Chapter 15 Angelina #2
"She's not your daughter." The words tear out of me. "You made sure of that."
"Custody agreements can be... revisited." Adrian adjusts his cufflinks, the same expensive suit and diplomatic money he's always worn as shields. "Especially when new circumstances come to light."
Cole takes one step forward, and Adrian steps back.
He's afraid of Cole. Good. He should be.
But even through the fear, Adrian's smile doesn't waver. He's playing a longer game. He always was.
He's going to try to take her. He's going to use his connections and his money and his goddamn diplomatic immunity and he's going to try to take my daughter.
I can't breathe. The parking lot is too bright, too loud, too full of people who have no idea what's happening ten feet away from their normal Saturday morning.
"We'll talk soon, Angelina." Adrian's voice carries that familiar undertone, the one that sounds pleasant to outside ears and lands like a threat in my chest. "About our daughter's future."
He walks away unhurried and deliberate, like he's already won whatever game he thinks he's playing.
Cole's hand lands on my lower back, warm through my cardigan, but I can feel the tension running through him. Every muscle locked and ready. He would have done it right here. In front of witnesses. If Adrian had touched Chesca.
Part of me wishes he had.
My hands shake so hard I can't get the car door open.
Cole reaches past me, opens it, and guides me into the passenger seat with careful hands.
Xander's truck pulls up beside us. Chesca's face presses against the window, her eyes huge and scared in a way that cracks something open in my chest. My baby. My whole world. Looking at me like she needs me to fix this, to make it make sense.
"She's okay." My words come out automatic, desperate. "She's safe with Xander. She's—"
"Breathe, firefly."
I can't.
Cole pulls out of the parking lot and drives like he's trying to outrun something. Maybe he is.
The seatbelt presses against my chest and my body flinches from it before I can stop the reaction. The phantom pressure of it cutting across my pregnant belly while Adrian laughed and accelerated. The world blurring past the windows. Begging him to slow down. Begging him to stop.
I force my hands flat on my thighs. This is Cole's SUV. This is now. That was eight years ago.
"Sorry," he says quietly, and eases off the accelerator.
He noticed. Of course he noticed.
We pull into my driveway. The house looks exactly the same. Windows reflecting afternoon sun. Everything normal, everything a lie.
Cole's phone buzzes against the center console. He glances down, and something behind his eyes closes like a door being locked.
"What?"
"Judge Sandoval. Albuquerque." He sets the phone face-down. "Number seven."
I stare at the house through the windshield. The flowers Chesca and I planted arguing about whether to do rows or clusters, the door I check three times every night. Sandoval probably had a door she checked too.
I don't move. Can't.
"He's never met her." My voice comes out hollow. "Eight years of deliberate separation. No photos, no conversations, no chance encounters. I made sure of that after the hospital. And he shows up at her soccer game." My composure cracks. "How did he know where we'd be?"
"I'll find out."
The certainty in his voice doesn't scare me. It settles something.
I turn to look at him. His jaw ticks. The engine's still running. Chesca's empty booster seat sits in the back, purple straps hanging loose.
"I need you to hear something. All of it. And then I need you to tell me you're not going to do something stupid."
"I won't promise that."
"Cole—"
"Tell me anyway."
My wedding ring tan line faded years ago, but sitting here with my hands folded in my lap, I still see it. Still feel the phantom band I haven't worn since before Chesca was born.
Tell him. Tell him everything. He deserves to know what he's protecting you from.
I take a breath.
"We need to go inside."
The living room doesn't feel like sanctuary. It feels like a confession booth.
My hands find my hair, fingers digging into my scalp as I pace across the carpet. Three steps to the window. Turn. Five steps to the kitchen threshold. Turn. Back again. The hardwood creaks under my feet, the house settling around us like it's listening.
Cole settles onto the couch, perfectly still, waiting. Patient in a way that makes me want to scream or throw something.
"I met him after you left." My voice comes out wrong, too thin. "Law school. I was... not in a good place."
Understatement of the century.
He doesn't move or react. Just watches me with those dark eyes that miss nothing.
"He presented well. Diplomatic family, old money, references that checked out." I laugh, but there's no humor in it. "I trusted a résumé over my instincts. Everything you weren't."
"When did it start?"
"The control? Immediately. The cruelty?" I reach for the medal, pressing St. Christopher's outline into my skin. "After the engagement."
The words come faster now, rushing out like I've punctured something that was supposed to stay sealed forever.
"He didn't like my friends. Said they were a bad influence. Didn't like me staying late at the library, said I was neglecting him. Didn't like anything I wore unless he picked it out."
I reach down to grab the throw pillow on the couch, straightening it against the armrest though it doesn't need straightening. Then the stack of case files on the side table, squaring the edges. Control what I can.
