Chapter 7 Cole
seven
Cole
"Ireorganized the whole file structure last night because somebody saved the Sacramento data in the Portland folder." Vanessa does not look up from her laptop. "I'm not naming names. I'm naming Jax."
"In my defense," Jax says, tipping his chair back on two legs, "folders are a social construct."
"Folders are the reason civilization functions," Vanessa responds.
"Bold claim from someone who names her hard drives after Star Wars characters." Jax seems on the verge of tipping his chair over, but he never does.
"Han has never let me down. Unlike some people at this table."
My chair faces the door. Back to the wall, twelve feet from the nearest exit. Morning light cuts through the angled blinds, pale bars falling across the table.
Kade stands at the head, folder flat, watching the wall-mounted monitors cycle standby images.
Asher sits two seats down with his tablet angled away from everyone—old habit, even older paranoia.
Jax sprawls now, with his leg already bouncing.
Damian occupies the seat across from me, grey eyes tracking the room without moving his head. Xander leans back, arms crossed.
Vanessa is still setting up, laptop open, presentation loading on the wall-mounted screens while she fixes whatever Jax broke in her file system. Her fingers haven't stopped moving since she sat down.
One empty chair.
Jax glances at it. "Remy running late?"
"Family thing." Kade doesn't elaborate. "He'll get briefed later."
Jax nods once. His leg keeps bouncing.
Footsteps in the hallway. A deliberate pace, professional heels on hardwood.
The door opens. and Angelina enters with coffee cradled between both palms, shoulders set, chin level. Courtroom posture transplanted into a room full of people who solve problems her courtroom cannot touch.
Jax half-rises, all California charm. "Saved a seat for the pretty judge."
"Thanks." She pulls out the chair three seats from mine. A deliberate gap. Not looking at me.
Jax catches my eye, grinning. I give him nothing. His grin widens.
Of course she's not looking at me. Two nights ago I told her she was mine and she slapped me hard enough to draw blood. Last night I promised to hurt the man who made her flinch.
Neither conversation was a comfortable one.
I watch her eyes move as she settles. Door first, noting the exit she just walked through. The windows. Bodies at the table. Back to door.
She is counting exits the way I would.
Yesterday. Adrian.
I don't raise it. Not here. Not yet.
She adjusts her blazer. Crosses her legs. Her professional armor is holding, seams tight. Then her fingers drift to her collar. Find the chain and close around the medal. Her thumb traces the edge of St. Christopher's profile while her coffee cools on the table in front of her.
I start counting. One. Two. Three.
She is still holding it when Kade opens his folder and looks around the table. "We good?"
Vanessa pulls the presentation onto the wall-mounted screens. "We're good."
Angelina's hand drops. Both palms flatten against her thighs.
Vanessa's first slide fills the screens. Faces. Dates. Cities.
"Four separate jurisdictions," Vanessa starts, "four separate FBI field offices, and not one of them thought to cross-reference cause of death—"
I should be looking at the screens.
But I watch her hands instead. They are my surveillance feed now, the only data that matters in a room full of monitors. Seven years of watching through cameras, and now she is close enough that I can see the chain catch light when she breathes.
She belongs here.
She is in danger.
Both things pull in the same direction. Towards me.
Vanessa's fingers fly, and the first photo fills the left monitor.
"Judge Margaret Hensley. Houston. Age fifty-one. Found dead in her chambers 6 weeks ago ago. Ruled heart attack."
The photo shifts. Another face, older. "Judge Nathan Cross. Phoenix. Sixty-one. Cardiac event during morning coffee. Also ruled natural."
A third image. "Judge Elaine Patterson. Portland. Fifty-three. Dead in her hotel room after a conference. Same conclusion."
Vanessa flips to a fourth photo. "Judge Robert Tannenbaum. Denver. Fifty-eight. Collapsed in his home office two weeks ago. Wife found him the next morning."
Her hand moves, arranging all four faces side by side on the screen. "Four federal judges across four states. All within the past six weeks. All cardiac events. All ruled natural causes."
Angelina's pen comes out. Black ink, thin barrel, the one that she seems to always have on her. She clicks it open against her notepad with one swift motion.
"All presided over trafficking cases," Vanessa continues, her rhythm accelerating the way it does when her brain outpaces her mouth.
