Chapter 21 - Gabriel
My father’s estate sprawls before me, unchanged despite everything that’s shifted inside me. The fountain in the circular drive still sprays water that catches morning light. Bougainvillea climbs the walls in violent pink cascades.
Inside, the house smells of leather and lemon oil and something indefinable that means home.
But underneath it now, creeping from the direction of the master suite, the sharp bite of antiseptic and the sweet rot of slow dying.
My footsteps echo on marble floors I learned to walk on.
Family portraits line the hallway, my mother's eyes following me from every frame.
Father's bedroom door stands open. What used to be the master suite has become a medical ward dressed in luxury.
The four-poster bed remains, surrounded by the machinery of dying.
IV stands flank it like chrome sentries.
Monitors beep steadily, tracking heartbeats and oxygen levels.
A morphine pump sits within reach, its digital display glowing green.
My father lies propped against silk pillows, diminished but not defeated. The illness has carved away flesh, left him gaunt, but his eyes remain sharp as cut glass. His cologne, the same Tom Ford he's worn for decades, can't quite mask the smell of mortality seeping through his pores.
"Gabriel." Not surprised. Jorge Delgado is never surprised. "About time."
I close the door behind me. "They broke into her home, Papa. Stole her things. Followed her car. These are your partners?"
His eyebrows lift slightly, the most emotion he'll show. "Her? Interesting. Sit. Then tell me what the hell you’re talking about."
I remain standing, my jaw tight from holding back more than I mean to say. "The Markovics. Emilio Rosetti just showed us the whole operation, so don’t try to deny it. Fifteen years of their money flowing through our accounts."
"Why would I deny that?" He reaches for water with a hand that trembles slightly. I don't help. He wouldn't want me to. "The relationship is profitable. Stable."
"They're criminals."
"So are we." The bluntness would be shocking if I hadn't grown up hearing it. "Don't pretend you didn't know, mijo. You knew exactly what paid for your education, your suits, your life before that collar."
He's right. I did know. Not the specifics, not the names, but the shape of it. The water was always dirty. That knowledge is part of why I left.
“Well, now they’re going after someone I care about.”
“Let me guess,” he says, his eyes narrowing shrewdly. “She has something in her possession that they believe should be in theirs.”
I can’t admit that I don’t know the details, so I let the silence sit between us, watching his frail chest move up and down.
"The Markovic relationship is strictly business," Jorge eventually says, adjusting the oxygen tube at his nose.
"Whatever they're doing to recover stolen assets, that's their affair, not ours.
The father is disciplined. Dragoslav understands that patience is a business strategy.
The son is different. Cristian wants to prove something. "
"How do you separate that? How do you do business with people who—"
"Boxes." He taps his temple with one thin finger.
"Everything in its proper box. The Markovics as partners exist here.
" His left hand makes a square in the air.
"Whatever else they do exists there." Right hand, another square.
"The boxes don't touch. That's how empires survive, Gabriel. Clean separation."
My chest constricts. The word echoes through me, and suddenly I'm twenty again, the weight of that night pressing down on me, already building the walls. Already separating what happened from who I need to be in the morning.
The priest lives in one compartment: collar, prayers, service, the performance of holiness.
The man who was there when Elena died exists in another, locked and guarded.
The hunger that makes me hard when Sera walks past, that makes me grip doorframes to keep from grabbing her, that has its own sealed room.
I've been living Jorge's architecture for my entire life without knowing I inherited the blueprint.
"You understand," Jorge says, reading my face. "I can see it. You always understood better than your sister."
My hands clench at my sides. He's right, and the recognition makes bile rise in my throat. Father Gabriel and Gabriel Delgado. I kept them separate, told myself the collar erased the blood. Just like Jorge keeps "business partner" separate from "the family hunting my woman."
"Understanding and accepting are different things."
"Are they?" He shifts against the pillows, a grimace of pain quickly suppressed. "You've been gone. Not dead. Gone. Living in your little church, playing priest, pretending the Delgado name doesn't exist. Tell me that's not its own kind of box."
The truth of it makes my jaw clench harder.
Jorge studies me with those sharp eyes, the mind still razor-edged despite the morphine, despite the cancer eating him from inside.
"Are you staying this time?" The question carries weight, maybe hope. "This interest in family business. These questions. Are you back, or is this another visit before you run to your church?"
I don't answer immediately. Can't. Because I don't know. The collar sits in a nightstand drawer at La Sirena, but I haven't thrown it away. The rectory in Homestead still holds my few possessions. I'm neither priest nor prince, caught between identities that no longer hold their shape.
"Answer the question, mijo. Are you staying?"
I turn toward the door without answering. Let him read whatever he wants in the silence. Behind me, machines beep steadily, tracking the heartbeat of a king whose empire runs on logic I understand too well.
The front door closes behind me with finality.
I can't go back to La Sirena yet, can't face Sera with Jorge's mathematics still echoing in my head.
My feet find the old path to the jacaranda tree, my palm scraping against bark that's grown rough with years.
The Florida heat presses down, thick with humidity that makes breathing feel like drowning.
