Page 39 of Cross + Catherine: The Companion

The Attack

Dante POV

Dante paced.

Back and forth, back and forth.

Ten steps to the wall, and then ten steps back to the waiting room chair where he had been sitting. When nothing else could be done—when he could do nothing else—he paced.

The hospital waiting room was too quiet. A fucking echo of silence mocking him. A half a dozen pairs of eyes watched him.

A caged animal.

That’s how he felt.

Wild.

Crazed.

Enraged.

His daughter—his blood—had damn near taken her own life. Downed two bottles of wine, and opened her wrist up like a flayed fish. She’d used a blade she popped out of a disposable razor.

Pink-stained water coming out from beneath the bathroom door had alerted him. His fears continued rising, and his calls to her went unheard. His fists beat hard against the door until bruises formed and his bones ached.

The memories were too fresh.

He suspected it would always feel that way.

Now, though, they only pissed him off.

The one question that seemed to be his constant companion since he had pulled his daughter from the bloodstained bathtub was … why?

But the very second his mind posed the question, his black, bleeding heart already had an answer. One that was all too obvious. One that only served to enflame his growing rage even more.

Cross Donati.

How could this not be because of him? All the bad choices made and wrong roads traveled in Catherine’s life seemed to lead straight back to that young man. Like a habit she couldn’t kick, Catherine kept going back to Cross regardless of how badly she ended up hurt in the process.

Just two weeks earlier, something had happened again between the two. Not that Dante was entirely sure what had happened, but he knew something did. Catherine showed up on their doorstep with a bag in hand, tears in her eyes, and nothing else. She wouldn’t talk when they pressed for details or reasons. She stayed shut away from them in her old room—avoiding.

The spiral downward had been obvious. She got worse and worse emotionally until … tonight.

So, of course it was Cross.

It was always Cross.

That fucking—

“Son.”

Dante spun on his heels to face his father. Antony’s old eyes held nothing but sympathy and compassion. No pity—Antony Marcello pitied no one when he hated pity himself. Dante wished it helped on some level to soothe the rage festering inside as he looked at his father, but it really didn’t. If anything, the rage festered up to his heart, and grew more. It only got wider, and bigger.

Why?

Because of every person in that waiting room. It was not just for Catherine’s pain that had finally spilled over. It was not only for his wife’s—and his own—pain. This pain had an echo. A reverberation of pain that continued on to each person it touched in their family.

All of them hurt for this.