Chapter 8 Angelina
eight
Angelina
The defense attorney is making his argument. Something about the chain of custody. I've heard the phrase twice now and can't repeat a word of what he's been saying.
My pen moves across the notepad. Not notes but interlocking squares instead. It's the law school habit I never broke, the one my property professor said meant I was either thinking deeply or not at all. Today it's the latter.
I count the exits for the third time since sitting down.
Three, the same three as always. Side door behind the bench, main gallery doors, the fire exit near the jury box that sticks in humidity.
I've sat behind this bench for six years.
I've never counted exits three times in the first twenty minutes of a hearing before.
Dio, when did I become this person?
The thought burns low in my stomach. Five days of Cole Tanaka in my life and I'm scanning rooms the way he scans them, observing the faces in the gallery, checking posture, looking for the person who doesn't belong.
The man in the third row has been adjusting his watch for the past six minutes.
The woman near the door keeps checking her phone under her purse.
They're bored, not armed. Stop it, Angelina.
Under my robe, my fingers find the St. Christopher medal. Three touches, the cold metal warming against my thumb. Not prayer, but inventory. The same impulse that makes me check locks three times and count Chesca's breaths at night.
Papa used to say faith was a comfort. This isn't faith. This is survival dressed up as ritual.
"Objection, Your Honor. Hearsay."
"Sustained." My judge voice lands flat and sure, six years of practice making words sound decided when the person behind them is anything but.
I've missed the substance of the objection entirely. The notepad is a grid of perfect squares and zero case notes.
Five people dead. That's what yesterday's briefing gave me. Five professional headshots of judges who are now case files. People in robes who looked like me, with courtrooms like mine, who counted their exits one time and presumably felt safe doing it.
And now they're dead. And you're sitting here drawing squares like a first-year associate trying not to fall asleep.
An alarm blares at 9:23.
My hand jerks. The pen skids across the notepad, one clean line bisecting the grid of squares. A bomb threat in a federal courthouse, with a judge who learned yesterday that she's probably on someone's list.
Move.
"Court is in recess. Bailiff." Steady voice, though the hands gathering my notepad are not steady, so I press them flat against the bench until they decide to behave. Two seconds, then three. Then I rise with the robes heavy on my shoulders and turn toward the side door.
Cole is already there.
He's been there the entire hearing. I've tracked his position through ninety minutes of motions I can barely recall, clocked him every time I scanned the gallery for threats I have no business scanning for.
My eyes keep finding him without permission, like my body decided he's a fixed point worth monitoring and forgot to consult my brain about it.
Stop it. He's protection detail. Not yours. Not anything.
He doesn't reach for me or speak, just opens the door and steps through first.
I follow him into the stairwell and hate that I follow without hesitating.
His hand finds mine on the third step down.
Not grabbing and not pulling, just there. His fingers close around mine as he guides me around the knot of clerks who've stopped on the landing to check their phones. The grip is firm but not tight, exactly enough to keep me close but not enough to register as force.
I don't pull away.
My body doesn't flinch, and my mind registers the change like a breach alarm going off in a building I thought was secure.
Five days ago I would have jerked my hand back.
Five days ago the sensation of a man's fingers wrapped around mine without warning would have sent my heart rate spiking for all the wrong reasons, not fear of the present but memory of the past. Adrian's hands always finding me, always knowing where I was, always gentle until they weren't.
Not flinching isn't trusting. Not flinching is exhaustion.
I tell myself that all the way down three flights and out the east exit, even as my fingers stay curled against the back of his hand.
Outside, cold air hits like a wall. I'm still in my robe with no coat because the evacuation didn't allow for coat retrieval from chambers. Wind cuts between the courthouse and the parking garage, carrying exhaust fumes and the mineral smell of the bay.
Emergency vehicles are already pulling in, and courthouse employees cluster on the sidewalk in their lanyards and sensible shoes with the collective expression of people being inconvenienced rather than afraid.
I'm afraid. I try to make the distinction between reasonable caution and fear, the way I would in a ruling. The distinction won't hold.
