Chapter 19 Angelina
nineteen
Angelina
The smell of coffee hits me before I'm through the doorway.
Morning light spills through the kitchen windows, catching the steam rising from the pot.Cole stands at the stove, but he's not alone. Chesca has pulled a chair over and stands beside him, wooden spoon clutched in both hands like a sacred object.
"Slower." Cole's hand covers hers, guiding the motion through the eggs. "You feel how they're starting to set at the edges? That's when you fold. Gently."
"Like this?" She drags the spoon through with exaggerated care.
"Exactly like that."
Her whole face lights up, that smile she saves for moments when something clicks. "Mamma never lets me help cook."
The St. Christopher medal presses cold through my shirt. Three hours of sleep last night, maybe four. Two more judges added to the death count since Tuesday. And my daughter stands at the stove like the world isn't burning down around us.
Give her normal. That's your job. Give her normal even when nothing is.
"Mamma just doesn't have time to teach you properly." I lean against the doorframe, watching them. "Mamma's eggs come out of a carton most days."
"They're rubbery," Chesca announces, still stirring with Cole's hand guiding hers.
"Traitor."
She giggles, and Cole's mouth curves into an actual smile. Rare and unguarded, the kind that transforms his whole face when he forgets to keep his walls up.
Something tight in my chest loosens just a little.
Two weeks ago I was scrambling to get dinner on the table after twelve-hour days. Now there's coffee waiting and someone teaching my daughter to cook like it's the most natural thing in the world.
Don't get used to this. Don't let her get used to this. He could leave. People leave.
"Almost done." Cole removes his hand, lets her finish alone. "Now we turn off the heat and let them sit. The pan stays hot, so they'll finish cooking without getting overdone."
Chesca nods solemnly, like he's imparting state secrets.
I move toward the coffee maker, which means passing Cole to get there. My shoulder brushes his back as I reach for a mug, and neither of us moves away.
The contact lingers, warm and solid, and my skin remembers every place he touched me last night. The way he held me after I broke. The way he stayed with me until Xander brought Chesca home.
"I like it better when you two get along."
Chesca's voice cuts through whatever moment was building. Cole and I exchange a look, both caught off-guard by an eight-year-old who sees too much.
"We're working on it, tesoro."
"Progress takes time." Cole's voice is level, but his eyes hold mine a beat longer than necessary before he turns to plate the eggs.
Chesca climbs down from her chair and settles at the table with her Lucky Charms, the cooking lesson apparently complete. She stirs her cereal without eating it, which means she's thinking.
Never a good sign.
"Mr. Cole." She keeps her eyes on her cereal, stirring in slow circles. "How come you used to watch me from the pigeon bench? At school?"
Cole and I both go still as our eyes meet.
He sets down the spatula. His expression doesn't change, but his hands go motionless in a way they weren't before.
"I was making sure you got inside safe." Simple and direct, no justification offered. "Every day."
Every day.
He watched my daughter walk into school. Every single morning. Protecting her from threats I never knew existed.
"But why didn't you just say hi?" Chesca asks. "You could've met my teacher. She's nice."
"I wasn't ready to meet your teacher yet."
"That's weird."
"It was."
"Good thing you're not weird anymore." She returns to her cereal, apparently satisfied with this explanation.
The laugh escapes me before I can stop it, surprised out of me by her matter-of-fact acceptance. Cole's shoulders relax slightly.
A few minutes later, she glances up again, spoon frozen midway to her mouth. "Sandy's mom picks me up at ten, remember? We're doing the craft thing first, then a movie, then the sleepover." She wiggles in her chair, barely containing herself. "I can bring Aaron Bear, right?"
I pause, coffee cup halfway to my lips. "Are you sure you want to go? With everything going on?"
Chesca rolls her eyes with the full dramatic weight only an eight-year-old can muster. "Mamma. It was just a bad dream. Sandy has a trampoline."
A trampoline. Of course.
"Aaron Bear's in your pink bag by the door."
"You're the best." She shovels another spoonful, then points her spoon at Cole with sudden intensity. "You have to come to ALL my soccer games now. Not just sometimes. Mamma never cheers loud enough."
All of them.
My throat tightens. Not unpleasant, but terrifying.
Cole glances at me. Checking. Is that okay?
