Chapter 2 Cole
two
Cole
The monitors glow in the dark room, her image reflected in my eyes as my hand moves against denim.
Slow, controlled pressure that has been building for the last twenty minutes. The room smells like cold coffee and weapon oil. It's the scent of too many nights exactly like this one.
On the screen, she stretches. The tank top rides up, exposing a sliver of skin above her waistband. My breathing goes shallow.
Then my phone buzzes, and the world narrows to three things: the ache in my cock, Kade's name on the screen, and the violent urge to ignore it.
Seven years of this ritual. Never unzipping, never skin to skin. Just pressure through fabric, building toward an edge I refuse to cross. Discipline as devotion. The denial keeps me functional, keeps the wanting from consuming everything else.
Some nights it is not enough. Some nights I grip the edge of the desk until my knuckles ache, reminding myself why I cannot have her. Why I do not deserve to.
Tonight is one of those nights.
She shifts in the chair, legs tucking underneath her as she tilts the journal toward the lamplight. Her hair falls over one shoulder in dark waves, concentration furrowing her brow as she writes.
The exterior camera angle only gives me the living room window. A slice of her world, but never the whole picture. I have memorized the way light falls across her face through that glass, tracked every expression I can catch from this distance.
Her hips are fuller than college. Her breasts heavier beneath that thin cotton. The body I memorized at twenty-two has become something richer, and I've tracked every change over the years of watching.
Mine.
The word loops like it has a thousand times before. She doesn't know I exist. Doesn't know about the cameras I installed around her property, and the angles I have calculated to see without violating. The windows I can observe. The blind spots that torment me.
Some parts of the interior of her home remain a mystery. The bedroom where she sleeps. The bathroom where she showers. Private moments I can only imagine through walls I refuse to breach.
I know her schedule. When she leaves, when she returns, who visits, how long she reads before the living room light clicks off. But the spaces where she is most herself, most vulnerable, those exist only in my imagination.
The not-knowing makes it worse. Always worse.
My hand increases pressure, thumb rubbing slow circles through the fabric.
Heat coils low in my belly, spreading upward.
She turns a page, oblivious to the man watching her through a window from half a city away.
I track the way her fingers brush paper, the shift of her shoulders, recording every visible detail like reconnaissance.
She got home around 8:30. I tracked her headlights turning into the driveway, watched her silhouette move past the kitchen window where Salvatore waited.
The child was already upstairs by then. Chesca.
Eight years old. Dark hair like her mother, gold flecks in her eyes that I've caught in glimpses of when the light hits right.
I watched Angelina climb the stairs through the gaps in the curtains, disappearing into the parts of the house my cameras don't reach. Twenty minutes later, she came back down. Settled onto the chair. Opened that journal she writes in every night.
The bedroom gaps torment me. Knowing Chesca sleeps up there, knowing Angelina will eventually climb those stairs, go down the hallway, and disappear into spaces I can only imagine.
But I've set my boundaries. Exterior cameras only.
Windows, walkways, the perimeter. What happens behind walls stays behind walls.
The distinction matters, even if only to me. But it doesn't stop me from wanting to know.
Tonight I broke my own rules. The Fairmont conference was not part of my standard surveillance rotation.
I had no business being there, standing in that ballroom, breathing the same air she breathed.
But when I saw her name on the attendee list during my routine monitoring, something cracked in my careful discipline.
Just a visual confirmation, I told myself. Verify the security measures. Check the exits.
Lies. All of it lies.
I went to see her in person. To exist in the same space without screens between us. To watch the gold flecks in her eyes catch the chandelier light when she laughed, that rough, surprised sound that escaped when a woman said something to her at the bar.
Standing by that marble column, I let myself imagine crossing the room.
What would I say? "Hello, Angelina. I've been watching you for seven years.
I know you count ceiling tiles when you're anxious.
I know you check on Chesca three times before you sleep.
I know you're afraid, and you should be.
Sometimes things are hunting you that you don't even know exist yet. "
She almost saw me. Her gaze swept the room and landed exactly where I stood, that familiar furrow appearing between her brows. Recognition flickered for a moment before doubt crept in. Then I moved, slipping into the crowd before her brain could make the connection.
