"Who?"
"The man who put someone on their knees in a parking lot." She takes a sip of coffee. "I was starting to think I'd imagined him."
The reminder of that night, of how easily violence came back to my hands, doesn't shame me. Sitting here with her needing protection while my cock remembers her mouth, I'm only grateful the skill remains.
"Okay," she says. "I'll stay."
I give her the bedroom. She argues, but I win, of course. She'll be in my sheets tonight. Tomorrow they'll smell like her. I'll either burn them or jerk off into them for the next month.
She looks at the room with an expression I can't quite read. The hard mattress. The crucifix on the wall above where I lay my head every night. The complete absence of anything that could be called comfort.
"This is your bed?" Her voice is carefully neutral. "This is what you sleep on every night?"
"It's fine."
"Gabriel, this is a plank with a sheet on it."
"It works," I say, because what else can I say? That softness feels like cheating?
She looks at me for a long beat, filing this alongside the empty kitchen and the bare walls. I don't enjoy being read, but I'm too tired to maintain walls tonight.
We should sleep. Neither of us does. We end up back at the kitchen table with cooling coffee, and the conversation that happens isn't planned. It comes the way conversations do at midnight when two people are exhausted and the pretenses have been stripped away.
"Most priests at least have a picture of their mother," she observes, studying the bare walls. "Maybe a houseplant that's dying. Something that suggests a human lives here."
"Plants die," I say flatly. "Everything I touch does. Safer to keep the counters bare."
The words come out heavier than intended. She sets down her mug, and the small clink echoes in my empty kitchen.
"Is that what you tell yourself? That you're protecting things by not having them?"
I don't answer. The crucifix watches us from the doorway, Christ in perpetual agony, the only decoration I allow myself.Fitting, really. A reminder that suffering is holy. That pain has purpose. That some things can't be atoned for, only endured.
My jaw clenches. I can feel her watching me, waiting. The silence stretches until it becomes its own confession.
She doesn't demand. She just looks at me across the table. Open, patient. Not requiring my secrets but offering space for them. A door, not a trap. Walk through if you want. Stay where you are. Either way, I'm here.
My hands grip the table edge. The words are there, pressing against my teeth, silence fighting to stay silent. But she's sitting in my kitchen because killers are hunting her, and somehow that makes us even. We're both carrying death. Maybe that's why the words finally come.
"I was…."
I stop. Start again. Stop. My jaw works like I'm chewing glass.
"I was twenty," I finally manage, the words coming out flat, careful. "I was in Miami, born into it. Gabriel Delgado, not the priest, the prince. The son of Jorge Delgado, everything that comes with that name."
I have to stop again. Stand. Pace to the window, check the street outside. Paranoid habit, but it gives me distance from her eyes.
"I was good at it," I continue, back still turned. "The charm, the rooms, the people. Moving through that world like I owned it, because in a way, I did. I loved it. The danger, the power, the electric hum of being someone who mattered. Loved it the way an addict loves the substance."
I turn back. She hasn't moved, just nods like she knows exactly what that kind of love costs.
"There was a woman."
The name sits on my tongue like a stone. My hands clench into fists. So long of not saying it aloud, and now it wants out,and my body is physically fighting it. But Sera is patient, steady, holding space for whatever I'm about to confess.
"Elena."
There. Said. The sky doesn't fall, but something in my chest cracks.
