Chapter 10 Cole
ten
Cole
I know I should be running threat assessments. Calculating variables. The sedan from three nights ago, the gap in courthouse security I identified yesterday, the seventeen different ways someone could access her chambers if they knew the building's maintenance schedule.
Not thinking about the sound she made when she came apart beneath me, the way her body arched off the mattress, and the tears that slid down her temples afterward while I held her together.
Kuso. Focus.
I adjust my grip on the wheel and check mirrors.
A silver Camry has maintained position two cars back since Mission Street.
It's most likely a commuter based on the driver's posture and the coffee cup visible through the windshield, but I log the plate anyway.
Habit. Discipline. The only things keeping me functional right now.
In the passenger seat, Angelina is assembling herself piece by piece.
I watch the transformation from my peripheral vision, noting each element the way I would study a target's security detail.
Pins sliding into her hair, pulling it tight against her skull until not a single strand falls loose.
Concealer beneath her eyes, covering the shadows that betray how little she slept.
I know she didn't sleep because I checked the exterior feed at 2 AM and her bedroom light was still on, still on at 3, still on at 4:15 when I finally stopped looking.
I didn't go to her. The restraint nearly killed me, but I didn't go.
Her suit is pressed to razor-sharp lines, color-coded tabs are visible in her briefcase, heels polished to a gleam. Judge Castellano taking shape from the raw material of the woman who fell apart in my arms eight hours ago.
But there's one thing she can't polish into place. The way she shifts in her seat, pressing her knees together for one beat too long before catching herself and going still. The slight wince when she adjusts her position, her body reminding her of everything we did in the dark.
Mine. She's mine now, whether she admits it or not.
The possessive thought surfaces before I can stop it. I let it sit there, examine it, decide whether to file it away or act on it. Filing it away seems prudent. Acting on it while she's assembling her professional armor would be counterproductive.
She hasn't met my eyes since we got in the car. Hasn't acknowledged what happened. She moved through the kitchen this morning like nothing between us had changed, pouring coffee, checking Chesca's backpack, kissing her daughter's forehead with the same efficiency she brings to everything.
Everything changed. She knows it. I know it. We're both pretending otherwise because the alternative is a conversation neither of us is ready to have.
I pull into the parking garage and find a spot near the elevator with clear sightlines to both exits. Cut the engine.
She reaches for the door handle.
My hand closes around her wrist before conscious thought catches up, brief, instinctive and the contact point burning through both of us. Her pulse jumps beneath my thumb, quick and hard, betraying everything her composed face refuses to show.
"Stay close today."
Her eyes meet mine for the first time since last night. A flash of heat, then something like anger, then nothing at all. The mask sliding over it, smooth and impenetrable.
She pulls free and her heels hit concrete, the sharp sound echoing through the garage.
I follow.
The elevator doors close and her reflection watches me from the brushed steel, jaw set, briefcase strap cutting a line across her shoulder. By the fourth floor, whatever she was last night—soft, vulnerable, crying in my arms—has been packed away into whatever compartment she keeps such things.
Judge Castellano steps out.
I fall into position behind her left shoulder and we move down the empty hallway, her heels marking a rhythm I've memorized over months of surveillance.
Seventy-three steps from elevator to chambers at her usual pace.
Today she's walking faster, putting distance between herself and whatever happened in the guest room.
The distance is an illusion. She can walk as fast as she wants. I will always be right behind her.
We reach her chambers. I take the key from her hand, she doesn't protest, just releases it when my fingers brush hers, and turn the lock. The door swings open and I step in first, scanning left to right the way I've done a thousand times in a thousand rooms.
Desk. Window. Bookshelves. Standard configurations, nothing out of place.
Then the smell hits me.
Something sweet beneath the recycled air and the faint mustiness of old legal volumes. Wrong for a federal courthouse. Wrong for this room. My hand moves toward my weapon before I've consciously identified the threat.
The flowers.
Small purple blooms cluster along leafy vines spilling from a crystal vase, the small flowers catching morning sun through the window.
