothing, by the way, unless you count a fifteen-minute mistake at a party that I forgot before you got to your car—is not a foundation for the fantasy you’ve been building. ”
Her face drains.
“Cat is not a placeholder. She’s not a phase.
She’s the girl I’m in love with, and that is never going to change.
And every time you stand at her locker and run your mouth, you’re not hurting her.
You’re reminding every person in this hallway that you’re the girl who can’t move on from a boy who never wanted her in the first place. ”
The friend makes a sound. Frannie’s eyes are filling. I don’t care. The bully in me—the version I’ve been trying to contain since Cat taught me that cruelty is a weapon and weapons have consequences—is fully operational right now, and I don’t have the bandwidth to feel bad about it.
“So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to walk away.
You’re going to stop talking about Cat. You’re going to stop talking about me.
And if I hear her name in your mouth one more time—from you, from your friends, from anyone in your orbit—I’m going to make sure every person at Edgewood knows exactly what kind of girl Frannie Clarke is when she thinks nobody is listening.
And trust me, Frannie—I’ve been listening. ”
She walks away. Fast. The friend follows. Neither looks back.
Cat is twenty feet behind me. I turn and see her leaning against the wall, arms crossed, watching me with an expression that’s seventy percent impressed and thirty percent annoyed. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“I can handle Frannie Clarke.”
“I know you can. But I wanted to. She’s been at your locker every day this week, and I’ve been letting it go because you told me to let it go, and I’m done letting it go.”
She walks toward me. Stops. Looks up. “You called me the girl you’re in love with.”
“Yeah.”
“To Frannie Clarke.”
“To the entire hallway, technically.”
The annoyance fades. What replaces it is something warmer.
Not gratitude—Cat doesn’t do grateful for things she considers unnecessary.
More like…acknowledgment. The particular look of a girl who is a little peeved that her boyfriend went full dark mode on another girl but also recognizes that the words he used were true and the delivery, while brutal, was motivated by something she can’t argue with.
“You’re a lot, Kaiden Monaghan.”
“You love it.”
“Unfortunately.”
The car. After school. The Skyline pulling out of the Edgewood lot.
Cat is quiet for the first minute. Scrolling her phone. Then she puts it away. Turns in her seat. Looks at me with an expression I recognize—the one where the ice princess has decided something and the decision involves me.
“Pull your seat back,” she says.
“We’re on the road, Cat.”
“I know where we are. Pull your seat back.”
I adjust the seat. One inch. She reaches across and adjusts it more. Then she unbuckles her seatbelt and leans across the center console and her hand is on my belt before I’ve processed what’s happening.
“Cat. I’m driving.”
“Keep driving.” Her fingers work the buckle.
The button. The zipper. Her hand wraps around me through my boxers and I grip the steering wheel so hard the leather creaks.
“You stood in a hallway and told Frannie Clarke I’m the girl you’re in love with.
Now I’m going to show you what happens when a girl who’s in love with you decides she’s tired of sharing your attention. ”
“This is—we’re on the main road—”
“You can multitask.”
She pulls me free. Her hand strokes—slow at first, learning the rhythm that makes my breathing change, the grip that makes my hips push off the seat.
Then she leans down. Her mouth closes around me and my vision narrows to the road ahead and the feeling of her tongue doing something that should be illegal while operating a motor vehicle.
I shift into third. The RB26 surges. Cat hums against me and the vibration makes my abs contract so hard I almost miss the turn.
Her hand cups me underneath. Her mouth takes me deeper. The particular enthusiasm of a girl who is not performing—who is doing this because she wants to, because the bully energy in the hallway turned her on and she’s reclaiming it, converting his possessiveness into her power.
“Fuck, Cat—” The road blurs. I take the back route—less traffic, fewer witnesses, the particular driving autopilot of a person whose higher brain functions have been redirected. “I’m going to—baby, I’m close—”
She doesn’t pull off. Her hand tightens. Her rhythm increases. She takes me to the base and holds—the particular pressure of a girl who has decided where this is ending and it’s ending in her mouth.
I come. Hard. My hand leaving the wheel to grip the back of her head—not pushing, holding, the reflexive grab of a body that has been overwhelmed and needs to anchor somewhere. She takes it. All of it. Swallows. Sits up. Wipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb. Looks at me.
“Mine,” she says.