Page 160 of Always: A Legacy Novel

Her hands fisted into the back of his dress shirt, and she pulled hard. He didn’t budge. She tried again, crying harder and tasting salt on her lips. She didn’t give a shit about Derik, but she cared about Cross.

There was no way this would end well for him on some level.

“Please, Cross, please!”

Her pleas were nothing to the snarled words flying out of Cross’s mouth with every punch he landed to Derik’s already broken, bleeding face.

“Where’s the fucking phone, Derik?”

And …

“You’re a dead man, motherfucker.”

And …

“Don’t you fucking ever …”

Catherine was flung off Cross by a student, and then three more football players took the place she had been. It took another two more coming to finally pull him off Derik. All five of them held Cross down while he beat and thrashed, hateful and raging and almost off the floor again.

Derik wasn’t moving.

At all.

Twenty minutes later, Cross, Catherine, and Derik sat in the reception area of the principal’s office together. Cross had already snatched the phone out of Derik’s pocket while he had laid unconscious on the hallway floor by the time a teacher came out.

No adult had seen the fight.

Cross’s bloody knuckles and Derik’s face was more than enough explanation when none of them spoke up. Even Derik said nothing when he finally came to again.

“Derik, your mother is here to take you to the hospital,” said the principal, before she let the door swing closed.

Cross’s gaze met Derik’s across the room. “Say a thing, and you’re fucking dead. One word, man, try me.”

Catherine stayed tucked in her own little corner of the office. She didn’t feel safe or okay again until Derik was gone.

“Cross?” Catherine whispered.

“Yeah, babe?”

“You can’t tell.”

He looked up from the phone in his hands—Derik’s phone—and stared hard at her. “What?”

“What I told you about what happened, I mean. You can’t ever, ever tell, Cross. Not the truth, not why.”

“Catherine—”

“You can’t tell. Please.”

Her bloody-knuckled, dark-eyed boy nodded.

Because he was hers.

Always.

Catherine hugged her arms closer to her chest, in an effort to keep out the cold. She should have grabbed a sweater before leaving the house, but she just reacted to the text from Cross saying he had something for her to pick up.

As it was, she also needed to get the hell out of her house. Her father had not been happy about what happened at the school, never mind that Cross had been involved, and the school played it off like it was tiff between the boys over her.