Sitting in the center of her desk where her coffee cup should be, exactly where she would see it the moment she walked in.
Belladonna. Deadly nightshade.
The Gardener found her.
A white card rests beside the vase, two words written in careful handwriting that probably won't match anything in any database because whoever did this is too smart for obvious mistakes.
24 days.
I process the implications in the space between one heartbeat and the next. This is a federal courthouse with metal detectors at every entrance, ID checks at the security desk, her chambers locked—I just used the key.
Someone bypassed all of it. The desk lamp glows in the far corner, the same lamp she left on last night when we walked out together. Someone came in after her, after hours, after the building should have been empty, and placed this like a gift.
While she was in bed. Maybe even while I was inside her, making her cry out against my palm, someone was here. Marking her. Counting down.
I failed. The realization lands like a blade between my ribs.
Twenty-four days. That's how long she has unless I find whoever did this and end them.
My phone is at my ear before I've made the conscious decision to call. "Kade. We have a situation."
I give him the details in short sentences: federal courthouse, belladonna, her chambers, twenty-four days on the card. My voice stays level because that's what training does, that's what discipline provides, but underneath it something hot and sharp is uncoiling in my chest.
Behind me, her voice from the doorway.
"Cole?"
"Hold," I say into the phone. Then I'm moving, shifting into the doorframe to block her line of sight to the desk, my hand finding her elbow to guide her back into the hallway.
Too late. She's already seen it.
Her fingers close around the card before I can stop her, plucking it from the desk with the automatic motion of a woman who has handled thousands of pieces of evidence in her career. The color drains from her face as she reads it, her jaw going slack, the recognition hitting all at once.
She was at the briefing. She knows about the judges who received flowers before they died. She knows what belladonna means.
I ease the card from her fingers and she releases it like the paper burned her.
"They were in my chambers." Her voice comes out thin, stripped of the authority she usually wears like armor. "The door was locked. I locked it myself. How did they—"
She looks past me at the desk lamp. The one she left on. The one that's been burning all night while we—
"While we—" She stops. Doesn't finish.
She doesn't have to. I already calculated the same timeline, already flagged my own failure in the mental log I'll review later when I have time to punish myself for it properly.
I bring the phone back up. "Evidence team. Now."
"Twenty minutes," Kade says, his voice carrying the careful neutrality of a man who's learned not to ask questions over unsecured lines. "Don't touch anything else."
I end the call and set the phone on the edge of her desk, away from the vase, turning up the volume so I'll hear if he if he comes through on the direct channel.
"Breathe." My hand moves to the back of her neck without permission, applying gentle pressure the way I would to ground myself during a particularly bad debrief. She pulls air in through her teeth like it costs her something.
"Twenty-four days." She says it flatly, testing the words against the air, against reality. "Someone put a number on my life."
"Yes."
She stares at the flower. Her hand finds the medal at her throat, fingers closing around it hard enough to turn her knuckles white, the chain pulling taut against her neck.
"It's beautiful," she says. "The flower. That's the worst part, isn't it? They made it beautiful."
I don't have an answer for that. The aesthetic observation strikes me as something she would notice, only a woman who notices beauty even when it comes wrapped in threat. I file it away with everything else I'm learning about her, everything the cameras never showed me.
Damian arrives in seventeen minutes with latex gloves, a camera bag, and the unhurried economy of a man who has processed more crime scenes than most homicide detectives see in a career.
He moves around the desk without speaking—flash and click, flash and click—and yellow evidence markers appear beside the vase, the card, a scuff on the floor near the leg of her chair that I didn't notice initially.
I make a note of that. A scuff I missed. Details matter, and I missed one.
Kade's voice comes through the speaker. "Belladonna confirmed.
Same pattern as the others. FBI task force gets notification, sitting federal judge under credible threat.
" A pause, and the quality of silence on the line shifts into something heavier.
"There's something else. Patricia Brown. Ninth Circuit."
I watch Angelina's face as Kade continues.
"They found her this morning. Same signature. Belladonna extract, cardiac event, no signs of forced entry."