"Of course, of course." His eyes are already calculating, filing information. "Your father… Jorge built something remarkable with the Foundation. Shame about his health. Good to see family continuity."
The weight of his absence sits heavy. Tonight his chair is empty because the cancer won't let him stand long enough to wear the suit. I'm standing where he stood, and the weight settles across my shoulders alongside the Italian wool.
The prosecutor finds me next, all teeth and implications. "Father Delgado. Or just Gabriel now? Hard to keep track." He leans in like we're sharing secrets. "Your family's been so generous with judicial campaign contributions. We appreciate the… civic engagement."
The threat is polished but clear. He knows which judges take our money, knows about the bodies that stay buried, themachinery that keeps the Delgado name clean. I deploy the smile that isn't quite agreement, isn't quite refusal.
The skill is horrifying in its fluency. Years of parish coffee hours, and I move through this room like I never left. Reading the layers beneath each conversation: who needs what, who fears what, who can be useful.
This is the native language. Not Latin. Not liturgy. This: the music of power, the grammar of strategic connection. I'm fluent in a tongue I claimed to forget, and the ease of it makes me sick.
Except.
Except I feel it. The thing Sera described in the confessional, in the dark, with that voice that's been living in my head for ten days.I only feel real when things are on the edge of disaster.The room hums with beautiful danger, and I'm more alive than I've been in three years.
And then I see her.
The champagne glass stops halfway to my mouth. My cock stirs, recognizing her before my brain catches up. Eight years of conditioning versus ten days of her voice in my head. Not even a contest. My body responds immediately, helplessly, the same reaction that had me hard in a confessional while she confessed her sins.
She's across the space, moving through a cluster of men in European suits. Not the Sera from Homestead, the woman in jeans sorting canned goods, paint in her hair, that warm laugh in the churchyard. This is someone else entirely. Someone wearing an expensive gown like armor, like she was born in it.
The transformation is complete. Dark hair loose instead of pulled back, falling in waves that catch the light. The gown is black, clearly costly, the kind of dress that transforms a woman completely. She's laughing at something someone said, but it's not the laugh I know. This one is polished, strategic, designed to make the man hearing it feel clever.
She's working the room.
The way she angles her body to include or exclude. The questions that sound casual but aren't. The progression from group to group that looks social but has a pattern, a purpose. She's not just familiar with this world. She's trained for it.
The champagne glass trembles slightly. The cold crystal against my palm does nothing to cool the heat spreading through me. I set it down before I shatter it.
She touches a man's arm, leans in to hear him better, and he preens under the attention. I have to grip the edge of the bar to keep from crossing the room and breaking his fingers. The collar might be off, but apparently the possessive bastard underneath never left.
My mind races through possibilities, none of them good. Widows who know how to work rooms like this didn't marry accountants. Women who can transform this completely aren't running from simple grief. She's here for a reason, and I watch her track toward it with the patient purpose of someone who's very good at getting what she wants.
I stand absolutely still, watching this dangerous version of the woman who's been slowly dismantling my self-control for the past ten days. The way she moves in heels like she was born in them. The confidence that makes the gown look like an afterthought instead of a statement. The smile that promises nothing while suggesting everything.
My body throbs with want. Every inch of her I can see, the curve of her throat, the bare shoulders, the way the dress clings, feeds the hunger that's been eating me alive since she walked into my confessional.
She hasn't seen me. She's focused, intent, working toward something on the other side of the room. I could leave. Could disappear into another cluster of donors, avoid this collision.
Instead, I watch. Like I've been watching her all week, pretending I'm not. Except now the collar's in my car and the suit's on my body and I'm not Father Gabriel anymore. I'm just a man watching a dangerous woman work a room, wondering what the hell she's really doing here. And fighting the urge to throw her over my shoulder and find out exactly how that dress comes off.
"Gabriel Delgado! There you are."
The name carries across the space. A woman’s voice, bright with champagne and a hint of lust, calling me over. My surname rings through the air like a bell.
Sera's head turns.
I watch it happen in real time. The recognition landing not gradually but all at once, like a tide hitting a seawall. Her eyes find me across the room, the suit, the setting, the name, and everything she thought she knew rearranges itself in the space of a heartbeat.
Her face. Jesus, her face. Not anger, not yet. Something rawer. The expression of someone discovering the ground has shifted, that the map they've been using is wrong. She's looking at the priest from Homestead standing in the middle of a Miami gala wearing a suit that costs a fortune, and people are calling himDelgado.
Our eyes lock across the room.
The gala continues. Music, laughter, the delicate clink of crystal. But between us, everything stops. The temperature drops despite the Miami heat, goosebumps rising on my skin under the Italian wool. We're staring at each other across thirty feet of silk and champagne, both of us exposed, both masks cracked beyond repair.
For ten days, I've held her secrets. Her confession in the dark, the weight of her dead husband, the shame of wanting danger.
Now the asymmetry flips.
