Page 52 of Revere: A Legacy Novel

Catherine scoffed hard. “You made a fucking joke out of what we were. I found out your lies hurt a hell of a lot more than mine ever did.”

“Catherine—”

Her eyes burned with unshed tears, but she refused to let them fall. She didn’t cry in front of anybody, and certainly not this man. Not again. Never again.

“I went back. I came back like you told me to months later, and where were you, Cross? All that work I did to get myself out of that black hole, and every step forward I took after everything was for nothing. All I needed was one rejection from you without you even having to say it, and I was fucked all over again.

“You think I owe you shit?” Catherine asked, ignoring the way her throat burned with her anger and words. “You used the one thing that you gave me when you took everything else away, and you ruined it. You gave me hope even when you were breaking my heart, and you couldn’t even give me the decency of telling me the truth. Always was nothing more than a fucking lie with you, Cross Donati. I know that now. You taught me that better than anyone. And for that, you can go straight to hell.”

Catherine was done.

With this day, their conversation, and Cross.

She grabbed her driver’s door, and swung it open. Cross only seemed to come out of his daze when she moved to close the door as she sat down in the seat. Instead of her arm, he grabbed her wrist that time.

“Wait, Catherine, please,” he said, leaning down to look her in the face.

She refused to cry. She wouldn’t even let her lips stop pressing together for fear they might tremble. “Let me go.”

He didn’t.

She tugged, and her jacket slipped up.

Cross’s warm thumb pressed into the soft, thin skin of her left inner wrist. She was acutely aware that she hadn’t slipped on any jewelry to hide her tattoo that morning. She had been running short on time. Her tattoo was firmly on display, and half covered by his thumb.

Catherine’s gaze darted down.

Cross followed her stare.

Carefully, his thumb swept to the side of her skin like he was doing a double-take of what he was seeing. His fingers pressed slightly harder, while the rest of him froze. She didn’t want to have that conversation, either.

Catherine tried to tug her wrist out of his hold once more. “Please, just let me go.”

He said nothing, but the sweep of his thumb over the black ink of the small cross made her start to shake. It wasn’t that he touched the tattoo, but that the pad of his digit lingered on the spine of the cross. He could feel it. She could see it in his eyes.

That scar she covered.

The pain she hid.

The story she didn’t tell.

Cross’s gaze darted up to hers. “Catherine—”

“Don’t say anything.”

“You know I can’t do that, babe. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You don’t get to know, Cross.”

“When?”

That was all he asked.

Nothing more.

Catherine clenched her teeth to keep the words inside, but somehow, they still slipped out. “A couple weeks after you made me leave. My depression got really bad, and it just happened.”

“A couple weeks after,” he echoed.