"Stay close today."
Her eyes meet mine for the first time since last night. A flash of heat, then something like anger, then nothing at all. The mask sliding over it, smooth and impenetrable.
She pulls free and her heels hit concrete, the sharp sound echoing through the garage.
I follow.
The elevator doors close and her reflection watches me from the brushed steel, jaw set, briefcase strap cutting a line across her shoulder. By the fourth floor, whatever she was last night—soft, vulnerable, crying in my arms—has been packed away into whatever compartment she keeps such things.
Judge Castellano steps out.
I fall into position behind her left shoulder and we move down the empty hallway, her heels marking a rhythm I've memorized over months of surveillance. Seventy-three steps from elevator to chambers at her usual pace. Today she's walking faster, putting distance between herself and whatever happened in the guest room.
The distance is an illusion. She can walk as fast as she wants. I will always be right behind her.
We reach her chambers. I take the key from her hand, she doesn't protest, just releases it when my fingers brush hers, and turn the lock. The door swings open and I step in first, scanning left to right the way I've done a thousand times in a thousand rooms.
Desk. Window. Bookshelves. Standard configurations, nothing out of place.
Then the smell hits me.
Something sweet beneath the recycled air and the faint mustiness of old legal volumes. Wrong for a federal courthouse. Wrong for this room. My hand moves toward my weapon before I've consciously identified the threat.
The flowers.
Small purple blooms cluster along leafy vines spilling from a crystal vase, the small flowers catching morning sun through the window.
Sitting in the center of her desk where her coffee cup should be, exactly where she would see it the moment she walked in.
Belladonna.Deadly nightshade.
The Gardener found her.
A white card rests beside the vase, two words written in careful handwriting that probably won't match anything in any database because whoever did this is too smart for obvious mistakes.
24 days.
I process the implications in the space between one heartbeat and the next. This is a federal courthouse with metal detectors at every entrance, ID checks at the security desk, her chambers locked—I just used the key.
Someone bypassed all of it. The desk lamp glows in the far corner, the same lamp she left on last night when we walked out together. Someone came in after her, after hours, after the building should have been empty, and placed this like a gift.
While she was in bed. Maybe even while I was inside her, making her cry out against my palm, someone was here. Marking her. Counting down.
I failed. The realization lands like a blade between my ribs.
Twenty-four days. That's how long she has unless I find whoever did this and end them.
My phone is at my ear before I've made the conscious decision to call. "Kade. We have a situation."
I give him the details in short sentences: federal courthouse, belladonna, her chambers, twenty-four days on the card. My voice stays level because that's what training does, that's what discipline provides, but underneath it something hot and sharp is uncoiling in my chest.
Behind me, her voice from the doorway.
"Cole?"
"Hold," I say into the phone. Then I'm moving, shifting into the doorframe to block her line of sight to the desk, my hand finding her elbow to guide her back into the hallway.
Too late. She's already seen it.