"We were together. She died. It was an accident."
I say "accident" and the word tastes like ash. I don't say how. Don't tell her about the room in the club or the breath play or how Elena's face looked when I realized she wasn't pretending anymore. I will never tell anyone that.
"I left Miami that night. Entered the seminary three days later. The collar was supposed to be a lock. A cage. A way to make sure I never hurt anyone again."
“But it was an accident. You didn’t hurt her.”
“I did. It was my fault.”
“You… murdered her?” Seraphina’s voice is flat, a simple question, like she’s asking whether I bought milk today.
“No,” I manage to say. “It was an accident but it was still my fault.” My voice sounds like someone else's. "So I took myself out of the equation, made sure I could never hurt another woman like that."
She makes a small humming sound.
I meet her eyes across the kitchen. "It worked."
I don't say ‘until you’. I don't need to. She's sitting in my kitchen at one in the morning, and I can still taste her on my tongue. The ‘until’ is self-evident.
She's quiet for a long time. I brace for the questions. How did she die, what kind of accident, what really happened? The questions that lead to the part where a woman trusted me with her breath and I held it too long.
She doesn't ask.
"You were twenty," she says finally.
I nod.
"And you've been punishing yourself ever since." Not a question.
I gesture at the kitchen. The bare walls. The empty counters. "Not punishing. Keeping other women safe. And atoning."
"There's a difference?"
I don't answer because I don't have one. All this penance and I still can't tell where the atonement ends and the self-destruction begins.
The conversation shifts. Not away from the pain but deeper into it. Elena opened the door. Now I walk through it into the room I've been avoiding even longer.
"Marisol." My sister's name feels foreign in my mouth. "She was eighteen when I left. Eighteen, and I just… left."
I have to stop. Pace again. The weight of this guilt is different, newer, raw where the Elena guilt has calcified.
I stare at the table, avoiding Sera's eyes. "When Elena died, Marisol was alone."
"Your sister," Sera says quietly.
"Our mother had died six months before. Father was getting sick." My hands flex, remembering violence. "All she had left was me, and I just… left."
"You thought you were protecting her."
"Did I?" I laugh, bitter. "Or was that the story I told myself? 'I left to protect her.' Makes the collar feel like heroism instead of cowardice."
Sera leans forward. "What does Marisol think?"
My voice cracks. "That I abandoned her. I thought I was saving her from my darkness, but—"
"You left her alone in her own," Sera finishes.
I look up, meet her steady gaze. "She fell into partying and drugs, ended up in the tabloid headlines every other week. And somehow I still thought I was protecting her by staying away. That she needed space."
