Chapter 10 Cole #2
Angelina's hand hits the edge of the desk to steady herself, her breathing shifting from controlled to barely held. This isn't a judge processing a threat briefing. This is a woman who just learned someone she knew is dead.
"You knew her," I say. Not a question.
"Conference circuit. We've served on panels together." Her voice comes out mechanical, reciting facts to avoid feeling them. "She had three grandchildren. She showed me pictures at the Ninth Circuit reception last spring."
The information reorganizes itself in my mind. Brown wasn't just a name on a list anymore, wasn't just victim number six in a pattern I'm trying to decode. She was a colleague. A woman with grandchildren who shared photographs at receptions.
And Angelina could be next.
Kade continues with standard protocol. Minimal information to be shared with Monroe's office until we know whether there's a leak. Task force coordination through secure channels and enhanced surveillance on all potential targets.
I hear the words and file them for later analysis, but my attention stays fixed on her.
Damian finishes his sweep, seals the last evidence bag, labels it with his cramped handwriting, and hands me a USB drive.
"Courthouse security footage is queued. Maintenance access logs are on there too." A single nod, his entire briefing, and then he leaves the room.
The door closes with a heavy click, leaving us alone in chambers that no longer feel safe.
I pull the blackout curtain across the window, replacing the view she's looked at for six years—the skyline, the bay, the bridge she probably watches when verdicts weigh heavy—with a flat expanse of dark fabric. She doesn't protest. Doesn't even seem to notice.
"Recommendation." Kade's voice comes through the speaker. "Relocate to CPG headquarters. Secure rooms, controlled access, full protection."
"No."
The word hits the room hard and the line goes silent.
She plants her feet like she's preparing to argue a case before a hostile bench. "I have seventeen active cases on this docket, including DeLuca. I am not hiding in a bunker while my courtroom goes dark."
"Angelina —"
"I said no." Her voice sharpens into something closer to the woman who sentences traffickers without flinching. "I was a target before anyone left a flower on my desk. The answer was no then and it's no now."
"You have a dated countdown sitting on your desk," Kade says, an edge creeping into his professional calm.
"Which is now in an evidence bag on its way to the FBI lab." She meets my eyes with a challenge burning in hers. "And I will be here when it reaches zero, because I refuse to let some theatrical psychopath dictate how I live my life."
Theatrical psychopath. Despite everything, I feel my mouth twitch. She's not wrong about the theatrics.
I turn toward the speaker. "She stays. We adapt the protection protocol to accommodate."
Kade's exhale carries clearly through the line.
He knows what this is. It's not about courtrooms or caseloads, but about who gets to make decisions about her life.
After what she told me about Adrian, about the locked doors and controlled movements and isolation dressed up as devotion, I understand why she's drawing this line.
"Then you don't leave her side," Kade says. "Not for a minute. Not for a second."
"That was already the plan."
"Keep me updated." The line goes dead.
"That was already the plan."
"Keep me updated." The line goes dead.
Silence settles over the room like dust after an explosion. Just us and the black curtain and the empty space on her desk where the flower sat, the ghost of it still hanging in the air between us.
Angelina hasn't moved from where she's standing near the bookshelf, arms wrapped around herself in a way that makes her look smaller than she is.
The judge who commands courtrooms has retreated somewhere deep inside, leaving behind a woman who just learned she has twenty-four days to live unless we find whoever did this.
"Figure out how to keep me alive without locking me in a cage." Her voice comes out quiet, but there's steel underneath it. "That's what I need from you, Cole. Can you do that?"
Cage.
The word lands exactly where she aimed it. What she told me about Adrian- pieces she gave up in the dark, voice flat, like reading from a transcript.
She's telling me that my protection could look like the same architecture if I'm not careful. That the line between keeping her safe and keeping her prisoner is thinner than I want to admit.
I won't be the next man who puts her in a cage, even a gilded one.
"I can do that," I say. "But you have to trust me when I tell you something isn't safe."
"Trust goes both ways."
"I'm aware."
She studies me for a long moment, her eyes searching my face for something I'm not sure I can give her. Whatever she finds there seems to satisfy her, because some of the tension bleeds out of her shoulders.
"Okay." She exhales, and the word sounds like a door opening rather than closing. "Okay."
I move toward her without making the conscious decision to do so, my feet carrying me across the carpet until I'm standing close enough to touch her. Close enough to see the faint tremor in her lower lip that she's trying to control, the way her fingers are clenched around her father's medal.
My hands come up to frame her face, thumbs against her cheekbones, fingers curving behind her ears. The same way I held her last night when she was falling apart, except now we're both fully clothed and standing in her chambers with a death threat hanging over us like smoke.
"Twenty-four days." My voice drops low, stripped of everything I've spent a lifetime building. The control, the discipline, the careful walls that keep people at a safe distance. "That's how long you have. That's how long we have. Unless I find the Gardener and end this, in twenty-four days—"
I can't finish it. The words stick in my throat like broken glass.
Yatto. I finally have her, and someone is trying to take her away.
"I will not lose you again." The words come out rough, raw, nothing like the measured speech I've cultivated for twenty years of military and intelligence work.
"Do you understand me? I spent seven years watching you through screens, telling myself it was enough, telling myself I was protecting you by staying away.
I am done staying away. I am done watching from a distance while you face threats alone. "
Her breath catches. Her hands come up to grip my wrists, not pulling away, just holding on.
"Cole—"
"I failed you once. I left, and you ended up with him, and I wasn't there when—" I stop, force myself to breathe, to think. "I will not fail you again. Whatever it takes. Whatever lines I have to cross. Wakarimasu ka? Do you understand?"
She stares at me, eyes bright with something I can't name. Fear, maybe, or hope, or some complicated mixture of both that doesn't have a word in English or Japanese.
"I understand," she whispers.
The air between us grows thick with everything we're not saying. Her hands tighten on my wrists, and I feel her pulse hammering against my palms, quick and hard, matching the rhythm of my own heartbeat.
My head drops an inch. Less. Her lips part and her breath touches my jaw, warm and unsteady. This close I can see every gold fleck in her brown eyes, the faint tremble in her lower lip, the way her chest rises and falls with shallow breaths.
My phone buzzes.
We don't jump apart. We separate like a wound reopening, slow, pulling, reluctant. Her hands slide off my wrists and my jaw locks against the urge to pull her back.
I check the screen. Kade. "Brown's autopsy is fast-tracked. Preliminary tox screen shows the same compound—pharmaceutical-grade belladonna derivatives. I'm adding two cameras to the hallway outside her chambers and rotating the shift overlap from fifteen minutes to thirty."
"Copy."
"And Cole?" A pause weighted with things he won't say over an unsecured line. "Don't let this compromise you."
Too late. Seven years too late. But I don't say that.
"Send the detail roster when it's ready."
I hang up.
Across the room, Angelina has retreated behind her desk. Her pen sliding across a legal pad with a mechanical movement, taking notes on something that probably doesn't need notes, giving her hands something to do besides shake.
Judge Castellano is back in place. The mask smooth, the armor polished, every crack sealed over like it was never there.
But I saw what was underneath. I've been seeing it for days now, and I can't unsee it.
"I have a hearing at ten," she says without looking up. Voice level. Professional. Like none of this just happened.
I take my position by the door. Back straight, sightlines clear, hands loose at my sides. The posture of a man doing his job. Except my job requires objectivity, and objectivity requires distance, and there is no distance left between us. Not after last night.
"I'll be here."
Her pen pauses for just a moment. Then it resumes its steady movement across the page.
Two professionals in a room. Nothing personal between them.
We are both lying, and we both know it, and neither of us says a word.