Chapter 27 - Seraphina
Gabriel’s eyes lock with mine across the hotel suite, and for a moment, time suspends.
Cristian Markovic is still alive under his hands, throat purpling, body twitching in its final protests.
I should look away. Should feel horror at watching a man die.
Should do something other than sit perfectly still in this leather chair, my pulse hammering between my legs.
His grip tightens. Deliberate. Patient. Gabriel's face shows no rage, no loss of control, just the terrible clarity of a man who has chosen exactly what he's doing.
His thumbs press deeper into Cristian's windpipe, and I watch the vessels burst in the younger man's eyes, watch his fingers claw weakly at Gabriel's wrists, watch the life drain from him like water from a broken glass.
My pussy clenches. The response is immediate, involuntary, my body recognizing something it was trained to want.
Five years of Julian's hands on my throat, of orgasms that came harder when I couldn't breathe, of my nervous system learning to translate controlled violence into arousal.
Julian's fingerprints are all over this response, the way my thighs press together, the way wetness gathers between them, the way my breath catches not in horror but in recognition.
I'm wet, and a man is dying three feet from me, and the shame of that combination makes my face burn even as my body responds exactly the way Julian conditioned it to.
Cristian's body goes slack. Not gradually, all at once, like a marionette with cut strings. Gabriel holds the grip for another ten seconds, making sure, then releases him. The body drops to the expensive carpet with a soft thud. No drama. Just meat that used to be a man.
Gabriel straightens slowly, looking at his hands. They're steady. No shaking, no trembling with adrenaline or horror. Just his mother's elegant fingers, unmarked despite what they just did. Then he looks at me.
The silence in the suite is absolute. The drive sits on the coffee table between us, thirty million dollars and a lifetime of secrets, and neither of us moves toward it.
We're both still inside this moment, inside what just happened, inside the recognition that he killed for me and I watched him do it and some part of me, the part Julian built or found or both, liked it.
The space between us becomes unbearable.
I'm moving before I decide to move, and he meets me in the center of the room, two bodies drawn together by the gravity of what just happened.
His mouth crashes into mine, all teeth and desperation, the violence we just witnessed combusting into something else between us.
I taste copper, blood from where I've been biting my lip, and underneath it, him, that familiar darkness I've been craving since Homestead.
My hands fist in his shirt, pulling him closer, needing to eliminate any distance between us.
His response is immediate, one hand tangling in my hair while the other grips my hip hard.
We're not kissing so much as devouring each other, the fire of death still crackling through our veins, trying to process what just happened through touch instead of words.
He walks me backward until my back hits the wall, never breaking contact.
My legs part automatically, letting him press between them, and I can feel him hard against me through our clothes.
The evidence that violence makes him hard too, that we're both this kind of broken, sends another pulse of heat through me.
His mouth moves to my neck, biting rather than kissing, and his hands, those hands that just ended a life, slide up my body to my throat.
His thumbs find my pulse points, pressing lightly at first, then with more pressure.
My heart hammers under his touch, and I arch into it, my body remembering this exact pressure, this exact pleasure, conditioned by years of Julian doing exactly this before making me come harder than I knew was possible.
Then Gabriel freezes.
Complete shutdown, hands pulling away from my neck as if burned. His whole body goes rigid. The color drains from his face so fast I think he might pass out, and when he takes three steps back, the distance feels infinite.
"No," he whispers, staring at his hands like they belong to someone else. "No, no, no."
"Gabriel?" I reach for him, confused by the sudden shift, but he backs away further.
"Don't." His voice cracks. "I can't, my hands were just on your throat."
"I know. I wanted them there."
He looks at me with such horror that my stomach drops. "You don't understand. Elena." He stops, jaw working like he's choking on glass. "The woman who died. When I was twenty."
I know about the accident. He told me days ago in his empty kitchen, how someone died and he ran to the seminary to cage himself.
But the way he's looking at his hands now, the way his whole body is shaking for the first time all night, tells me there's something he didn't say, something worse than just an accident.
"We were together," he says, the words coming in broken pieces. "In Miami, at La Sirena. The Calypso room. We were…" He has to stop, pressing his palms against his thighs. "She liked, she asked me to control her breathing. During sex. Breath play."
The revelation lands hard. This isn't just more detail about an accident, this is a completely different story. My mind races to recalibrate everything I thought I understood about his guilt, his priesthood, his fear of his own hands.
"I thought I was careful. Safe words. Signals." His voice breaks on the last word. "But she didn't come back. She went still and she didn't come back."
My pulse is still elevated from where his hands just pressed, the irony of the timing making me dizzy.
"I tried CPR." The words are barely audible now. "On a woman I'd just been inside. Her body still warm from—" He can't finish, but he doesn't need to. The image is clear enough.
