6. Gabriel’s Gaze
Gabriel's Gaze
Gabriel
The house is wrong.
I've been home for four days, and I've felt it every moment—a shift in the atmosphere, a change in the pressure, the kind of wrong that you notice before you can name it. The kind of wrong that makes the hair on your arms stand up and your back teeth ache.
My father is not himself.
I watch him at dinner. He pushes food around his plate—the same food he's been eating for twenty years, prepared by the same chef, served at the same hour—but he doesn't taste it.
His eyes are elsewhere. Somewhere beyond the dining room, beyond the mansion, beyond the empire he built with his own two hands.
He's thinking about something. Or someone.
I've never seen him like this. My mother died when I was eight and after that, my father became a monument.
Cold. Unmoving. The kind of man who didn't grieve because grieving was inefficient.
He buried her and buried whatever softness he'd possessed and became the thing he needed to be: the architect.
The patriarch. The man who could order a death and sleep through the night.
I've never seen him look at another woman. Not once. Not in ten years.
But he's looking at something now. And I need to know what.
The first time I follow him, I tell myself it's curiosity.
The second time, I tell myself it's concern.
The third time, I stop lying.
He leaves the house at eleven-thirty, dressed in a suit that costs more than most people's rent, and he drives himself—no driver, no security, just him and the car and whatever's pulling him into the city.
I wait five minutes, then take my own car.
An old Honda, nondescript, the kind of car that doesn't draw attention.
I keep my distance. I've been watching him my whole life.
I know how to follow without being seen.
He drives to a diner. A 24-hour place on LaSalle, neon sign buzzing, the kind of establishment that exists for people who have nowhere else to go. He parks in the lot and walks inside, and I park across the street and turn off my engine and watch.
The window is large. The light inside is yellow and unforgiving. I can see almost everything.
My father sits at the counter. Not a booth—the counter. The kind of seat where you sit when you want to talk to the person behind it. He's facing away from me, but I can see the woman he's talking to.
She's young. Younger than me, maybe, though it's hard to tell from this distance.
Dark hair pulled back. An apron tied around her waist. She moves like someone who's used to working—efficient, economical, no wasted motion.
She pours him coffee without being asked, and I watch my father's shoulders relax in a way I've never seen before.
She's not afraid of him.
That's what I notice first. Not her face, not her body, not the way she moves.
The absence of fear. My father is a man who inspires fear the way the ocean inspires drowning—inevitably, impersonally, without malice.
People are afraid of him because they should be.
Because he has killed. Because he will kill again.
Because the thing that lives behind his eyes is patient and cold and absolutely without mercy.
But this woman—this girl—she laughs at something he says. A real laugh, not a polite one. And my father's shoulders shake slightly, and I realize he's laughing too.
I've never heard my father laugh. Not really. Not the kind of laugh that comes from somewhere genuine.
I sit in my car for two hours, watching through the window.
The cold seeps through my jacket, through my skin, through the bones of my fingers where they grip the steering wheel.
But I don't start the engine. I don't turn on the heat.
I don't do anything that might draw attention to the car across the street.
I just watch.
Her hands. I notice her hands. They're steady—always moving, always doing something, wiping the counter, pouring coffee, cutting pie. She has good hands. The kind of hands that belong to someone who knows how to use them.
She touches my father once. Just a brush—her fingers against his wrist when she sets down his coffee. An accident, maybe. Or not. But I see the way his hand turns toward hers, just slightly, like a flower turning toward the sun.
I've never seen my father want anything. He has everything. He built everything. Want is for people who don't already own the world.
But he wants her. I can see it from across the street, through a dirty window, in the yellow light of a diner that smells like bacon grease and despair.
He wants her. And she doesn't even know who he is.
I go back the next night.
And the night after that.
I tell myself I'm studying him. Trying to understand what's happening to him, what's changing him, what threat this woman might pose to the family. I tell myself I'm being responsible. The heir to the empire—or one of them, anyway, Nathan would remind me—has a duty to protect what his father built.
But I'm not watching my father anymore.
I'm watching her.
She works the graveyard shift. I learn that from watching.
