Page 38 of Crossover

“Tell me it isn’t true!” I snapped, my voice rising with a desperate edge.

“Ivy…” Grayson’s reply was barely audible, his voice heavy with regret. “I’m so sorry.”

Those three words hit me with the force of a shotgun, splintering my heart into jagged pieces. I swear I could feel them ripping through my torso like searing scraps of metal.

“Did you know?” I slammed both palms against his chest, and he took a step back. “This whole time we were together, did you know?”

Tears streamed down my face.

“When you kissed me?” I snarled.

Another shove, another step back.

“When you fucked me?”

This time, I shoved him into the wall. He could have stopped it; the guy was twice my size and three times as lethal, but he took everything I gave him.

“No,” he said softly, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

The pieces of my heart scattered around me like shards of glass. Everything I thought I knew, everything I believed in, was nothing more than a cruel illusion.

“I don’t ever want to see your face again,” I sneered, my pain morphing into a white-hot rage that consumed me from the inside out.

“Ivy…” Grayson reached for me, but I recoiled as if his touch were poison. “I would never have killed an innocent man,” he pleaded, but his words fell on deaf ears.

“You did.” My words dripped with venom. “You did kill an innocent man. My father.”

My mind raced with memories of my dad—his warm smile, his gentle guidance, his dreams of spending his retirement surrounded by grandchildren. Dreams that would never come true because of the man standing before me.

Desperation etched across his chiseled features.

“Ivy, please…I was following orders. Daniel said he?—”

Grayson stopped abruptly and looked up at me in horror as the truth finally took shape. Daniel lied. Just like he lied about me. How long had Daniel been the puppet master, pullingGrayson’s strings, lying and manipulating him to cover his dirty deeds?

Still, Daniel might have put the gun in Grayson’s hand, but it was Grayson’s hand that pulled the trigger. How could I ever look at him the same again?

“You killed him. And you let everyone think it was a suicide. Do you know what that did to us?”

“I was following orders,” Grayson repeated. “I was told it had to look like he’d done it himself.”

“So, you staged it like that on purpose?” I choked.

“Ivy.”

“You know what? It doesn’t matter!” I wiped a fresh avalanche of tears off my cheeks.

Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. It did matter that Grayson hadn’t done it intentionally, hadn’t kept it from me on purpose—for some reason, I believed him on that. And it did matter that, evidently, Grayson was lied to, used as a pawn by the man he’d trusted the most in this world. Daniel was the bad guy here.

And it mattered that Grayson should have killed me, but chose not to. He’d disobeyed orders to protect me, and later, he and his brothers rescued me and my mother from torture and certain death. For that, I was eternally grateful, but it didn’t change the fact that my father, the man who had loved and raised me, was gone forever.

Because Grayson pulled that trigger.

“There is nothing you can say to take back what you did to my father. I will never look at you the same again. All I see when I look at your face is my father’s killer. You need to leave.”

I wondered if those words were echoing around his heart like they were mine—father’s killer.

“Ivy,” he eventually managed, his voice so tight, it sounded like it was about to crack. “I can’t leave you; it’s not safe.”

---