Page 115 of Crossfire

Which posed another question. Let’s say my mom’s ex was some psychopathic liar. What would he have to gain by killing me?

Then again, what wouldanyonehave to gain by killing me?

But before I could voice any of my concerns, a loud crash shattered the tense silence, echoing from the office where Grayson had disappeared moments before.

“Ivy? Are you okay?” Detective Mitchell’s voice was sharp with alarm.

“Yeah.” My heart ricocheted off my ribs.

But was Grayson? He’d gone into the office, and now, a deadly silence fell over the cabin.

“Let me call you back,” I said, my voice trembling.

I ended the call, my hand gripping the phone tightly as I slowly stepped toward the office, fear and uncertainty creating a symphony of apprehension in my blood.

Apprehension that grew the second I saw Grayson’s face.

51

GRAYSON

“As you can see, she works with Vosch.” Daniel’s voice rumbled through the phone with an undercurrent of impatience, mixed with pity.

I stared at my laptop screen, my chest constricting, mind reeling, desperately searching for an explanation, a glimmer of hope that this was all a terrible mistake. Ivy couldn’t possibly be the same person in these damning files. There had to be another explanation, a cruel twist of fate that had led to this devastating mix-up.

As I scrolled through the evidence, though, each photograph and document became a dagger twisting in my gut.

“I’m sorry, Grayson.”

“This has to be some kind of mistake,” I muttered, my voice tight.

“I wish it was. People like her are very skilled at hiding who they really are.”

This was more than hiding; this was playing me, manipulating me. Lying to me—a seasoned CIA agent who’d what…fallen for it all?

It couldn’t be true.

There had to be something in these files to prove they were wrong. What, I had no idea, but I searched for it more desperately than a man dying of thirst in a hunt for water. Yet with each click of my mouse, every pixel of my screen drew me further from what I thought I knew—what I’d been so sure of—and deeper into the abyss of agony.

“I would have seen this,” I reasoned. “I would have known.”

This new reality mocked me for the fool I had been and threatened to shatter what was left of my heart.

For the first time in my life, I had allowed myself to feel something for a woman, and I’d started to imagine a possible future together. One of love and peace rather than agony and fury. It’s funny how you don’t know what you truly want until it’s within your grasp. And just when you want to hold on to it, something threatens to rip it from your grip so violently that it will leave your soul blistered and raw.

I mean, my God, this evidence meant Ivy was even worse than the man who had killed my father. That she was a snake, lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike, while also hypnotizing me into believing she was innocent.

Maybe the signs had been there all along, in plain sight. Her lethal fighting skills, her knowledge of that classified location, her desperation to come up with money…

And I had been too clouded by affection to see them.

“We all have our blind spots,” Daniel assured.

If this was true…

“She wasn’t a blind spot,” I said. “She is…was a black hole.”

This whole time, when I’d feared my world crashing in around me, it had always been the terror of someone being taken from me, but as it turned out, there was another way I could lose it all.