I pull my hand back and get out of the car. Walk to my front door on legs that don't feel entirely steady.
The keys scrape against the lock because my hands are shaking—not from fear this time, but from something else entirely. It takes me two tries to get the key in. Three to actually turn it. I push the door open and turn around.
He's still in the car. Engine off. Giving me space.
Space I don't want.
Go inside. Shower. Process. Be a functional adult.
I am so goddamn tired of being functional.
"Come inside."
I don't recognize my own voice. Lower, and I don't care.
He doesn't move. He's watching me through the windshield, waiting for me to be sure.
"Cole."
His hand moves to the door handle.
"Come inside."
He doesn't ask if I'm certain. Doesn't offer me an out or a chance to change my mind. He just opens the door and crosses my driveway with those bloody hands hanging at his sides, weapons he hasn't decided whether to sheathe.
He stops in front of me on the porch. Close enough that I can see every crack in the dried blood on his knuckles.
The setting sun catches his face and gilds him in gold, and he looks like something out of the stories Nonna Rosa used to tell me when I was small.
Not the gentle saints with their lambs and their halos, but the other ones. The angels with flaming swords who guarded the gates of Eden. The kind of holiness that came with a body count.
What am I doing? What am I about to do?
I step backward into my house and hold the door open for him.
I guess I'm about to find out.
eighteen
Angelina
"Oyelaran," Cole says.
No preamble. Just the name, dropped into the car's silence like a stone into still water.
I stare at the dashboard. The heater pushes warm air across my knuckles where they grip my briefcase strap. Outside, San Francisco crawls past in its usual Thursday fog, and somewhere in Tucson a federal judge is dead.
"When?"
"Last night. Kade got the call at four AM." He keeps his eyes on the road, his voice carefully neutral in that way that means he's holding something back. "Cardiac arrest is the official story, but Remy says the tox screen will tell a different one."
Judge Adebayo Oyelaran. Southern District of Arizona. Sixty-one years old. Three grandchildren.
I know because I looked. After Sandoval, I looked up every federal judge with an active trafficking docket. Read their bios. Studied their faces. Tried to see them as names on a list insteadof colleagues with families who will get the same phone call mine will get in seventeen days if—
Seventeen.
The number sits in my chest like a stone I can't cough up.