Chapter 4 - Seraphina
The best thing about Father Gabriel is that he’s safe.
I tell myself this on Monday morning while sorting canned goods at the food pantry, building neat pyramids of green beans and corn while the grieving-widow-finds-purpose cover story writes itself.
Nobody questions a woman who shows up to organize donations.
Nobody looks too closely at someone doing God's work.
And nobody — nobody — is a threat in a clerical collar.
That's the logic. That's why the flutter in my chest when I hear his footsteps is fine.
Why the way my pulse picks up when he rounds the corner with a clipboard is harmless.
He's a priest. He's off-limits. Off-limits means I can look at him, feel things about him, use him as a reminder that I can still respond to a man without it meaning anything dangerous.
Like admiring a painting behind glass. You can want it.
You're never getting it. The glass is the point.
"Two thousand cans of cranberry sauce."
His voice comes from behind me, dry as desert sand, and the glass develops a hairline crack.
I turn, keeping my expression neutral. He's examining inventory with the precision of someone who actually cares about logistics — genuinely tracking numbers, cross-referencing his clipboard, frowning at discrepancies. His collar catches the fluorescent light. That white band. My safety glass.
"Maybe people really love cranberries," I offer, setting aside a can that expired in 2019.
"Nobody loves cranberries that much." The corner of his mouth twitches. Almost a smile, quickly killed. "They love tax deductions."
I laugh before I can stop it — genuine, unguarded — and something shifts in his eyes.
Warmth that flares hot before he banks it.
His gaze drops to my mouth for a fraction of a second.
Then the mask slides back, and he moves to the next station, and I'm left holding a dented can of cranberry sauce thinking: he’s a priest. Nothing can happen. Thank God.
Except I feel him tracking me for the rest of the morning. When I stretch to reach a high shelf. When I bend to lift a box. His attention follows like heat from a lamp, and the space between us hums with everything we're not saying.
Safe. Completely safe.
Tuesday finds me in the church basement, damp and close, sorting clothing donations with Mrs. Herrera.
Father Gabriel appears around ten with coffee.
Sets a mug on my work table. Our fingers don't touch.
He's too careful for that — maintains exactly arm's length, every time, like he's calculated the precise distance where temptation turns dangerous.
Julian never maintained distance. Julian closed distance — deliberately, strategically, until there was none left and I couldn't breathe.
Julian's proximity was a weapon. Father Gabriel's distance is a courtesy.
He's choosing not to crowd me, not to press, not to use his physical presence as leverage.
After five years of a man who weaponized closeness, Gabriel's restraint feels like oxygen.
I notice other things. The way he runs the food pantry like an operation — inventory systems, distribution schedules, volunteer coordination.
There's a brain under the collar that was built for more than homilies.
I watch him negotiate a donation from a local farm and recognize the technique: strategic warmth, calibrated charm, the ability to make someone feel like they're doing you a favour when you're the one with the leverage.
That's not seminary training. That's something else.
But it doesn't set off my alarms. Julian's competence was cold, transactional, always pointed at someone's throat.
Gabriel's competence is — warm? Directed at feeding people?
He's running logistics for canned goods, not orchestrating power plays.
The skill set is familiar. The application is completely different.
Safe, I think again. Smart and capable and disciplined and safe.
I ignore the fact that my breathing changes when he's near.
That when I look up suddenly, I catch him watching me with an intensity that has no business on a priest's face.
That my body is keeping a running tally of his hands, his jaw, the way the collar sits against his throat, the precise shade of dark in his eyes when he forgets to be careful.
I'm not attracted to him. I'm attracted to the safety of him. There's a difference.
There has to be a difference.
On Wednesday, I'm painting the storage room because it needed doing and I needed a reason to be in this building for eight hours.
The walls are institutional beige going to slightly less depressing cream.
Paint fumes make my head swim, or maybe that's just the Florida heat turning the small room into a sauna.
My shirt clings. I've tied my hair up but curls escape, sticking to my neck.