Cole positions himself between me and the parking lot entrance, not hovering, not speaking, just there.
"You could at least pretend to be concerned," I say. My voice comes out sharper than I intend. Good.
"I am concerned."
"You look like you're waiting for a bus."
"I'm waiting for the bomb squad to clear the building." He checks the perimeter without looking at me. "Different stance."
"Must be nice, having a specific stance for bomb threats."
His jaw shifts a fraction, not a smile and not anything I have any business noticing. "You'd prefer I panic?"
"I'd prefer you weren't here at all." The robe whips against my legs in the wind and I pull it tighter, which does nothing. I'm shivering from cold or nerves or both. "I'd prefer to be inside my chambers finishing motions instead of standing in a parking lot in my work clothes because someone—"
"The call came in as suspicious package. Foil wrapping near the judges' chambers." He's still watching the parking lot. "No secondary call. Single package, single location."
I stare at him. "And that's supposed to reassure me?"
"Bomb squad confirms or rules out. I read the situation." His gaze sweeps the lot in that constant motion I've learned to recognize. "Two different things in my line of work."
"In my line of work, reading the situation based on available evidence is called a reasonable inference." My teeth are chattering now and I hate that he can probably hear it. "And I'm freezing to death while we wait for your two different things to become one thing."
He holds out his jacket without saying anything, just extends his arm with the jacket hanging from two fingers while his eyes stay on the street. Not offering exactly, more like presenting options.
I take it because my teeth are chattering. That's the only reason.
It smells like him, saffron and cedar and something warm underneath that I can't name but my body recognizes anyway.
Twelve years, and my mind still remembers what he smells like.
I pull it closed across my chest and hate how much better I feel, not warmer but safer, which is ridiculous because a jacket isn't armor and Cole Tanaka isn't—
Isn't what? Isn't the man who left you? Isn't the man who's been watching you for seven years? Isn't the man whose scent is currently wrapped around you like a claim?
Nonna Rosa would laugh at me. "Tesoro, when a man gives you his coat, it means something."
It means I was cold. That's all.
"If I die of hypothermia in this parking lot," I say, "I want the record to reflect I was wearing your jacket under protest."
"Noted."
The all-clear comes forty minutes later.
A retirement gift for Judge Morrison. A bottle of wine in a box wrapped in decorative foil, left outside his chambers by a clerk who forgot to include a card.
No name, no note, no one claiming it when security started asking questions.
Standard protocol says unattended packages near judicial offices get treated as threats until proven otherwise.
An hour of bomb squad work for a bottle of cabernet.
I wait for relief. It doesn't come fully, because the spike was real even if the threat wasn't. My hands are still shaking inside the sleeves of his jacket.
Cole exhales through his nose. Once. Not a laugh, not commentary. Just an exhale I catch because I've been tracking every breath he takes for an hour whether I want to or not.
"Cabernet," I say flatly. "An hour in the cold for a bottle of wine."
"Could have been worse."
"How, exactly?"
"Could have been a boxed wine."
I almost laugh. Catch it behind my teeth and turn it into a sharp exhale that isn't fooling anyone.
Don't you dare find him funny. Don't you dare.
He waits for me to push off the barrier I've been leaning against first, then falls into step beside me. He's close enough to touch, not touching. I walk back into the courthouse wearing his jacket, catch myself halfway through the lobby, and keep walking anyway.
It's because we're almost at chambers. Not because it's warm. Not because it smells like anything in particular.
I wear it all the way to my office door before I make myself take it off.
Xander looks like he's been through a small war.
He's sitting at the kitchen table with Chesca, surrounded by newspaper, a jar of flour paste, and something that looks like it started as a papier-maché cone and evolved into an asymmetric disaster leaning thirty degrees to the left.
Flour dusts the front of his shirt, and Chesca has a streak of brown paint across her forehead and the expression of a field commander who is not satisfied with her troops' performance.
"Xander says I have to let the layers dry," Chesca says, as though this is a personal affront. "But it's due Thursday."
"It's Tuesday," Xander says with the thousand-yard stare of a man who has seen too much.