Chapter 26 Angelina
twenty-six
Angelina
Footsteps in the hallway. Wrong rhythm, too quick, too light. One of the other operatives. Not him. My nails have carved crescents into my palms.
Then a longer stride, deliberate. The rhythm I've learned over the past three weeks. Cole.
The footsteps stop outside my door. Two knocks, controlled and even.
I'm at the door before I finish the thought, pulling it open.
His silhouette fills the doorway. Broad shoulders, that stillness he wears like armor. Then my eyes adjust and the details hit me.
His hands first. Dried to a dark crust around knuckles that are split and swelling. His shirt is stiff where it's drying against his collar, rust-brown at the edges. A smear along his jaw like he wiped his face and didn't realize what he was leaving behind.
The copper smell hits me a second later. Sharp. Real.
Cole doesn't move. Doesn't step forward, doesn't reach for me. Just stands there in the doorway letting me see exactly what he is. What he did.
I step forward. My hand finds his chest, and the fabric is stiff under my palm, damp in places, and underneath it his heart is pounding, fast and barely controlled. I'm pressing into the evidence, and some part of me already knows what I'm going to ask. What I need him to confirm.
"Inside."
He moves. The door clicks shut behind him.
We stand in the room. The rumpled bed behind me, the sealed door behind him. Nothing but two feet of air between us. His breath comes uneven. Mine matches it.
"Adrian?" One sharp nod, but not enough. "Say it."
His eyes hold mine, dark and intense, and the control he wears like a second skin is gone.
"He is dead."
Three words, and my whole ribcage expands. Not grief. Relief, the first full breath after years of holding it. Adrian is dead. Cole killed him. And I'm reaching for his hands like I want to hold the weapons that did it.
Because I do.
Dio mio. What does that make me?
"Come on." I take his hand and pull him toward the bathroom.
The light is harsh and unforgiving. I turn his hands over, assessing the damage. Split skin over bone, already swelling. His right hand is worse.
My hands aren't shaking as I reach for the first aid kit under the sink.
"Sit."
Cole lowers himself onto the closed toilet lid without argument, and the light catches every new detail.
His shirt rides up when he sits, and the skin underneath is already mottling — dark bruises spreading across his ribs.
The exhaustion settling into the lines around his eyes.
Heavy lids, loose mouth. The face of a man who finished what he started.
I kneel in front of him with the antiseptic and gauze, and his breath stutters. His eyes go soft for half a second before he catches himself.
"This will sting."
The antiseptic makes him hiss through his teeth when I press the soaked gauze to his knuckles, but he doesn't pull away. I clean each split one by one, watching the rust-brown dissolve into the white cotton. His hands are shaking slightly under mine, fine tremors he's trying to hide.
"What happened?"
His mouth goes hard. "He called you 'cara.'"
The word lands wrong in my chest. Adrian's word for me, back when I thought his intensity was passion, not possession. Back before I learned that cara could be a warning and a weapon all at once.
I keep cleaning. Don't stop. Don't let my hands mirror the tremor I can feel in his.
"And then?"
"I offered him a clean death." Cole's voice is flat, matter-of-fact, like he's delivering a mission report. "A blade. The chance to die with some dignity."
Seppuku. Late nights in his dorm room, his voice low and serious about honor.
"Let me guess. He refused."
"He chose to beg." His eyes are dark, unflinching. "So I gave him nothing."
The words should horrify me. The part of me that sits on a federal bench, that swore oaths, that has already bent those oaths for family.
That part should be screaming. But the rest of me, the part that remembers exactly how Adrian's hand felt around my throat, how his voice sounded when he promised no one would believe me. That part is glad.
"Good."
Cole goes still. Whatever he sees in my face, he doesn't flinch from it.
I wrap his right hand first, winding the gauze over the worst of the damage. "He was a coward. In the marriage and at the end. At least he was consistent."
His mouth twitches. Dark. Appreciating the venom.
I move to his left hand, the one that's bruised but not split. The bathroom smells like antiseptic and copper and him. The scent of his skin that I never forgot, not in twelve years.
"You are good at this."
"I've had practice." The words slip out too fast, and his whole body tenses, his hand tightening around mine.
"Chesca." Quieter now. "She fell a lot. You were at the ER three times before her second birthday."