"I was so broken after you left that I couldn't tell the difference between love and control. And he stayed. You left and he stayed and I thought that meant something."
"Angelina—"
"Let me finish." I hold up my hand. "I need to get it all out before I lose my nerve."
I pace again but stop at the window. Outside, the street looks peaceful. A neighbor walking their dog, a car passing slowly. Normal life continuing while mine unravels.
"Then I got pregnant."
Cole goes completely still. Not the quiet stillness of someone listening, but the coiled kind, something dangerous.
"Six months along. We had an argument about me working late." My hand drifts to my stomach, and suddenly I'm back there, feeling the seatbelt dig into my swollen belly, the centrifugal force throwing me against the door as he took the corner too fast.
I wrap my arms around myself, trying to hold the memory in. "He drove like he wanted to kill us both. Weaving through traffic, running red lights. I begged him to stop. He laughed."
You made me do this, cara. If you'd just listened—
Cole hasn't moved. His eyes have gone flat and cold, all the warmth stripped away, replaced by something that was already planning.
"Said I 'made him do it.' That if I'd just listened—" The medal bites into my grip. "I ended up in the hospital with a premature labor scare. The baby was in distress. I didn't know for six hours if she was going to live because he decided to teach me a lesson."
"Angelina." My name sounds like a prayer and a curse in his mouth.
"I called Sal from my hospital bed, still hooked up to monitors, still not knowing if my baby would survive.
" The memory tastes like copper and fear and the antiseptic smell of the labor ward.
The scratchy hospital gown. The beeping machines.
Sal's voice on the phone, going quiet and then very, very cold.
"I told him 'I need out. He's going to kill us both.
' Sal made him an offer. Money and an overseas position. Or... consequences."
I take a deep breath. "Adrian took the money. Left for Milan before Chesca was ever born." My composure finally shatters.
"That should have been the end of it." I straighten the throw pillow again. Realize I'm doing it. Force my hands into my lap. "You don't just walk out of something like that clean."
"I take Wellbutrin. Three hundred milligrams a day, split into two doses, one with my coffee, one with dinner." I say it the way I'd read lab results into evidence. Clinical and detached. Easier that way.
"It lives in the medicine cabinet behind the children's Tylenol so Chesca doesn't ask questions. Because God forbid the Honorable Judge Castellano can't keep her own brain chemistry in line without pharmaceutical intervention."
His expression doesn't change. I keep going. If I stop, I won't start again.
"I have panic attacks. Not the kind in movies.
The kind where I pull over on the way to court because my hands won't stop shaking.
Where I lose the thread of an oral argument because all I can hear is my own heartbeat.
" I cross my arms over my chest. "I haven't slept through the night in eight years.
I check the locks multiple times. I count every body in every room I enter. "
"Dr. Peters calls it PTSD with comorbid generalized anxiety disorder." I almost smile. "I call it Tuesday."
The joke lands on nothing.
"I tried telling someone once. Two years after the divorce, a nice man, a pediatrician." I pick at the thread on the pillow I just straightened. "Made it about halfway through and he looked at me like I was a case file. Paid for dinner. Never called again."
I face Cole and brace for it. The recalibration. The careful distance. The look the pediatrician gave me right before he asked for the check.
"He's been gone all those years. And he shows up at her soccer game like he has the RIGHT—"
I lose the ability to finish the sentence.
The tears come then, eight years of them, twelve really, since the moment Cole walked away and I had to learn how to survive without him.
"He almost killed her before she was born." The words come out strangled. "And now he wants custody. He can't— I can't—"
Cole crosses the room in three strides.
He doesn't ask permission, just pulls me against his chest, and for one terrible second my body goes rigid, bracing for the wrong kind of hands.
Then his scent registers. Saffron and cedar. Not Adrian's cologne.
Cole. This is Cole.
His arms wrap around me, and I let them.
"He's not taking her." His voice is low and absolute. "He's not touching either of you again."
"You can't promise that—"
"I already did."
His heartbeat is even against my cheek. Even, even, even.
Breathe, tesoro. Match his rhythm. You're here.
I shouldn't need this, shouldn't need him specifically. I've handled everything alone for eight years. Built a life. Raised a daughter. Became a federal judge.
But his arms feel like the first safe place I've had since I was twenty-two years old.
Dio, I hate how much I need this.
The resistance drains out of me, and I cry into his shirt. Twelve years of grief and eight years of fear and all the moments in between when I had to be strong because there was no one else.
His hand moves to my hair, gentle despite the tension I can feel running through his muscles.
"I've got you, firefly."
The medal presses between us, my father's protection and Cole's, layered together. His arms don't loosen.
I don't know what to do with a man who stays.
But his breathing has gone shallow and controlled, the way it does when he's working through something.
And I realize I'm not the only one who's been holding something in.