Chapter 5 - Gabriel
The collar is in the glove compartment. The suit fits like I never took it off.
I stand beside the valet stand at the waterfront estate, watching October light catch on Biscayne Bay.
The Italian fabric sits on my shoulders like memory, custom-tailored, cut like a weapon, the kind of suit that changes how people see you before you open your mouth.
After three years of rough clerical cloth, the silk lining feels obscene against my skin.
Every movement reminds me what I gave up. What I'm walking back into.
Marisol sent it. Of course she kept my measurements. Of course she knew exactly what would make me look like the prince returning.
The valet takes my keys with the deference reserved for men in suits like this. Not the casual efficiency they'd show a priest. This is the choreographed respect for someone who matters, someone whose family name is etched into the building behind us.
I walk toward the entrance and the room opens before I reach it.
Not the doors, those are already open, staff positioned like sentries.
The space itself opens, the way it always did.
People shift without realizing, creating a corridor.
Security nods with recognition they can't quite place. The suit speaks before I do: Delgado.
The venue is one of those Old Miami estates that hosted Kennedy and Capone with equal discretion.
Colonial arches, marble that stays cool despite the heat, gardens that need constant maintenance.
The Foundation has rented it for the night, though rented is the wrong word.
When you're the Delgados, doors open. Venues appear.
The city reshapes itself around your needs.
"Gabriel."
Marisol finds me before I'm three steps inside.
She's luminous, not trying, just is. Golden in something that probably has a designer's name I'd recognize if I still paid attention.
She's in her element here, running the Foundation with the same intensity she brings to everything.
My sister, who I abandoned with a corpse and a secret, pulling me into her orbit like gravity.
"You came." She reaches up, straightens my lapel with the automatic gesture of someone who's been fixing men's collars her whole life. First our father's, now mine. "Try not to look like someone's torturing you."
"I was aiming for 'man who hasn't worn a suit in years,'" I say. "But torture works too."
She laughs, not the polite society laugh she uses with donors, but the real one—sharp and quick, gone before anyone notices. Her hand drops from my lapel to my arm, squeezing once before letting go. A gesture that says more than the words we aren't speaking.
She links her arm through mine, and for a moment we're children again, before the money got complicated, before our mother died, before I killed someone and ran to God. "Come on. People are asking about you."
Her new husband Nico appears at her shoulder, steady presence, military precision translated into a dinner jacket.
We exchange a nod that carries more than words.
Soldier to soldier, each serving different generals.
His hand rests on Marisol's lower back with the unconscious protectiveness of a man who's chosen his territory.
"Good to see you," he says, and means it.
"Likewise."
The room spreads before us. Champagne and calculation, silk and strategy. The legitimate face of families whose money started in darker soil. Everyone here knows it. No one mentions it. That's the beauty of a charity gala, washing reputation through tax-deductible philanthropy.
They come in waves. The donors, the politicians, the people who matter in rooms where checks get written. They want to see the Delgado son, the priest who might not be a priest anymore, the heir who abdicated maybe returning.
"Gabriel Delgado." A man in his sixties, extending his hand, someone who clearly knew my father. "Heard you were back from… where was it? Homestead?"
"Still there, actually." The handshake is automatic: firm, brief, the exact pressure that says I could hurt you but choose not to. My father taught me that grip when I was twelve. The muscle memory is perfect. "Just here for Marisol."
"Of course, of course." His eyes are already calculating, filing information. "Your father… Jorge built something remarkable with the Foundation. Shame about his health. Good to see family continuity."
The weight of his absence sits heavy. Tonight his chair is empty because the cancer won't let him stand long enough to wear the suit. I'm standing where he stood, and the weight settles across my shoulders alongside the Italian wool.
The prosecutor finds me next, all teeth and implications. "Father Delgado. Or just Gabriel now? Hard to keep track." He leans in like we're sharing secrets. "Your family's been so generous with judicial campaign contributions. We appreciate the… civic engagement."
The threat is polished but clear. He knows which judges take our money, knows about the bodies that stay buried, the machinery that keeps the Delgado name clean. I deploy the smile that isn't quite agreement, isn't quite refusal.
The skill is horrifying in its fluency. Years of parish coffee hours, and I move through this room like I never left. Reading the layers beneath each conversation: who needs what, who fears what, who can be useful.
This is the native language. Not Latin. Not liturgy. This: the music of power, the grammar of strategic connection. I'm fluent in a tongue I claimed to forget, and the ease of it makes me sick.
Except.
Except I feel it. The thing Sera described in the confessional, in the dark, with that voice that's been living in my head for ten days. I only feel real when things are on the edge of disaster. The room hums with beautiful danger, and I'm more alive than I've been in three years.
And then I see her.
The champagne glass stops halfway to my mouth.
My cock stirs, recognizing her before my brain catches up.
Eight years of conditioning versus ten days of her voice in my head.
Not even a contest. My body responds immediately, helplessly, the same reaction that had me hard in a confessional while she confessed her sins.
She's across the space, moving through a cluster of men in European suits.
Not the Sera from Homestead, the woman in jeans sorting canned goods, paint in her hair, that warm laugh in the churchyard.
This is someone else entirely. Someone wearing an expensive gown like armor, like she was born in it.
The transformation is complete. Dark hair loose instead of pulled back, falling in waves that catch the light.
The gown is black, clearly costly, the kind of dress that transforms a woman completely.
She's laughing at something someone said, but it's not the laugh I know.
This one is polished, strategic, designed to make the man hearing it feel clever.
She's working the room.
The way she angles her body to include or exclude. The questions that sound casual but aren't. The progression from group to group that looks social but has a pattern, a purpose. She's not just familiar with this world. She's trained for it.
The champagne glass trembles slightly. The cold crystal against my palm does nothing to cool the heat spreading through me. I set it down before I shatter it.
She touches a man's arm, leans in to hear him better, and he preens under the attention. I have to grip the edge of the bar to keep from crossing the room and breaking his fingers. The collar might be off, but apparently the possessive bastard underneath never left.
My mind races through possibilities, none of them good.
Widows who know how to work rooms like this didn't marry accountants.
Women who can transform this completely aren't running from simple grief.
She's here for a reason, and I watch her track toward it with the patient purpose of someone who's very good at getting what she wants.
I stand absolutely still, watching this dangerous version of the woman who's been slowly dismantling my self-control for the past ten days.
The way she moves in heels like she was born in them.
The confidence that makes the gown look like an afterthought instead of a statement.
The smile that promises nothing while suggesting everything.
My body throbs with want. Every inch of her I can see, the curve of her throat, the bare shoulders, the way the dress clings, feeds the hunger that's been eating me alive since she walked into my confessional.
She hasn't seen me. She's focused, intent, working toward something on the other side of the room. I could leave. Could disappear into another cluster of donors, avoid this collision.
Instead, I watch. Like I've been watching her all week, pretending I'm not.
Except now the collar's in my car and the suit's on my body and I'm not Father Gabriel anymore.
I'm just a man watching a dangerous woman work a room, wondering what the hell she's really doing here.
And fighting the urge to throw her over my shoulder and find out exactly how that dress comes off.
"Gabriel Delgado! There you are."
The name carries across the space. A woman’s voice, bright with champagne and a hint of lust, calling me over. My surname rings through the air like a bell.
Sera's head turns.
I watch it happen in real time. The recognition landing not gradually but all at once, like a tide hitting a seawall. Her eyes find me across the room, the suit, the setting, the name, and everything she thought she knew rearranges itself in the space of a heartbeat.