She comes in at ten-thirty, ties her apron, checks the coffee, rearranges the pie case.
She talks to the cook—a man named Del, according to the glimpses I catch of his nametag—and sometimes she laughs, and sometimes she doesn't, and sometimes she stands at the window and stares out at the street with an expression that looks like homesickness.
She's not from here. I can tell. The way she moves, the way she holds herself, the way she flinches at sirens—she's not a city person. She's from somewhere else. Somewhere quieter.
My father comes at midnight. Every night. He stays until two or three, and then he leaves, and she watches him go with an expression I'm still trying to decipher.
On the fourth night, I decide to stop watching from the car.
The door chimes when I walk in.
Cheap and cheerful. The sound makes me want to flinch, but I don't. I've been trained not to flinch. I've been trained to walk into rooms like I belong there, even when every instinct is telling me to turn around and run.
The diner is empty except for the cook—a large man in a stained apron who glances up from his grill and then looks away—and her.
Monika. I know her name now. I heard my father say it, through the window, the shape of it on his lips like something precious.
She's behind the counter, wiping it down with a rag. She doesn't look up when I walk in. Just keeps wiping, circular motions, the kind of cleaning that's more about keeping her hands busy than about actual cleanliness.
"Take a seat," she says. "I'll be right with you."
I sit at the counter. Not the stool my father uses—I've memorized which one that is, the second from the left—but the one next to it. Close enough to talk. Far enough to pretend I'm not watching.
She finishes wiping and turns to face me. And for the first time, I see her up close.
She's pretty. Not beautiful—not in the way the women in my father's world are beautiful, polished and perfect and purchased.
She's pretty in a way that feels accidental.
Her face is open. Her eyes are brown, the color of river stones, and they look at me like she's actually seeing me, not just cataloging me as another customer.
"Hi," she says. "What can I get you?"
"Coffee," I say. "Black."
She pours it without comment. The coffee pot is heavy, and her hands are steady, and I watch the steam curl up between us.
"You're new," she says.
"I've been in the neighborhood a few times. Never stopped in."
"Where are you from?"
"Around."
She raises an eyebrow. "That's not an answer."
"No," I agree. "It's not."
Something flickers across her face. Recognition, maybe. Or amusement. "You sound like someone I know."
"Who's that?"
"Just a guy. Comes in late. Orders the same thing." She sets down the coffee pot and leans against the counter, across from me. "He never answers questions either."
"Maybe it's a personality type."
"Maybe it's a conspiracy."
I smile before I can stop myself. It feels strange—smiling at a stranger, in a diner, at midnight.
I don't do this. I don't talk to people I don't know.
I don't sit in public places and let myself be seen.
I'm Gabriel Mire, and my last name is a weight I carry everywhere, and most people look at me like they're trying to calculate whether I'm worth the risk.
She doesn't look at me like that. She looks at me like I'm just a person. Like my last name doesn't matter. Like I could be anyone, and she'd still be standing here, pouring coffee, asking questions.
"I'm Gabe," I say. The lie comes easily. It's not even a lie, really—just an omission. Gabe is a nickname. Gabe could be anyone.
"Monika." She points to her nametag. "Welcome to the diner, Gabe. Try not to get stabbed."
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing. Inside joke." She turns away to check the coffee pot, and I watch the muscles in her back move under her uniform, and I feel something shift in my chest. Something I don't have a name for.
"You're a student," I say. It's not a question. There's something about the way she holds herself—the tiredness around her eyes, the way she checks the clock like she's counting down to something—that reminds me of myself during finals week.
"Was," she says. "Not anymore."
"What did you study?"
"Pre-vet. For a while."
"Veterinary medicine?"
She nods. "I wanted to be a vet. Had the grades, had the experience, had the hands." She holds them up—those steady hands, the ones I've been watching through the window for four nights. "Didn't have the money."
The words land somewhere soft. Somewhere I didn't know I had.
"That's what I want," I say. The words come out before I can stop them. "Medicine. I'm... I'm in school for it. Pre-med."
She looks at me differently then. Not with pity—I would have hated that—but with something that looks like recognition. Like she sees something in me that she sees in herself.