Page 94 of Crossfire

“According to you, it will be clean.”

“If it were clean, they wouldn’t put a hit on my life.”

“A mistake, you have assured me.”

“Guilty until proven innocent, eh?” I couldn’t hide the bite in my tone as I repeated a question he’d conveniently avoided earlier. “Let me ask you this: will you kill me if he tells you that you have to?”

The silence that stretched on between us haunted me.

“Are you hiding something?” Grayson pressed. “Something you haven’t told me?”

“Like what? I forgot to mention that I’m actually a psychopathic criminal? No.”

He pursed his lips. “Over dinner, I’m going to ask you more questions. You’re going to answer them.”

“We already did this dance.”

“And yet we barely scratched the surface.”

“Pass. Wait for your murder file; I’m sure it’ll have everything you’re looking for in there.”

His eyes half sparkled in amusement, half narrowed in annoyance. “Have you always been the stubborn?”

“Have you always been a homicidal maniac?”

“You know nothing about me.”

When Grayson’s jaw tensed, a smarter girl would’ve bitten her tongue.

Turns out, I wasn’t very smart.

“You kill people for a living,” I said. “I’d say I know the most important thing about you.”

Grayson moved with the fluidity of a lion until his face hovered mere inches from my own, his palm now pressed against the wall behind me—caging me in like a trapped animal.

“You know this hostility act is getting really old,” he murmured.

I seriously didn’t appreciate his attempted intimidation tactics. He already had the upper hand, holding me hostage and dragging me out here, in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.

“So is being a hostage. What do you say you release me and we call it a day?”

Grayson looked at my left eye, then my right.

Maybe deciding which one he’d pierce with an ice pick first.

“Do you think this sarcasm and hostility are getting you anywhere?” Grayson pressed. “Making your life easier?”

Well, when he put it that way…

“No,” I admitted.

Grayson hesitated, then stepped back.

“Good. Now that you finally realized that, we can have an honest conversation over lunch.”

I shifted.

“Learning about my life isn’t going to help us figure this out,” I said.

---