I make the call from beneath branches that still hold our childhood scars.
My sister answers on the second ring. She was always there for me.
"Gabriel? Everything okay?"
"Do you know anything about a family called the Markovics? Dad's been in business with them for years."
Silence. Then a long exhale that carries across a thousand miles.
"You’re calling for business? Jesus, Gabriel, I thought maybe you wanted to chat.”
“I’m just… the Markovics are going after Se—someone I care about. I just want to know everything I can about them.”
“Well, whoever they are, they probably help fund our lifestyle. You left. I stayed. What did you think paid for La Sirena's renovation? For the lawyers when I got arrested those times? For everything?"
The weight of it settles on my shoulders.
"You left," she says again, quieter. "And I don't blame you. God knows you had reasons. But I stayed. I had to learn things. See things. Make peace with things."
"Mari—"
"I'm not angry. Not anymore. I'm just tired of pretending any of us are clean."
We sit with that truth for a moment, the phone connection carrying our shared exhaustion across the distance. I press my back against the tree, feeling the ridges of our old initials carved deep when we thought this place would always be home.
La Sirena's kitchen smells like comfort: garlic, onions, cumin, some delightful combination that means Sera's cooking.
She stands at the counter with her back to me, the wooden spoon moving in steady circles through whatever she's creating.
Her shoulders are tense beneath the thin cotton of her shirt, and I fight the urge to press my mouth to the spot where her neck meets her shoulder, to feel her relax under my touch.
She knows I'm here. The slight pause in her stirring tells me that much. But she doesn't turn, doesn't acknowledge me beyond that microscopic hesitation.
I watch her for a moment from the doorway.
Watch the careful way she holds herself, the controlled movements that speak of hypervigilance.
Then she turns, and my chest constricts.
She's looking at me the way prey looks at predators: the careful study of threat.
The same micro-expressions she described using with Julian, now aimed at me like I'm something to survive.
"Dinner's almost ready," she says, voice carefully neutral. But her eyes are still tracking, still measuring. Is his jaw tight? Are his hands clenched? What mood is he carrying into my kitchen?
"Smells good."
We're speaking in code, both of us. The real conversation happens in the space between words, in what we're not saying.
I sit at the table. She brings plates, her body angled so she doesn't have to turn her back to me completely.
The domestic choreography we perfected in Homestead, but all the warmth has leaked out.
She sets the salt between us. I reach for it.
Our fingers don't touch. We're both too careful for that.
In Homestead, every shared object was a bridge.
The coffee cup passed between hands. The wooden spoon offered for tasting.
Contact disguised as coincidence, building intimacy through accumulated touches.
Now even the salt carries distance.
She is being hunted by the same people my family works with.
We eat in parallel silence. The food is perfect.
Of course it is. Sera cooks the way some people pray, with total devotion.
But I barely taste it. I'm too aware of her watching me, still assessing me like I’m a threat.
Too aware of the way her lips close around the fork, the movement of her throat when she swallows.
My cock stirs despite everything, my body refusing to acknowledge the distance my mind is trying to maintain.
"You visited your father," she says finally, not quite a question.
I push rice around my plate. "Jorge's dying slower than he'd like."
More silence. More careful consumption of perfect food that tastes like sawdust in my mouth. The woman I adore sits three feet away, close enough that I can smell the vanilla of her shampoo, and the distance might as well be miles.
She clears the plates, never quite meeting my eyes.
I watch her move through the kitchen, her kitchen now, claimed through cooking and care, and think about what she's not telling me.
The way her hips sway slightly when she walks makes my hands itch to grab her, to press her against the counter and remind us both what we are beneath all this careful distance.
This morning she left with just "running errands.
" But Logan mentioned Reyes, mentioned meetings.
She's been investigating something, building plans with Logan while I sat in that briefing learning about my father's sins.
We're both keeping secrets, maintaining our own siloes even while the walls between them crack.
"Thank you for dinner," I say, standing.
"Of course."
The distance between us isn't the table anymore.
It's not the careful way we passed the salt without touching.
It's everything we haven't told each other.
Her secrets about Julian, about the Markovic family, about whatever she's planning.
My visit to Jorge, the staying question I couldn't answer, the recognition that I understand his mathematics because I've been living by the same equations.
She turns to the stove, adjusting something that doesn't need adjusting. Still monitoring. Still maintaining distance. Still treating me like I might become the threat she's been running from.
She reaches for the wooden spoon, and for just a moment, her guard drops. I see the exhaustion underneath the vigilance, the woman who's been running for six months finally starting to feel the weight of it.
"Sera," I start, but she shakes her head.
"Not—"
"We can't keep doing this," I cut her off, my voice rough. "This distance. These secrets."
She grips the wooden spoon tighter.
"You went on some bullshit errand today," I say. "And I went to see my father. And meanwhile the Markovics are—"
"Are what?" She turns to face me fully now, and there's something dangerous in her eyes. "Are your father's business partners? Are the people your family has been in bed with for fifteen years?"
The accusation lands exactly where she meant it to.
Then she turns on her heel, and is gone.