"What did she need?"
"Her brother. Not a priest." I swallow hard. "She needed someone to stand beside her at our mother's grave, not… absence dressed up as virtue."
Sera is quiet, just holding the weight of what I've said.
"She called you," she says finally. "Still calls. That door isn't closed."
I huff out a laugh. “My sister is a fucking angel.”
She sets down her mug, looks at me directly. "You can't unleave. But you can stay now. She doesn't need your sermons. She needs you to show up messy and imperfect and present."
Something loosens in my chest. Not absolution. Permission. Permission to stop punishing Marisol with my absence.
It's past two when we finally stop talking. The coffee pot is empty. The kitchen feels less stark somehow, like her presence has changed its molecular structure.
She takes the bedroom. I take the couch that's six inches too short. She closes the door and I lie there staring at the ceiling, achingly aware of her in my bed. In my sheets. Her hair on my pillow where tomorrow I'll press my face and breathe her in like a fucking deviant.
I should be in agony. Should be doing the cold shower, the rosary, the pull-ups until my arms shake. Instead, I just lie here, cock half-hard from proximity alone, something in my chest finally unclenched.
I said Elena's name out loud. First time since it happened. The guilt didn't lift, it never lifts, but it shifted. Like setting down one end of something heavy.
10 - Seraphina
Gabriel is murdering eggs at the stove when I find him, frowning at the pan like it’s personally betrayed him.
The sight stops me in the doorway. Father Gabriel, the man of the plank bed and empty counters, is attempting to cook actual food. With an actual pan. The eggs are losing badly, browning at the edges while he watches with the same intensity he brings to parish inventory, as if they've failed to meet operational standards.
There's toast. Burned. Coffee made with my beans, my grinder, which he's clearly wrestled with because there are grounds scattered across the counter like evidence of battle.
The domesticity of it hits harder than it should. I slept in his bed last night. Told him about the men following me. He told me about the woman he accidentally killed, and we talked at his kitchen table past midnight, trading our worst secrets like currency. Now he's making me breakfast. Badly. But still making it.
Every car that passes outside, my body tenses. We're playing house while killers circle, and the normalcy of him cooking eggs feels both absurd and necessary. Like if we can just maintain this fiction of ordinary morning routine, the danger will stay outside where it belongs.
He looks up. Sees me hovering in the doorway. Hair finger-combed, yesterday's clothes that still smell faintly of turpentine from painting the storage room, no makeup, no armor. The most undefended I've been in front of anyone since Julian.
Something crosses his face. Not the guilt I expected, not post-confessional horror. Something softer and infinitely more dangerous. The look of a man seeing a woman in his kitchen in the morning and wanting it so much the wanting shows.
He kills it fast. But I catch it.
"Coffee's ready," he says. Normal. Controlled. As if I didn't sleep in his bed and he didn't confess to killing someone and we aren't standing in his kitchen like two people who could belong here.
The crucifix watches from the doorway as I cross to the table. Christ in perpetual agony, bronze body gleaming in the morning light. Even the sheets on his bed smell like aggressive cleanliness, bar soap and discipline.
Except underneath the soap last night, I caught something else. Him. Not cologne, he doesn't wear any. Just skin. Clean, warm, male. The scent that clung to him when he gripped that confessional doorframe, when his control cracked just enough to let me see what's underneath.
"Sleep well?" I ask. “You look almost human this morning."
"Almost?"
"Well, you're still in yesterday's clothes and slept on a couch that clearly hates you, so we're grading on a curve."
I take the wobbly chair. He puts coffee in front of me. Made with my beans, strong, no milk because he doesn't have any. Then the eggs, which are thoroughly defeated, served on a plate with burned toast.
"You don't have butter," I observe.
"No."
"Or salt."
