Chapter 29 - Gabriel
My eyes track from the bag to Seraphina, collapsed on the floor. I know this moment. I’ve lived it from both sides. The person who stays, the person who leaves. The choice made in darkness.
"You packed," I say, voice rough from sleep.
She doesn't deny it. Can't. The evidence sits there like a confession.
"Yesterday," she says, "when you killed that man—" she stops, seeming unsure.
"I scared you," I finish for her.
"No." She shakes my head. "That's the problem. I wasn't scared. I was…" She doesn’t say the word, but her body betrays her with a flush that crawls up her neck.
My dick twitches as my eyes widen. I understand exactly what she’s not saying.
"Julian conditioned me to respond to violence," she whispers. "To find power arousing. To stay with dangerous men. I don't know what's me anymore and what's his programming."
"Maybe we're both just collections of other people's influences," I say. "Julian. The church. My father. Your abuela."
"Rosa would hate that idea." She smiles faintly. "She believed in souls. In something underneath everything else that can't be touched."
"What do you believe?"
The question sits heavy between us.
I cross to my angel, movements careful like she’s something that might startle. I crouch beside her, close enough to smell the whiskey on her breath, to see the salt of dried tears. “Tell me you’re not going to leave.”
She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me with eyes that have been crying. Red-rimmed, swollen, the kind of crying that happens in the dark when you’re trying not to make noise. “It will be easier if I just disappear.”
“Easier.” The word burns in my mouth.
“Vanish without a word,” she says, voice hoarse, like she’s been talking to herself all night. “Remove myself from this fucking world of yours.”
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth ache. Heat rises in my chest, spreading through my arms, my hands. She was going to leave. Without goodbye. Without explanation. Just gone like she never existed here.
I stand abruptly, putting distance between us because if I stay close I might grab her, shake her, beg. My hands curl into fists, knuckles white.
“How could you even think about—” I stop, breathe hard through my nose.
The packed bag sits there like evidence of a crime.
I want to kick it, scatter her carefully folded clothes across the floor, make leaving messy instead of neat.
“You were going to fold our life into that bag and just walk away?”
She’s still on the floor, looking up at me with exhaustion that goes bone-deep.
“I’ve done it before. Julian taught me how to disappear.
The men before Julian too.” She pushes hair back from her face with a trembling hand.
“I know how to become small enough to fit through any exit. How to vanish so completely it’s like I never existed. ”
The casual way she says it, like it’s a skill set, like a resume line, makes my chest burn.
Sera pushes herself up from the floor, using the cabinet for support.
Her legs shake slightly. How long was she sitting there?
Hours? All night? Standing now, her exhaustion transforms into something sharper.
“And you—” She points at me, finger steady despite everything. “You did exactly the same thing to Marisol.”
The accusation lands hard in my gut.
“Seminary wasn’t a calling, Gabriel. It was abandonment dressed up as faith.
” Her voice gains strength with each word.
“You left your sister alone with your mother dead and your father dying. Hiding in that collar while Marisol suffocated in clubs and coke and whatever else she could find to fill the hole you left.”
I want to defend myself, to say it was different, but my throat closes around the lie.
“You want to lecture me about leaving?” She’s fully alive now, exhaustion burned away by anger.
“You left everyone who loved you. Called it God’s will.
Built walls of liturgy and cold showers and called them devotion when really you were just running.
Always running. From Elena, from your family, from yourself.
Abandoning everyone and calling it holy. ”
Each word finds its mark. My mother dying just before I went to seminary. Marisol’s overdose I heard about third-hand. Jorge alone in that massive estate.
“You think I don’t—” She stops, presses her palms against her temples, then drops them. “God, I love you and I watch you do it even here—”
The words tumble out mid-sentence, not a declaration but shrapnel. She doesn’t pause, doesn’t give the love confession space to breathe, just keeps going.
“These careful distances. The way you divide yourself into pieces. Priest-Gabriel, Delgado-Gabriel, the Gabriel who fucked me in that sacristy. Always keeping one foot—you don’t protect people, Gabriel.