The revelation rewrites everything, not just who Gabriel is, but who I am for still wanting him after hearing it. My body hasn't stopped responding to him even as my mind tries to reconcile this new information with the man standing in front of me.
He continues, voice hollow.
"Eight years of cold showers and self-denial and playing priest because I thought if I could just control myself enough, cage myself enough, I'd never hurt another woman.
But I just killed a man with these same hands and then put them on your throat and I wanted, God help me, I wanted to squeeze. Not to hurt you. To make you—"
He can't finish.
"To make me come," I say quietly.
He flinches like I've slapped him. "My desire to control kills people. First Elena, now Cristian, and I had my hands on your throat and all I could think about was how wet you'd get if I squeezed harder."
The suite smells like expensive cologne and death.
My heels catch on the thick carpet as we gather our things, stepping carefully around the spreading darkness under Cristian's head.
Gabriel picks up the drive from the coffee table and places it in my hand without ceremony, his fingers careful not to touch mine.
The weight of it, thirty million dollars, leverage, freedom, feels heavier now than it did an hour ago.
Cristian's body lies between us like a question neither of us wants to answer.
The adjoining room door stays closed, the guards either unaware of what happened or choosing not to intervene.
Professional muscle doesn't abandon their post, but they also know when a situation is above their pay grade.
Gabriel opens the suite door. We step into the hallway, leaving Cristian's body behind like a secret the room will keep.
Men in expensive suits appear from nowhere, folding around us without words.
Rosetti men. They'll handle the body, the hotel cameras, the guards in the adjoining room, the entire scene we're leaving behind.
That's what money and connections buy, the ability to make a dead nephew of the Markovic family disappear from a Manhattan hotel.
The car is waiting at the curb, engine running.
Gabriel and I sit on opposite sides of the backseat, the middle space between us feeling like an ocean.
The silence has weight now, heavy with everything that just happened: he killed a man with his bare hands, I watched and got wet, he touched my throat and remembered killing a woman the same way, then told me everything while both our bodies were still humming with unspent energy.
"Thank you," I finally say as Manhattan slides past the windows. "For telling me the truth."
He looks out his window. "You deserved to know what kind of man you're traveling with."
The silence returns, but it's not hostile.
Just fractured. We can't look at each other.
Can't speak. What am I supposed to say to a man who just told me his worst secret while his victim's body cools behind us?
The distance between us on the seat is deliberate, we both need it, need space to process what we've learned about each other and ourselves.
"The drive," Gabriel says as we merge onto the highway. "It's yours. You earned it. The leverage, the money, everything you worked six months to get."
"I know."
More silence. The weight of the space between us grows heavier with each mile. We're leaving together but feel more apart than ever, the fault line running between us like the white lines on the highway.
The pilot announces our descent into Miami, and I realize I haven't said more than ten words since we boarded. Gabriel sits across the aisle, close enough to touch but might as well be in another country. We're traveling together but separately, the space between us full of everything unresolved.
I have the drive. Thirty million dollars, enough leverage to protect myself from anyone, enough money to disappear forever.
Everything I came to New York for is in my purse.
The mission is complete. So why am I going back to Miami with a man who just confessed to killing a woman the same way he almost touched me?
"You can leave," Gabriel says quietly, like he's been reading my thoughts. "When we land. Logan can arrange protection, money, whatever you need. You don't have to come back to La Sirena."
He's giving me an out. After everything, killing for me, confessing his worst secret, showing me exactly what kind of violence lives in his hands, he's offering me escape from him. I could take it. Every exit is visible from here, every escape route clear. But I'm not moving toward any of them.
"Is that what you want?" I ask.
"I want you safe," he says, still not looking at me. "And I'm not sure I can offer that anymore."
The plane touches down, Miami's lights spreading beneath us like a promise or a threat. The fracture between us hasn't healed. If anything, it's wider now, full of Elena's ghost and Cristian's body and the truth about what we both are when the control breaks.
I could leave. Take the money, take the drive, start over somewhere Gabriel's hands and their history can't reach me. It would be the smart choice. The safe choice.
But I think about his hands shaking as he told me about Elena, steadier killing Cristian than confronting his own history.
I think about the distance he's maintaining now, not to punish me but to protect me from himself.
I think about going back to that kitchen at La Sirena, the wooden spoon, the family dinners, the home I've started building, and I don't know if any of it survives what happened in that hotel room.
"I don't know if I should stay," I tell him honestly.
"I know," he says, and the acceptance in his voice makes my chest tight.
The plane door opens. Miami's humid air rushes in, carrying the scent of jet fuel and jasmine. Gabriel stands first, moving toward the exit without looking back.
"Where are you going?" I ask.
He pauses at the door. "To tell Logan that Cristian Markovic is dead. And that I killed him."