I nod because I don't trust my voice.
"I'd like that," he says to Chesca.
He left once. He could leave again. And this time he wouldn't just break me. He'd break her too.
The thought surfaces and I shove it down. Not now. Not this morning.
The doorbell rings.
Chesca's chair scrapes back so fast it nearly tips over. "That's Sandy's mom!" She grabs her overnight bag, pink canvas bumping the wall as she swings it over her shoulder. "Bye Mamma, bye Cole!"
She hugs me first. Quick, fierce, smelling of strawberry shampoo and Lucky Charms. Then she runs to Cole and wraps her arms around his waist while he's holding the wooden spoon. He freezes for half a second before his free hand settles on her back.
Brief but real.
The pigeon bench man finally came inside. And now my daughter hugs him goodbye like it's the most natural thing in the world.
"Got everything, sweetheart? Toothbrush?"
"YES, Mamma. Bye!" The door opens and slams behind her so quickly that I barely manage a brief wave to Sandy's mom', but I hear her cheerful voice carrying as they head to the minivan.
Cole moves to the window, watching until the minivan turns the corner. Then he pulls out his phone, types something quick.
"Xander?"
"He'll keep eyes on her the whole time. Discreet."
Of course he will. Even playdates and sleepovers get surveillance now. I should find it invasive and excessive and all the things I would have thought before judges started dying, but I don't. I'm grateful
Silence settles over the kitchen. The coffee maker sputters its final drips while cooling eggs sit on their plates. I pick up Chesca's cereal bowl, the milk turned green from the Lucky Charms, and carry it to the sink.
"Every day." I rinse the bowl, not looking at him. "You watched her walk into school. All those mornings?"
Cole takes the bowl from my hands and sets it in the drying rack. "Yes."
"Why her? Why not just—" I stop. The cameras covered me. The bench covered Chesca. He was watching both of us, from every angle he could manage.
"She trips on the same crack in the sidewalk most days.
Third one from the crosswalk." He picks up the pan, runs water over it.
"Puts her backpack on the wrong shoulder.
Rain or shine, days I hadn't slept in forty-eight hours, it didn't matter.
If I was in the city, I waited until she walked in, then I left. "
The words land somewhere raw. I take the dish towel from the counter and start drying the bowl he just racked. Standing close enough that our elbows almost touch.
"I never knew. All those mornings rushing her out the door, worried about being late to court, stressed about everything. You were already there."
"That was the point." He shuts off the water and turns to face me, hip against the counter, hands still wet. "You weren't supposed to know. Neither was she."
"And if something had happened? If someone had tried to—"
"They wouldn't have made it off the sidewalk."
The certainty in his voice should frighten me. It doesn't. It settles something.
"Now you're inside." I fold the towel, creasing it once, then again. Something to do with my hands. "No more benches."
He takes the towel from me and sets it on the counter with deliberate care. "Now I'm inside. And I'm not leaving unless you tell me to."
My phone buzzes before I can respond. Uncle Sal.
Merda. Not now.
"I need to take this."
I step into the living room, though I can still see Cole through the doorway. He's cleaning up, scraping eggs off of plates, moving through my space with an ease that should feel like invasion but doesn't.
"Bambina." Sal's voice is tight, the way it gets when he's holding back something he wants to say. "The stronzo. The courthouse. I hear he needed stitches."
"Cole handled it."
"I handled it once before. From your hospital bed, remember?" A pause. The kind that carries eight years of debt and family obligation. "I can handle it again. More... thoroughly."
My fingers find the medal through my shirt, thumb running along the familiar edge of St. Christopher's face. Sal's thoroughness is why I owe him everything. Why some of my verdicts aren't mine and why I'll never be entirely free of the family no matter how far I run.
"No."
"Angelina—"
"I said no, Zio."
A beat of silence. "Castellano women. Testarda come tua nonna." Stubborn as your grandmother. Something almost warm underneath. "Anything changes, you call me. Not him. Me."
"I will."
I hang up and return to the kitchen.
Two plates. Two seats. Chesca's chair empty but not missing—her absence creating space rather than void.
Cole pulls out my chair. Waits.
I sit. He takes the seat across from me.
I pick up my fork from the left side of the plate, where he set it. That he might have remembered from before, from college, a lifetime ago when we were different people.