You leave them.” Her voice cracks. “You’ll leave me too.
Just like Marisol. Just like everyone. So why shouldn’t I—why shouldn’t I get there first? ”
The accusation sits in my gut like broken glass. She loves me. Said it buried in anger, wrapped in accusation, but she said it. And she’s right about the rest. I have no answer because it’s true. I do leave, I do run, I do dress abandonment as virtue.
When I turn and walk out the door, I’m proving her point with every step.
My church in Homestead feels foreign and familiar at once, like returning to a childhood home.
Too small, too neat, too rundown, but somehow exactly unchanged.
The incense smells wrong, sweeter, heavier, mixed with something floral my mother would have recognized.
Gardenia, maybe—the scent she wore to Mass when I was young, before illness took her perfume away along with everything else.
Crickets chirp from outside instead of traffic noise, and the light that spills through the stained glass windows looks somehow pure and innocent.
I sit in a middle pew. The wood is hard against my spine, catching my shirt when I shift. No softness here. Just a man and an altar and a God I need to fight.
I grip the pew in front of me until my knuckles ache. I’ve given so much to this institution, and for what? Was any of it real faith or just fear wearing vestments? Running to God because running from Elena wasn’t far enough?
My head drops forward. Sweat beads at my temples despite the church’s coolness.
The original bargain rises in my memory.
Twenty years old, Elena’s body cooling, my hands still trembling.
The promise I made in my childhood church: take my desire, take my body, take my life, just make me safe. Make women safe from me.
But there were real parts. I force myself through the honest accounting.
Mrs. álvarez in the third pew every Sunday, bringing me casseroles I didn’t want, gripping my hands after Mass because she needed to hold onto something and I was there. Real loneliness I really eased.
The teenager who came to confession about cutting. Week after week, the careful conversation through the screen, never pushing, just listening, until one day she said she’d stopped. That the words helped. My words. Real pain I really helped heal.
The baptism last spring. The Ramírez baby, finally here after three miscarriages. The way the parents wept when I poured the water. The way my own eyes burned because their joy was so pure it hurt to witness. I’d felt God in that moment. Really felt Him. Not performance. Presence.
Tomás. Every Tuesday coffee. The man who knew about Elena, knew I was running, and loved me anyway. Believed in my ministry even knowing its poisoned foundation.
“God uses broken tools,” Tomás said once. “Otherwise He’d have no tools at all.”
Even my own homilies surprised me sometimes. When the words came from somewhere deeper than preparation. When Mrs. Santiago said my sermon on mercy saved her marriage. When the Gospel felt alive in my mouth instead of dead on my tongue.
Real ministry. Real compassion. Real moments of grace.
My hands tighten on the pew. But even those real parts grew from poisoned soil.
Every genuine moment traces back to that night with Elena—her breath slowing, stopping, gone.
My hands on her throat, the twenty-year-old who lost control, who held on three seconds too long because she asked for more and I gave it.
The boy who became a priest not from calling but from horror.
Good work built on horror is still horror, even when the work itself brings light.
My fist slams into the pew. The crack echoes through the empty church. Pain explodes in my knuckles but I don’t care.
“Where were You? When she was dying? When I was destroying Marisol by leaving? Where the fuck were You?”
My anger at God builds volcanic, years of suppressed rage finally erupting—for the silence when I begged for answers, for Elena’s death that shaped everything after, for the collar that worked as a cage but never as a cure.
I still wanted, still burned, still went hard at the sight of a woman’s throat.
“Eight years!” I’m on my feet, shouting at the crucifix. “Eight years I gave You everything. And You gave me nothing. No peace. No answers. Just silence and hunger and more fucking silence.”
My voice cracks. But even this fury is its own faith—fighting with Someone I still believe is listening. You don’t rage at nothing. You don’t scream at absence. This anger proves Someone is there.
I slump back into the pew, exhausted. Who am I without the collar and without the running? Not the priest—that part’s done. Not the Delgado prince—that was never real. Not the twenty-year-old who killed Elena—that boy died that night too.
Is there anything beneath all these identities? Or am I just empty architecture, all walls and no center?