Strategic retreat. Just repositioning. More lies I tell myself.
The truth is simpler. I am a coward who wanted one moment of proximity before returning to my screens and my distance and my delusion that watching her from afar keeps either of us safe.
On the monitor I see her legs shift, bare skin catching the lamplight through the window.
Something hot and hungry claws at my chest. The bedroom gaps eat at me.
Knowing she is up there at night, knowing what she probably sleeps in, remembering what she looked like in college when she thought no one was watching.
She doesn't know I've been her shadow. Doesn't know I've identified and eliminated three distinct threats without her even becoming aware the danger existed. Doesn't know I've memorized every detail of her face, every expression, every—
There's movement on the secondary monitor.
My hand stills. The arousal does not fade, but sharpens into something else. Focus.
A sedan sits three houses down from hers, tucked against the curb beneath a broken streetlight. Dark color, late model American make. It was not there an hour ago when I ran my standard perimeter check.
I sit up straighter, hand leaving my lap entirely. That is not my vehicle. That is not anyone I recognize.
Someone else is watching her.
I toggle the camera, zoom in as far as the resolution allows. The streetlight catches the shape. Four doors, tinted windows, engine off. Someone is sitting in the driver's seat. The glow of a phone screen illuminates a jaw, a shoulder. Nothing more.
I track the plates, but the angle is wrong. Cannot get a clear read from this camera position.
New variable. Unidentified. Possibly threat, possibly coincidence.
My mind sifts through the possibilities even as my body remains coiled with frustrated want. It could be nothing, a visitor to a neighbor's house, someone answering emails before heading inside. It could be surveillance. It could be the first move in a game I have not yet identified.
I reach for my secondary laptop, fingers flying across keys to pull traffic camera footage from the intersection nearest her street. If the sedan drove in from the main road, I will find it. I will trace it backward. I will know.
The phone buzzes again. Third ring.
Blood pounds in my ears, my cock still straining as I reach for the phone without looking away from the sedan on the screen.
"I'm listening."
"You available for immediate assignment?" Kade's voice is steady and professional. "High-priority protection detail."
I begin cross-referencing the sedan's shape against vehicle databases, phone pressed between ear and shoulder. On the primary monitor, Angelina turns another page, completely unaware of the man in the car outside her home or the man watching her from across the city.
"Tell me what we're dealing with."
"Possible pattern Vanessa flagged. Four federal judges dead over six weeks, moving west toward California. All had trafficking cases on their dockets. Could be coincidence." A pause weighted with the thing he is not saying. "Vanessa doesn't think so."
My fingers still on the keyboard. Four judges. Six weeks. Trafficking cases.
Angelina has trafficking cases.
"Natural causes?" I keep my voice level, analytical. The question of a strategist, not a man whose heart just stopped.
"On paper. That's what concerns us. Too clean, too convenient. Vanessa's running a deeper analysis, but the pattern seems to be moving in this direction."
On the monitor, Angelina sets down her book and stretches her neck, rolling her shoulders as if they ache. I've watched her do this a thousand times. The small gesture of a woman carrying too much weight alone.
The sedan has not moved.
"Who is the client?"
"Salvatore Castellano." Kade lets the name sit for a moment. "I gave him a heads-up as a professional courtesy, since his niece is a federal judge with trafficking cases on her docket. He hired us before I finished the sentence."
Everything stops.
Salvatore. The uncle. The one whose name appears in my research files flagged with connections I have never fully untangled. His niece. Federal judge. Trafficking cases.
Her.
Seven years of watching from shadows. Seven years of protecting without her knowledge, eliminating threats she never knew existed. And now the universe opens a door for me.
The strategist in my head is already calculating variables: loss of objectivity, emotional compromise, and conflict of interest. Every protocol I have written says this assignment should go to someone else.
Someone who can maintain professional distance.
Someone who will not burn the world down if she gets hurt.
The rest of me is already through that door.
"I will take it."