Chapter 12 Cole
twelve
Cole
"Ineed poster board. For a project. It's due tomorrow."
Chesca rounds the corner into the kitchen at six forty-three in the morning, backpack already on even though pickup is over an hour away, hair half-brushed, a fistful of crumpled papers in one hand.
She drops into the kitchen chair with full weight and total commitment and zero doubt that the chair will hold.
"Good morning to you too," I say, setting a glass of juice in front of her.
She takes it without looking up, already smoothing the crumpled papers across the counter. "It has to be blue. Not light blue. Real blue."
Footsteps on the stairs, deliberate, someone who has learned to control her entrances.
Angelina comes into the kitchen with her hair twisted up and blouse buttoned to the collar, armor halfway assembled.
Her feet are still bare, heels waiting by the front door.
Her gaze sweeps the counter, the juice glass, her daughter's head still bent over the papers.
"Chesca. What do you say?"
Chesca glances at the juice, then at me. "Thank you." Back to the papers. "It's due TOMORROW, Mom."
Angelina reaches for the counter where her mug sits every morning, the blue one with the chip on the rim she refuses to throw away because Chesca picked it out. Her coffee is already made. Oat milk, one sugar.
Beside her mug, a second one. White ceramic, no pattern. She set it out for me sometime between last night and this morning, and neither of us is going to mention it.
Her eyes close over the first sip for one second, and her shoulders drop a quarter inch.
She opens her eyes and finds me watching. Her chin lifts, shoulders squaring.
"We need to be at CPG by nine."
"Mr. Cole." Chesca's voice is earnest in the way only eight-year-olds manage. She has turned in her chair to face me fully, presenting the half-brushed disaster on her head like evidence. "Do you know how to French braid? Mom only does regular."
Angelina's hand stops halfway to her coffee. "Excuse me. What is wrong with my braids?"
"They're fine." The diplomatic pause of a child who has learned the word fine can end a conversation. "But Lily's mom does French braids and they look like the ones in the videos."
"The videos," Angelina repeats. She looks at me over Chesca's head with an expression that dares me to say a single word.
"My okaasan taught me," I tell Chesca. "I can try."
"What's okaasan?"
"My mother. In Japanese."
"Is she good at it?"
"She is good at everything she decides to learn."
"Cole, you really don't have to—"
"Turn around."
Chesca spins so fast the chair scrapes the floor. I move behind her, gathering the tangled mess with both hands. She's clearly fought the brush to a draw.
Her hair is still damp from her shower, dark waves that smell like strawberry shampoo and something warm underneath.
I section it carefully, the muscle memory rising through twenty years of disuse.
Okaasan's hands over mine, guiding the crossover pattern with the same patience she brought to tea ceremony.
Not for you, she said. For the people you will care for someday.
"You have your mother's hair."
"Mom's is curlier."
"Mom's is also brushed," Angelina says. She's leaning against the counter with her mug in both hands, watching. Her attention is on my hands as I separate three sections at Chesca's crown.
"The trick is even tension." I keep my voice instructional. "Too loose and it falls apart. Too tight and it hurts. You have to find the balance."
"That sounds like a metaphor," Angelina murmurs.
I meet her eyes briefly. "Most things are."
Cross the right section over center. Add hair from the side. Cross the left over center. Add hair. The rhythm finds my fingers the way kendo forms settle into my wrists.
"It pulls when Mom does it," Chesca informs me.
"It pulls when you don't brush your hair," Angelina says.
"It doesn't pull when Mr. Cole does it."
"That's because Cole isn't fighting a bird's nest at seven in the morning."
"Okaasan would say the knots are the braid's way of asking for more patience," I offer.
Chesca twists just enough to squint up at me. "Your mom sounds cool."
"She is."
Angelina takes a long sip of her coffee. She says nothing, but her eyes track my hands through her daughter's hair. Something close to the expression she wears when she thinks no one is watching, the one I have seen through cameras but never from six feet away.
I keep my attention on the braid. Cross over center. Add hair. Cross over center.
"Almost done."
"Can you do two? Like, one on each side?"
Angelina checks the time on her phone. "You have thirty minutes before Xander gets here and you haven't eaten breakfast."
"That's not a no," Chesca says.
"That is not a no," I confirm.
Angelina sets her mug down with a deliberate click. "I'm going to need both of you to stop ganging up on me before seven AM."
