Page 48 of Crossfire

My jaw flexed. “I don’t kill women.” It irritated me I had to repeat myself. Daniel should’ve known better than to come to me with this. “There are plenty of CIA operatives who will kill anyone without question.”

“Well, this one came to us, and it needs to get done. In case you haven’t thought about this, you’re not the only one with your name attached to a failed mission.”

The burden of my screwup sharpened his tone.

I clenched my fists until my nails dug into my palms; how far would the bleeding of my mistake go on?

Of course Daniel would be in the doghouse, too. This hit was probably a test for our entire team, not just me. They could have given it to anyone, but “we” had just epically failed to carry out a high-level mission.

Here was an assignment with a little bow on it. In our home city, with no complications of travel, no complications of parking garages with bombs. A quick in-and-out hit.

“I’m the leader of that mission, Grayson. And I can’t push back on leadership when they hand us a job. Not right now, not after what happened with Vosch.”

Still, I could not imagine ending the life of a woman.

And the fear, no matter how irrational, continued to pulse through my veins that this was Ivy.

Ivy, who’d shown up at that meeting. Ivy, who I believed was an innocent victim. Ivy, who I found myself thinking about every moment since I left that coffee shop.

And not just due to work.

“We don’t have the upper hand here,” Daniel said. “We’re lucky we haven’t been taken off the Vosch case. Just get this job done and move on.”

I raked my hand through my hair, scraping my nails across my scalp until it hurt.

“She’s a violent criminal planning an attack, Grayson—that much I know. Our job is to eliminate this woman before she causes bloodshed. This will be on your hands if you don’t stop it.”

Goddammit. I clenched my eyes shut and tried to steady the frustration in my voice.

“Who is she?”

“Her name is Samantha Jackson.”

I exhaled a breath of relief.

It’s not Ivy.

My relief was short-lived, though.

I didn’t want to kill a woman, no matter how evil she might be.

Maybe that was sexist. Women were just as smart and capable as men to carry out whatever their hearts wished. And the CIA would only target her if lives were in imminent danger. What if I said no, and in the time it took for them to secure another agent, innocent people were killed? Children, even? How could I live with that? I pinched the bridge of my nose, my mind torn between my principles and my responsibility.

Still…

A woman.

How in the world was I going to do this?

The struggle had the power to tear me apart from the inside out. But in the end, the lives of innocent people were hanging in the balance, and I couldn’t let my personal reservations stand in the way of that.

With a resigned sigh and twisted soul, I steeled myself, knowing that what I was about to do might haunt me for the rest of my life.

22

IVY

“I wasn’t sure you were going to show.”

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