Of course he knows. Of course he watched even that.
"She grew out of it," I say, because I don't know what else to say.
The tension eases. I finish wrapping his hand and sit back on my heels. He flexes his fingers experimentally, the white gauze stark against his skin, then looks at me. Really looks, that intense focus that sees everything I try to hide.
"Thank you."
Two words, simple, but the way he says them makes my throat tight.
I rise up on my knees, bringing my face level with his. I cup his jaw, thumbs tracing the edge of the bloodstain I haven't cleaned yet.
I reach for the washcloth on the towel bar, wet it in the sink.
It comes away rust-colored the first pass, then pink, then finally clean.
I work slowly, erasing Adrian from Cole's skin one stroke at a time.
Along the line of his face where he smeared it without thinking.
Across his cheekbone. The corner of his mouth, and when my thumb traces his lower lip he exhales like I've wounded him.
"You don’t have to do this." Low. Rough at the edges. "Any of it."
"I know."
"You could have called Sal. He would have handled it. No—" His eyes drop to my hands. Rust-colored smears on my fingertips from cleaning his knuckles. "No blood on your hands."
But I wanted to touch it. I wanted to see Adrian on his skin and wash it away myself. The moment I let him walk out that door, I became complicit.
I don't want to uncross it.
I rinse the washcloth. Watch the water swirl pink in the basin. "I needed to be part of it."
"This is mine too. What you did. I wanted it done, and you did it."
"It was personal." His bandaged hands come up to cup my face, so gentle it makes my chest ache. "Everything about you is personal."
"I know. That's why it had to be you."
I lean forward and press my mouth to his.
He kisses me back like he's starving for it, and for a moment it's just that. His mouth, copper and heat, and I sigh against his lips.
He stands, pulling me up with him, mouth still on mine.
I fist his shirt, drag him closer, and we stumble out of the bathroom doorway together.
His hands in my hair, my body melting into his, and for the first time there's no ghost between us.
No name I couldn't say. Just his mouth and copper and heat.
I shove him.
Both palms flat against his chest, hard enough that his shoulders hit the bedroom wall and the impact knocks a breath out of him.
Good.
Before he can process it, I'm on him. I fist his ruined shirt and yank him down to my mouth. This isn't a kiss. This is a siege. My teeth scrape his bottom lip, my tongue shoves past, and he groans into me like I'm pulling it out of his chest with both hands.
He grabs my hips—
I grab his wrists. Slam them against the wall on either side of his head.
"No." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "My turn."
He could break my grip in a heartbeat. He keeps his hands where I put them. Doesn't move. Doesn't take.
That. That's what I need.
Adrian never held still. Adrian grabbed.
Adrian took. Adrian decided when and how and whether I got to feel anything at all.
And if I pushed back, if I said no or not like that or stop, his hands got harder.
His voice got quieter. His control got tighter until there was no air left in the room for mine.
Cole holds still. Cole holds still and shakes.
I press into him. My hips flush against his, my stomach against the hard length of him through his pants. He's shaking. Cole Tanaka, who killed a man tonight with these hands, is shaking because I pinned his wrists to a wall.
"He never let me take." The words come out before I'm ready for them, dragged up from somewhere deep and ugly. "Three years of marriage and he never let me have."
His whole body is locked tight. Giving me what I need the only way he knows how. By holding perfectly still while I take it.
"Good boy."
A sound escapes him. Wrecked. Desperate. His head drops back against the wall.
"Hai."
My jaw unclenches. My shoulders drop. Like a fist I've been holding for eight years finally opening.
I release his wrists and shove him toward the bed. He goes. Sits when the backs of his knees hit the mattress, looks up at me with those dark eyes and waits.
My shirt is gone. I don't remember taking it off. Somewhere between the wall and the bed it just stopped existing.
His breath catches when I climb onto him, knees on either side of his hips, my weight settling onto him.
His hands hover at my sides, not touching, not until I say so.
Buttons scatter across the sheets when I yank his shirt open, and the gauze on his knuckles is bright white against my skin when I press his hands to the mattress.
"These hands." I trace the edge of the bandage on his right hand. The one I wrapped ten minutes ago, careful and tender. "I cleaned them. I took care of them." I grind down against him, his cock hard through his pants, and his breath punches out. "Now they don't move until I say."