Father Gabriel keeps appearing in the doorway. Checking progress. Bringing water. Maintaining his careful distance while the air between us gets heavier with each visit.
By late afternoon, I'm cutting in along the ceiling, arm extended, balanced on my toes. I feel him before I hear him — that shift in the atmosphere, the way a room changes weight when he enters it.
"You missed a spot." He’s closer than I expected.
I don't turn. "Maybe I like leaving things unfinished."
Silence. Then, quiet: "That's dangerous thinking."
Now I turn. He's in the doorway, hands gripping the frame like he's physically holding himself back.
The light from the hallway behind him throws his face into shadow, but I can see his eyes.
They're not safe. They're not pastoral. They're the eyes of a man who's fighting something, and the something is winning.
"For who, Father?"
"For both of us."
The words hang there. Neither of us moves. I'm holding a paintbrush and he's holding a doorframe and the distance between us — his carefully maintained, precisely measured distance — feels like a dare.
I reach for a high corner. My shirt rides up. I know it does. I'm not sure I didn't do it on purpose, and that uncertainty bothers me more than the act itself.
In the doorway, Father Gabriel goes still. Not priest-still. Man-still. Hungry-still. For three heartbeats, the collar is invisible and the man underneath is looking at me like I'm the most dangerous thing in the room.
Then he clears his throat. "I'll get that ladder." His voice is wrecked. His exit is too fast.
I lower my arms slowly, pulse hammering. That was a crack in the glass, and I put it there, and the worst part is how much I liked the sound it made.
I press my thumb to the scar on my inner arm — the old burn from Abuela Rosa's kitchen. She used to say some people run hot, that they need to be careful not to burn everything they touch. I thought she meant the stove.
But this is different from Julian. It has to be.
Because Julian took what he wanted and Gabriel is holding himself back, and the difference between a man who advances and a man who restrains himself is the difference between a cage and an open door.
I can want Gabriel precisely because he won't act on it.
The collar guarantees it. The discipline guarantees it.
He'll never cross the line.
Thursday night rolls around. At nine PM, I'm finally leaving the church, my hands cramped from painting, the smell of latex and turpentine in my hair. The parking lot is dark and empty except for my car and the soft glow from the rectory window. Gabriel, still working.
I walk toward my car, fishing for keys.
The sedan is parked across the street. Dark blue, Florida plates, engine off. I wouldn't have noticed it — wouldn't have given it a second glance — except for the movement inside. The faint glow of a phone screen. The shift of a silhouette.
My body knows before my brain catches up. That tension I learned in Julian's world — the awareness that kept me alive in rooms full of men who made people disappear. The hair on my neck rises.
Two car doors open. Two men get out. They don't bother with pretense — they're walking toward me across the lot with the unhurried purpose of professionals who've done this before.
One thick-necked, heavy through the shoulders.
The other leaner, hands in his jacket in a way that's meant to communicate.
The Markovics. Or their people. It has to be. They found me.
My pulse spikes, and underneath the fear, the thing I hate about myself: that electric aliveness, that sick thrill that says danger is here and I'm about to feel real. I am so fucked up.
Keys between my fingers. Makeshift weapon. Church door twenty feet behind me — unlocked, because Gabriel is still inside. I calculate distances, angles, odds. Two professionals, one of me, a dark parking lot, no witnesses.
I turn back toward the church. Not running. Running shows fear.
The rectory door opens.
Gabriel steps out. Jacket on, keys in hand, heading to lock up. He sees me crossing the lot. Sees the men. Reads the entire situation in about one second.
What happens to his face is the most frightening thing I've ever seen.
Not because it's violent. Because it's familiar.
Because the shift from priest to something else happens with the speed and ease of a man putting on a coat he's worn a thousand times.
One moment, Father Gabriel. The next — someone I don't have a name for.
Someone whose body rearranges itself into angles I recognise from Julian's security detail.
Shoulders dropping, weight shifting forward, hands loose and ready.
He walks toward us. Not hurrying. Covering ground with a deliberate, coiled purpose that makes both men slow their approach. He reaches me, positions himself between me and them.