The door closes with a heavy click, leaving us alone in chambers that no longer feel safe.
I pull the blackout curtain across the window, replacing the view she's looked at for six years—the skyline, the bay, the bridge she probably watches when verdicts weigh heavy—with a flat expanse of dark fabric. She doesn't protest. Doesn't even seem to notice.
"Recommendation." Kade's voice comes through the speaker. "Relocate to CPG headquarters. Secure rooms, controlled access, full protection."
"No."
The word hits the room hard and the line goes silent.
She plants her feet like she's preparing to argue a case before a hostile bench. "I have seventeen active cases on this docket, including DeLuca. I am not hiding in a bunker while my courtroom goes dark."
"Angelina —"
"I said no." Her voice sharpens into something closer to the woman who sentences traffickers without flinching. "I was a target before anyone left a flower on my desk. The answer was no then and it's no now."
"You have a dated countdown sitting on your desk," Kade says, an edge creeping into his professional calm.
"Which is now in an evidence bag on its way to the FBI lab." She meets my eyes with a challenge burning in hers. "And I will be here when it reaches zero, because I refuse to let some theatrical psychopath dictate how I live my life."
Theatrical psychopath.Despite everything, I feel my mouth twitch. She's not wrong about the theatrics.
I turn toward the speaker. "She stays. We adapt the protection protocol to accommodate."
Kade's exhale carries clearly through the line. He knows what this is. It's not about courtrooms or caseloads, but about who gets to make decisions about her life. After what she told me about Adrian, about the locked doors and controlled movements and isolation dressed up as devotion, I understand why she's drawing this line.
"Then you don't leave her side," Kade says. "Not for a minute. Not for a second."
"That was already the plan."
"Keep me updated." The line goes dead.
"That was already the plan."
"Keep me updated." The line goes dead.
Silence settles over the room like dust after an explosion. Just us and the black curtain and the empty space on her desk where the flower sat, the ghost of it still hanging in the air between us.
Angelina hasn't moved from where she's standing near the bookshelf, arms wrapped around herself in a way that makes her look smaller than she is. The judge who commands courtrooms has retreated somewhere deep inside, leaving behind a woman who just learned she has twenty-four days to live unless we find whoever did this.
"Figure out how to keep me alive without locking me in a cage." Her voice comes out quiet, but there's steel underneath it. "That's what I need from you, Cole. Can you do that?"
Cage.
The word lands exactly where she aimed it. What she told me about Adrian- pieces she gave up in the dark, voice flat, like reading from a transcript.
She's telling me that my protection could look like the same architecture if I'm not careful. That the line between keeping her safe and keeping her prisoner is thinner than I want to admit.
I won't be the next man who puts her in a cage, even a gilded one.
"I can do that," I say. "But you have to trust me when I tell you something isn't safe."
"Trust goes both ways."
"I'm aware."
She studies me for a long moment, her eyes searching my face for something I'm not sure I can give her. Whatever she finds there seems to satisfy her, because some of the tension bleeds out of her shoulders.
"Okay." She exhales, and the word sounds like a door opening rather than closing. "Okay."