Chapter 18 Angelina #2
"Trial schedule concerns. Whether the judge killings might delay proceedings." He crosses to the window, checks the curtain's edge, turns back. "She wanted to know if witnesses were being advised to adjust their availability."
"For eight minutes?"
The corner of his mouth twitches. Not a smile, but something worse. Recognition.
"You were timing it."
Damn him.
"I was observing." I fold my arms across my chest like that will somehow make me look less like a jealous teenager. "There's a difference."
"Is there?" His expression stays neutral, but there's a glint in his eyes. "Because you stopped hearing whatever Winchester was selling the moment Lockwood leaned across me for the courtroom schedule."
The accuracy of it burns because he's right.
Winchester was mid-sentence about administrative liaisons and I lost the thread completely because Victoria Lockwood's shoulder passed within an inch of Cole's arm and my brain just…
went blank. Three seconds of nothing in the middle of a conversation about trafficking survivors.
She was asking reasonable questions." Cole's voice drops the public formality and goes quiet in the way it only does behind closed doors. "Nervous witness in a building where people in authority keep dying. That's all it was."
"I know that."
"Do you?" He moves toward me. Slow. Deliberate. The way he always moves when he's closing distance and giving me time to decide whether I want it closed. "Because your jaw's been tight since you walked in here, and it's not about Winchester."
"My jaw is tight because another judge is dead in Tucson and I have seventeen days, Cole." I hear my voice rising and can't seem to stop it. "Not everything is about—"
"You were watching me." Simple and factual, no triumph in it. Just observation, the way he states everything. "The whole time she was talking, I was watching you watch me."
A slow pull behind my sternum, like a book sliding toward the edge of a shelf it's been balanced on for weeks.
"That's—"
"I always see you, Angelina." Quiet. Like it costs him nothing to say because it's as true as gravity. "In every room. Through every doorway. You're the only thing I'm ever actually looking at. Everything else is just..." He pauses, searching for the word. "Perimeter."
I don't know what to do with that. With being someone's center point. With a man who tracks threats for a living telling me I'm the thing he watches hardest.
So I do what I always do when he gets too close to the soft parts. I redirect.
"Winchester concerns me more than Lockwood." I pick up the card, turn it between my fingers, study the embossed letters like they'll reveal something useful. "She's already got Morrison's approval for her proposal. She mentioned CPG by name. Unprompted."
Cole takes the card, studies it, and files it somewhere in that compartmented mind alongside threat vectors and exit strategies. "I'll look into the foundation. See if the connections are what she claims they are."
"And Lockwood?"
"What about her?"
He says it like the question genuinely confuses him. Like Victoria Lockwood has already been processed and archived under resolved: no threat and he can't understand why we're still discussing her.
His face gives me nothing but patience and that quiet intensity aimed at me like I'm the only signal in a room full of noise.
"If she talks to you again—"
"You'll what?" His eyes narrow slightly, intent. "Tell me."
The words crowd my throat. Mine. She can't have you.
I'll tear her hands off if she touches you.
Things a federal judge doesn't say out loud.
Things a woman who spent twelve years building walls doesn't admit to feeling.
Ugly, territorial, possessive things that have no place in chambers with a hearing in thirty-five minutes and a dead colleague in Tucson.
"I'll be very unhappy."
"Good." His expression eases, and something satisfied moves behind his eyes. "Be unhappy. Feel it. I want you to feel it."
"And then I'll stab you with a pen."
"With what pen?"
"I have several." I gesture at the cup on my desk. "Take your pick."
"You're threatening a member of your security detail with office supplies."
"Consider it a formal warning."
His mouth does something it almost never does. It curves into a real smile, brief and unguarded, the kind that changes his entire face and makes him look younger and softer. The kind that makes me forget, for half a second, that the world outside this room is counting down.
Half a second. That's all we get.
Because his hand finds his phone, the smile fades, and whatever he reads there pulls his expression shut.
"Kade's pulling Oyelaran's case files." His voice is clipped now. The man behind the glass again. "Looking for overlap with your docket."
My docket. My countdown.
I sit behind my desk and open the DeLuca file.
The lines blur, then sharpen into witness depositions and evidence logs and trial schedules.
The machinery of justice grinding forward because it doesn't stop for fear.
Doesn't pause for dead colleagues or flowers with numbers attached or the sound of my own heart beating too fast.
Cole leans against the wall by the window, silent and present. His attention is on his phone now: my house, my daughter's school, the street outside this building. Keeping the perimeter while I try to do my job.
Eight judges dead. Seventeen days left. A philanthropist who knows too much and a pharmaceutical witness getting too close to Cole.
And a man by the window who told me I'm the only thing he's ever actually looking at.
I don't know which one scares me more. The countdown or how much I needed those thirty seconds of banter to feel like the world wasn't ending.
I open the file. Start reading. Don't look up.
Seventeen days.