"Same financial network. So, when I saw the pattern, because nobody else bothered to cross-reference state lines, I pulled case records.
The common thread is trafficking prosecutions tied to offshore accounts, shell corporations, shipping manifests. Same money trail, different faces."
Angelina writes. Three clean lines, numbered. Her pen doesn't stop.
"And the flowers. There are variable timelines on the flowers.
" Vanessa clicks to another slide. Delivery receipts, timestamps, locations.
"Three victims received belladonna arrangements between six days and three weeks before death.
The last one didn't receive flowers, or at least nothing documented.
Timing's inconsistent. Could be targeting preference, could be opportunity, could be—"
"Confidence level." Angelina does not look up from her notes. "On the pattern attribution. What's your statistical baseline for distinguishing correlation from causation?"
Vanessa blinks. Then grins. "I like her."
"Ninety-two percent confidence." Vanessa pulls up another screen.
"Accounting for age, health history, case overlap, and geographic distribution.
Baseline cardiac death rate for this demographic is point-zero-three-nine percent annually.
We're seeing ten times that rate concentrated in judges handling linked cases. That's not chance."
Angelina underlines something. "Jurisdictional gaps? What are you missing?"
"Federal cases only," Vanessa admits. "State courts handle trafficking too, but the data's fragmented. Different reporting standards. I can't get clean cross-state analysis without another forty hours of pulling records."
"And the FBI field offices—"
"Didn't talk to each other about it," Vanessa finishes, shaking her head. "Houston doesn't know about Portland. Phoenix doesn't care about Seattle. No federal task force, no centralized tracking. They each ruled their own judge's death natural and moved on, with no follow-up triggered."
Angelina's pen taps twice against her notepad. Then she writes again.
I can't look away.
This is what she does. Cross-examines expert witnesses. Calm, methodical, pulling at weak points until the whole structure either collapses or hardens into something she can trust. Taking notes on threat assessment like she's reviewing a brief.
Brilliant and competent and mine. The combination is going to be a problem.
My hands flatten against the table. Tendons stand sharp beneath the skin.
"So we've got a serial killer with a gardening hobby," Jax says, chair tipped back again. "I vote we call them the Gardener. It's got that serial killer name energy. Like the Zodiac, except with better taste in flowers."
Silence drops.
Then Frost breaks the silence without looking up from his tablet. "You just described homicide as having good taste."
"Thematic homicide," Jax corrects. "There's a difference."
"There isn't."
"The flowers make it thematic—"
"They make it botanical," Frost says flatly. "Congratulations. You've discovered horticulture."
Jax grins. "See? The Gardener. It works."
Kade exhales audibly through his nose. "Let's concentrate on the case."
Vanessa pulls the case files onto the main screen. Names, case numbers, dates of death. The trafficking prosecutions line up in parallel. Money laundering, coerced transport, conspiracy. Different defendants. Same network underneath.
Angelina's pen stops moving.
She stares at the screen. Her hand doesn't lift from the table.
Nobody says it.
The math is in the room.
She handles trafficking cases. She's connected to the same network through DeLuca. Federal bench. High-profile rulings. The trial starts in days.
The pen sits on the notepad, remaining still.
I watch her arrive at the conclusion the way I've watched her process a hundred difficult moments through camera feeds—the micro-flinch she thinks no one sees, the way her throat moves when she swallows hard, the split second before training takes over and locks everything down.
My jaw locks. Every instinct screams at me to put myself between her and what's on those screens. Three chairs of professional distance is the only part of my operational protocol still functioning.
I stay in the chair.
Her eyes flick to mine for half a second. Then back to the screen.
"The variable timing," she says. Her voice is steady. "On the flower deliveries. You said six days to three weeks prior to death. What's the confidence interval on that window?"
Vanessa hesitates. "Low. The sample size is just too small. It could be noise."
"Or it could be testing," Angelina says. "Surveillance before execution. Confirming target routines."
Kade nods once. "Possible."
"Then the question isn't just who," Angelina continues. She picks up her pen again and starts writing. "It's also when."
Vanessa's laptop chimes. She reads something that makes her entire posture change before she speaks.
"Judge Henry Li." Vanessa says quietly. "Sacramento. Found this morning."
The pattern updated while we were sitting here.
Damian's eyes find Angelina across the table.
"Sacramento," Jax says. Just the word. His chair comes down on all four legs.