Page 14 of Crossfire

My hand tightened around the phone. “Was anyone hurt?”

“No, but it means more people looking into it. We’ll need to figure out a way to contain this.”

And yet we had a leak of some kind, saying God knew what to cops right now. I glared at the police station across the street, its imposing structure a stark backdrop against the sunny sky, hoping I was waiting at the right location. Police officers in the city of Chicago were assigned to districts, and based on the geographical area where cops picked up the mysterious woman, this should be the precinct they took her to.

Only time would tell, however.

“Did you find the SUV Nightshade fled in?” I asked.

Nightshade. The code word we used for Vosch when speaking out in the open.

“He abandoned it a few blocks away. We’re going through it now. Since he had to ditch it so quickly, maybe we’ll find something.”

Unlikely.

And now, the guy was in the wind, free to conduct whatever horror he had planned with no one to stop him. Endangering lives.

“This is on me. I was waiting for a clear shot. If I had fired, maybe I could’ve…” My words trailed off, lost in a sea of what-ifs.

Daniel’s silence screamed his disappointment. You’d think a covert operative wouldn’t care about something like that, but it sliced through my gut like an unpolished knife.

“This was a tough mission,” Daniel finally said. “You’re the first one who made it out alive.”

If he thought that made me feel any better, he was sorely mistaken.

“How will I redeem myself from this?” Failing wasn’t something I was accustomed to, and now this guy was loose in my home city. These were my people to protect, and anyone he killed would leave blood on my hands.

“You’ve saved more lives than I can count,” Daniel countered. “The FBI may take over?—”

“Don’t let them cut me out of this.” My sharp words were edged with desperation.

“Grayson…”

“This wouldn’t be the first time the CIA and FBI worked together,” I reminded him.

“You know how this goes. We’re supposed to be discreet. When things become more public”—like an explosion—“they tend to step in.”

I hated how jurisdictions sometimes overlapped into gray zones like this one. It made everyone seem to whip out their dicks onto a table and size ’em up.

“Please, just make some calls,” I pressed.

Daniel had been in the CIA for over two decades, and he had connections throughout prominent levels of the government—people who would listen if he said his operative needed to stay engaged.

“I want to be the one to take him down,” I declared with steely resolve. “I had a shot, and I let it slip through my fingers. This is on me. Let me finish this.”

I couldn’t escape the relentless replay of that pivotal moment when I had Vosch in my crosshairs and didn’t squeeze the trigger. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing, waiting for the perfect shot, but now, the fallout of my failure bore down on me. If only I had pulled that trigger, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

“I have to finish this,” I asserted.

Daniel allowed several seconds to pass.

“I can’t make any promises,” he hedged.

The tension in my body began to melt. “Thank you.”

“Now, let’s talk about our other problem,” Daniel pressed.

I pinched the bridge of my nose, wishing I had more information—a name at least. If I had that, I could at least tell Daniel, who had shown up while we solved thewhy. It was embarrassing enough to fail at the hit, but to have not gotten anything other than a physical description of this woman was maddening.

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