But the coffee is already made the way I take it now. Oat milk, not cream.
Twelve years of remembering. Seven years of learning.
All of it converging in my kitchen on a Saturday morning with coffee. Breakfast someone else made. The man who watched us for years, cooking eggs like he belongs here.
Maybe he does.
We eat in comfortable silence. When we finish, he washes and I dry, and the morning bleeds into afternoon without either of us naming what's building between us.
We don't talk about any of it. Not Adrian. Not Winchester. We move around each other with new awareness, not the crackling tension of before, but something quieter. The silence between us feels different than it used to. Comfortable instead of cautious.
He reviews security footage on his laptop while I read on the couch, my feet tucked under a throw blanket.
I make lunch, nothing complicated, just sandwiches, and he eats what I put in front of him without comment.
We watch a documentary about deep-sea creatures because neither of us wants to choose something that matters.
His hand rests on my knee through the last hour, warm and steady, and I don't move away.
This is what normal people do. Weekends. Together. Without bodyguards and death threats and flowers counting down.
What would it be like to have this all the time?
A news ticker scrolls across the bottom of the screen. Red banner. Update.
Federal judge murders: FBI expands task force as death toll reaches eight—
Expanding. Three months and eight bodies later, and all they can do is expand the task force. More people looking at the same nothing.
The remote is in my hand before I finish reading. I flip to a cooking show. Someone making risotto. Anything else.
Cole's thumb stops moving on my knee.
"Angelina."
"I know." My voice comes out steadier than it should. Doesn't match the cold spreading through my chest. "Eight judges. Three months."
He pulls out his phone and types something quick. Kade, probably. The response comes fast.
"Still no leads on the pattern." He sets the phone face-down on the cushion beside him. "Vanessa's running new algorithms. Nothing yet."
Sixteen days.
On screen, someone stirs risotto like it matters. Like anything matters except the fact that judges keep dying and no one knows how to stop it.
His hand returns to my knee. Warmer this time. Deliberate.
I focus on the risotto. On his hand. On anything except the countdown that keeps getting shorter.
His phone buzzes twice more through the afternoon. He reads, responds, sets it aside without comment. I don't ask. Don't want to know which lead went cold, which thread unraveled, which theory fell apart under scrutiny.
Silence from the team means no answers. No answers means we wait.
I'm so tired of waiting
But underneath the quiet, his eyes follow me through the afternoon. Not surveillance-watching. Something else. Patient, like he's waiting for me to decide something I haven't named yet.
Cole's phone buzzes. He glances at it and then turns it to show me the message.
Xander: All quiet. Pizza consumed. Movie started. She's fine.
The tension in my shoulders eases.
After dinner, Cole clears the plates in silence. I settle back on the couch with my book, the same paragraph I've read six times without absorbing a single word.
Why am I waiting for him?
"There's something I want to show you."
I look up. He's standing by the kitchen doorway, watching me the way he does—patient, like he's been waiting for the right moment and just decided this is it.
"Show me what?"
"Not here." He stands straighter. Deliberate, like everything he does. "My place."
The words land wrong. Or right. I can't tell.
His place. Somewhere I've never been. Somewhere I can't picture because I've never even tried. Two weeks of him living in my guest wing, cooking in my kitchen, learning the creaks in my stairs, and I don't know if he has a couch or what color his walls are.
He knows my coffee order, my daughter's favorite color, which step I skip on the staircase. I don't even know his address.
"Why tonight?"
"Because she's safe. Because you have the time." A pause. "Because you asked me to stop hiding things."
Did I ask that? Or did I demand it?
Both, probably.
I should say no. It's late, and I'm tired, and going to an unfamiliar place with a man I've known for two weeks—well, known again for two weeks—is the kind of decision that Dr. Peters would have opinions about.
Several opinions. Delivered in that carefully neutral therapeutic voice that somehow manages to convey judgment without technically judging.
But he just spent two weeks learning every corner of my world without inviting me into a single corner of his.
"Fine." I stand. Smooth my shirt. "But I'm driving."
"You don't know where I live."
"Then you'd better give good directions."
He picks up his keys from the counter. His hands are steady. They're always steady. Except tonight, just for a second, they're not.