Chapter 12 - Seraphina #2
"I watched your sister go through almost a decade of clubs and tabloids and substances I couldn't identify and men who didn't deserve to breathe the same air as her.
Years of showing up at La Sirena at two in the morning because no one else would.
Endless nights of pouring her into cars and cleaning up her mess and lying to your father about how bad it was. "
Watching Gabriel take Logan's verbal punishment makes something twist in my chest. This is the man who dropped to his knees for me on an altar, and now he's being reminded of every person he failed before me.
I want to defend him. I want to run. I want to take his hand and tell Logan that Gabriel is trying, God, he's trying, but that's not my story to tell.
Instead, I shift closer to him, just slightly, letting my knee press against his under the table.
He doesn't acknowledge it, but I feel the tension in his body ease a fraction.
The silence does the work.
"She's better now. She put herself back together. Nico helped. I helped. You didn't. You were here." He looks around the rectory, the bare walls, the empty kitchen that I've only just begun to fill. "Doing whatever this is."
The gesture encompasses everything: the priesthood, the self-punishment, the eight-year exile. Logan's hand sweeps the rectory as if it's evidence in a case he's been building since Gabriel left.
Gabriel says nothing for a long time. Then, quietly:
"You're right."
It's not what Logan expected. I can see it, the fractional shift in his composure, the half-second where the prepared argument meets an admission instead of a defense and doesn't know where to land.
"I know what I did," Gabriel says. "I know what it cost her. I know what it cost you. I abandoned her when she needed me. I don't have a defense for it."
Logan looks at him. The fury is still there. Years of fury don't evaporate because someone agrees with you. But something else enters his expression. Not forgiveness, too early for that. Recognition, maybe. The acknowledgment that the man sitting across from him is not the man who left.
His eyes flick to me.
"Be careful, Miss Sera," Logan says, his voice carrying a warning wrapped in silk. "The Delgado men have a habit of destroying the women they love."
Gabriel shifts again, that predator tension returning. "Logan."
He picks up the folder. Straightens the papers. Reassembles his professional exterior.
"Wednesday," he says. "The lawyers need those by Wednesday. I'll have a courier pick them up."
Gabriel walks Logan to the door. They exchange words I can't hear, low, private, the frequency of two men who have more to say than one visit can hold.
I stay at the table, trying to slow my racing pulse, trying to process the Rosetti connection and what it means for my safety.
For Gabriel's. For whatever this thing between us is becoming.
But Logan, on his way out, stops in the kitchen doorway. Looks at me. The full assessment again, but this time he holds it a beat longer. I meet his gaze steadily, even though my heart is hammering.
"The kitchen looks different," he says. To me, not to Gabriel.
"I bought groceries," I say.
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Logan Cruz doesn't seem like a man who smiles casually. Something drier.
"Keep buying them," he says. Then, softer, almost gentle: "He needs someone who isn't afraid of what he used to be."
And leaves.
The door closes. Gabriel stands in the hallway. The rectory is quiet again. Our bubble, which Logan punctured for forty-five minutes, is reforming. But the air inside it has changed. It's thicker now, charged with everything Logan revealed and everything I'm still processing.
Gabriel returns to the kitchen. Sits. He looks heavier.
The weight of Logan's visit settling on him like sediment.
Without thinking, I reach for his hand, not through the coffee cup this time, but directly, skin to skin.
His fingers close around mine immediately, desperately, like I'm the only thing keeping him anchored.
"Logan is our operations manager," he says. "He runs La Sirena, my sister's club. He's been running everything, really, since my father got sick."
The "our" lands. Not "their." Our. The family isn't something he left. It's something he's tethered to, and the rope has been there all along.
I squeeze his hand. Feel the weight of his guilt, his grief, all of it pouring through our joined fingers. Even with Logan's revelation about the Rosettis, even with my world tilting on its axis, all I want in this moment is to ease his pain.
He pulls me closer, and I go willingly, ending up in his lap, his arms around me, my face buried in his neck. I breathe him in: incense and soap and underneath it, him, just Gabriel. Not the priest, not the Delgado heir. The man who's holding me like I'm the only real thing in his world.
"The Rosettis," I whisper against his skin. "Your family knows the Rosettis."
His arms tighten. "Does that scare you?"
I pull back to look at him. His dark eyes search mine, and I see the fear there, that I'll run, that this is too much, that his world is too dangerous.
"Everything about you scares me," I tell him honestly. "And I can't seem to stay away."