Page 171 of Revere: A Legacy Novel

Cross went back to the map. “Twenty minutes, and I want to be on the water.”

“We can make that happen,” Lucian Marcello said quickly.

“What about once we get there, and the trade has happened?” Cross asked. “We’re supposed to just assume Rhys won’t attack us when we’re leaving?”

Calisto shrugged. “You get the guns there, son, and let us worry about the rest.”

He could try.

Cross had never been good with trusting others to get shit done.

Catherine, Catherine, Catherine.

His heart was thrumming her mantra.

He supposed he didn’t have any other choice.

“Girl,” the man said, his rough accent heavily coloring his bad English, “you get out of car, or I make you.”

Catherine glared at him. “Fuck you.”

“Nasty words for girl with hands tied,” he said.

“Fuck. You.”

The two other men who had been driving in the vehicle with them chuckled as they exited from the front. None of them, including the man who was talking to her now, paid her very much attention the entire drive. She wasn’t even sure where they were.

A private airstrip, by the looks of it.

A jet sat waiting fifty feet away.

“One time more, girl,” the man warned, “or I make you.”

“I guess that’s what you’re going to have to do then, asshole.”

He sighed as though she was a small child in need of a spanking. His icy brown eyes held no hint of emotion, and his face was as blank as stone. All of the men had been like that, even when they busted the windows out of her car, pulled her out fighting and screaming, and made her cut herself on the glass. Her arm was still trickling a bit of blood from the cut on her elbow.

The bastards.

Catherine was dragged from the back of a black SUV by her hair. She should have known better than to fight the man, as it had done her no good when they first grabbed her, nor when she was stuffed inside their vehicle. They simply stared at her like she was a bug bothering them, tied her hands in front of her, and tossed her in the back seat.

Her cussing, name calling, and shouting had done nothing. Not for them, anyway. They chatted away in a language she didn’t understand and couldn’t place as the tallest of the three drove the SUV.

Three hours later, Catherine’s scalp stung as she was dragged across the tarmac.

“Stupid girl,” the man with his fist in her hair said. “You listen, no hurt.”

He pulled her up to her feet, and Catherine ignored the way her skin had been scraped on the black tarmac. Aches and pains were a part of this game, and she was not going to give these men even a fucking inch of her to use to their advantage.

Not her pain, fear, or anything else.

It was almost like she could hear her mother and father in her head, telling her what to do or not do. Would they fight? Absolutely. Would they bend to anyone’s will? Absolutely not.

She was their daughter, after all.

She could also hear Cross, different from her parents, but still the same in a lot of ways. Strength, defiance, and all fight.

So fuck these men.