Crossfire (Cross Duet #1)

17. GRAYSON

17

GRAYSON

Jesus.

This woman wasn’t a mastermind; she was a victim. Someone tricked her into coming to that parking garage, someone with the knowledge that a dangerous meeting was going down. Someone who would have assumed she’d never make it out of there alive.

Who, outside of the CIA, knew about this meeting in the parking garage? Did Vosch leak it to someone in his camp?

And where was the mystery guy during the meeting with Vosch? If he’d been lying in wait for Ivy to show, Seth or I would have seen him—me when I’d cleared all parking levels or Seth with his pre-meeting recon. Even if we both somehow missed him and Vosch’s driver interrupted the plan, did the guy die in the explosion? He must have. After all, if he’d fled, Seth would have seen him leave. Or maybe the guy showed up late, after the blast?

More questions than answers on that front, but back to Ivy. I’d still do my due diligence in vetting her, of course—I couldn’t be 100% certain of anything—but every instinct screamed of her innocence.

Ivy had almost been killed, and replaying the events through this lens, the puzzle pieces fit. Her surprised shriek, rushing into the arms of law enforcement, and crying and trembling on the bus. That wasn’t an act—they were the raw emotions of a woman who’d almost lost her life.

I flexed my fingers at my side as a protective edge surged through my limbs like an electric volt.

Based on her combat skills, she didn’t need anyone’s protection in a fight—which, by the way, I could now admit to myself was sexy as sin—but I learned a pivotal lesson in my time at the CIA: If someone wanted you dead, there was little you could do to stop it.

And if whoever did this to her was sophisticated enough to orchestrate a death like this for her, they would likely try again. And probably wouldn’t stop until they succeeded.

I needed to help her.

Not just from the killer in her life, but also, if she was innocent, as I believed, the CIA needed to back down because if we didn’t find Vosch quickly, the CIA might become more desperate to talk to the woman who’d stumbled onto his attempted assassination.

And by talk to, I mean, they might pull in a darker team who didn’t handle questions in a coffee shop with a smile.

Simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But the CIA shouldn’t be looking at her. They needed to find out who had leaked the intel of that meeting and who would use something like that to kill a seemingly mundane woman.

Whoever wanted her dead didn’t want blood on their hands. But who would have that intel, and why would they have done something so elaborate just to kill her? There were plenty of other ways to get rid of someone, especially in a metropolitan city as large as Chicago. The possibilities were endless—a mugging gone wrong, a carjacking, anything.

Or what about an off-the-grid hit man—anyone from a gangster wannabe to a CIA operative who’d lost their job because of performance? I knew some in the latter group and had run into them when I was helping my brother Hunter try to track down who had taken a shot at his girlfriend’s father.

But I digress.

Whoever had done this was arrogant enough to think that leaked intelligence would never lead back to their identity.

I’d had a few missions ruined from leaked intelligence. One time, a CIA operative got high at a bachelor party and spilled classified information to a stripper. Turned out, the stripper was the stepdaughter of a mob boss, who was making a lot of money supplying our target with weapons. I almost got my head blown off on that mission.

Another time, a cyber hack compromised intelligence and sold it to the highest bidder. The terrorist knew we were coming, and I lost a colleague in that assignment.

Point being, intelligence wasn’t as airtight as the public assumed, and intelligence in the wrong hands was as dangerous as a missile.

The question was, who in her life was connected enough—or dirty enough—to obtain the intel that brought her to that garage?

My attention swept over to the ex-boyfriend with a new, dirty lens.

The guy was an asshole, but was he smart enough to plan this? Could he have been the recipient of an intel leak, be it from a parent, an uncle, a cousin, or a friend?

He had grabbed her arm yesterday, and if he was willing to do that in public, what was his temper capable of behind closed doors? Plus, he seemed more like a stalker than an ex who had moved on. I mean, look at that dick, flaunting his new girlfriend in Ivy’s face. That was not the behavior of someone who had moved on.

It was the behavior of someone who wanted to hurt her.

Or worse…

I needed to talk to Daniel. But first, I needed some answers from Ivy.