"We're not ganging up," Chesca says, at the exact moment I say, "We are not ganging up."
Angelina's lips press together. Her eyes cut to the window. Chesca twists around to grin at me. I tie off the braid with the elastic from her wrist.
"One braid, for today."
She runs her hand down the back of her head, feeling the pattern. "It's bumpy. Like ridges."
"That is the French part."
"Cool." She hops off the chair, grabs her juice glass, and drinks half of it standing up. "Can I have toast?"
"Please."
"Can I have toast, please."
I make toast. Angelina watches me locate the bread, the toaster, the butter dish. Seven days, and I move through her space like I built it.
She knows, has known since the first morning.
A knock at the side door. Three short, pause, two long.
Xander's pattern. Chesca shoves the juice glass onto the counter, grabs her backpack straps, remembers the backpack is already on, and barrels toward me instead.
Her arms wrap around my waist with the casual force of a child who hasn't yet learned to guard her heart.
"Bye, Mr. Cole! Don't let anyone mess up my braid!"
"I will defend it with my life."
She grins and runs for the door.
"What do you say?" Angelina calls.
"THANK YOU BYE."
The door closes and the kitchen goes quiet.
Mine. The thought surfaces before I can stop it, Chesca's strawberry shampoo still on my fingers, her arms still warm around my waist. Both of them. Mine.
Angelina rinses Chesca's juice glass. Her hands move through the water, long fingers, nails trimmed short, the thin scar across her right palm. The silence isn't hostile. That's new.
She dries her hands on the kitchen towel and turns to face me, arms crossed, chin level.
"We should talk about last night."
"We need to leave in twenty minutes."
"That's not an answer, Cole."
"It is the only one I have right now."
Her jaw works. For a moment I think she's going to push harder, demand the conversation I've been avoiding since she stood in my doorway last night with bare feet and no armor. But she reads whatever is on my face and decides against it.
She walks out of the kitchen, grabs her briefcase from the living room chair. I follow.
The CPG conference room has the flat light of a space designed for function, not comfort. Overhead fluorescents, a table that seats twelve, screens mounted on three walls.
Kade stands at the head of the table. Jax leans back in his chair, one leg bouncing.
Vanessa's laptop casts blue light across her face, fingers already moving.
Asher sits with a stylus balanced between his knuckles, turning it end over end in a rhythm only he hears.
Damian has his coffee untouched in front of him, eyes moving from face to face without hurrying.
Angelina sits to my left with her notebook open and pen uncapped. Spine straight, chin level, attentive without revealing what she thinks. She watches the team the way she watches a courtroom, and I don't know what to do with that.
"Li's tox screen came back." Vanessa pulls the results onto the main display.
Chemical compound names, concentration levels, a diagram I don't pretend to understand.
"Atropine and scopolamine derivatives. Belladonna-based.
The concentrations were lethal and exact.
This is not someone grinding up berries in a kitchen.
This is pharmaceutical-grade synthesis."
"The flowers are the weapon," Kade says.
"The flowers are the delivery mechanism.
The compound is extracted, refined, and administered separately.
The flowers are left as signature." Vanessa's hands move as she talks, gesturing at the molecular structure on screen.
"Whoever is doing this has real pharmaceutical knowledge.
Access to equipment, understanding of dosing, familiarity with alkaloid compounds. This is not amateur work."
"What about delivery method?" I ask. "How is the compound reaching the victims?"
"That's the part that kept me up last night." Vanessa pulls up another set of data. "No injection sites, no evidence of ingestion under duress. These victims are consuming the compound voluntarily. Which means they're being poisoned through something they eat or drink regularly, or—"
"Or they know their killer," Asher says without looking up.
"Or they trust their killer," Vanessa corrects. "There's a difference."
Angelina's pen has stopped moving.
Jax's leg stops bouncing. "So we're looking for someone with pharma training. That narrows our lane."
"Or opens it up to a six-lane highway," Asher says. "Pharmaceutical industry in the Bay Area employs tens of thousands."
"Narrow it to someone with reason to target federal judges and knowledge of belladonna specifically," Vanessa says. "That is a smaller pool."
"How small?"
"I am working on it. Give me caffeine and don't talk to me for six hours."
Angelina's pen moves across her notebook.
Twenty-three days.