"No," I say. "I don't."
His arm tightens around me. I press my face into his chest and let myself have this, thirty seconds where I'm not a judge, not a target, not a mother running threat assessments in my sleep. Just a woman in a bed with a man who isn't going anywhere.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I should ignore it. News alerts at this hour are never good news, and I already know what it's going to say. Another name. Another city. Another colleague I'll have to pretend I remember at a memorial I'll be too dead to attend.
I look anyway. The compulsion to know is the same one that makes me check Chesca twice, annotate every filing, document every threat. Evidence exists whether I look at it or not.
Federal Judge Carmen Delgado found dead in San Diego home. Cause of death pending.
Nine. The count is nine now.
I met her once, maybe. A conference in Sacramento three years ago? We talked about caseloads and bad courthouse coffee. She'd just gotten a corgi puppy, something with a ridiculous name. I can't remember her face, but I remember she laughed when she said it.
The warmth drains out of me so fast it's physical. One second I'm safe, and the next I'm a statistic waiting to happen. Cole feels me go rigid. He reads over my shoulder, and his arm around me shifts from comfort to something harder. Protective.
We just said we can't walk away.
Fourteen days. And the number on the other side keeps climbing.
I stare at the screen until it goes dark. The bedroom is quiet. His hand on my hip doesn't move. Neither do I.
Somewhere in San Diego, someone's phone is ringing and ringing and no one is picking up.
twenty-four
Cole
Angelina's back presses warm against my chest, her hair spread across the pillow between us. My arm rests heavy across her waist, anchoring her close even in sleep.
I've been awake for two hours. Watching the morning light shift. Listening to her breathe. Running threat assessments in the back of my mind while the rest of me notes the smaller things, the way her fingers curled around mine sometime in the night, the lavender scent of her shampoo mixing with something warmer underneath, and the steady rise and fall of her ribs beneath my palm.
Petition for Custody.
The custody papers sit on her nightstand. I've read them six times while she's slept. They don't say anything different at dawn than they did at midnight, but I keep looking anyway. Searching for the angle I'm missing. The weakness I can exploit.
Adrian's move. Calculated, legal, designed to drag her through international courts where his family's money and connections carry more weight than justice.
Angelina shifts against me, a small sound escaping her throat. Not quite awake. I spread my hand across her stomach and pull her closer, saffron and cedar mixing with her scent until I can't tell where I end and she begins.
My lips brush the back of her neck. Not seduction. Comfort. The kind I didn't know I was capable of giving until her until recently.
"What time is it?"
"Early." I keep my voice low. "Chesca's still—"
The bathroom door opens. The one connecting to Chesca's room.
We both freeze.Thank God we cleaned up and pulled on clothes before passing out last night.
The second bathroom door swings wide.
Chesca stands in the threshold with Aaron Bear dangling from one hand, her dark hair a tangled mess around her face. She's wearing her favorite pajamas, the ones with little cats, and her feet are bare against the tile.
Her eyes go wide. "Mamma?"
Her gaze swings to me. "Cole?"