I let him hold me while bile rises in my throat. He genuinely believes this. Genuinely admired Julian's control. Genuinely thinks the arrangement was good for me. That's what makes him dangerous: not malice but conviction.
As soon as it is seemly to do so, I signal to Logan and we leave. The car ride back is silent for the first ten minutes. Logan drives while I stare out the window, both of us decompressing from the performance.
Miami flows past the windows. Neon and shadow and lives happening behind lit windows. The AC is too cold, raising goosebumps on my arms, but neither of us adjusts it. We need the chill to wash away the evening's warmth.
"Well done tonight," Logan finally says. "You confirmed the vault opening for Monday."
I just hum. I suppose he’s right, but the words ‘molded’ and ‘creation’ sit in my mind like cancer.
"You were flawless in there," Logan observes, and I can't tell if it's a compliment or a job appraisal.
"I learned from the best."
Logan doesn't respond. The city keeps flowing past.
"Reyes wants to have dinner with me after the vault. Then he wants to take over my life, take over where Julian left off," I say quietly.
"Yeah." Logan's voice stays flat. "Men like him always do."
Something in his tone makes me glance over, but his face reveals nothing. Just the perfect planes of a man who's very good at being whoever the room requires.
My phone buzzes. Gabriel, checking in. Just a question mark, letting me decide how much to share. I type back: Successful. Monday locked. Home soon.
Home. La Sirena, where Gabriel is waiting.
Logan gets out first, holds the door for me with professional courtesy. We part in the hallway. Him to his office, me to the suite where Gabriel is probably reading or pretending to read while actually waiting.
I climb the stairs slowly. My feet know the way now, this building becoming more familiar than the cottage in Homestead ever was. But I'm carrying something extra: the muscle memory of being someone else's perfect student.
The suite door is unlocked. Gabriel sits on the couch with a book he's not reading, and when he sees me, the relief on his face is immediate. He doesn't get up, doesn't crowd me. Just watches me cross to him.
"How was it?" he asks.
"Awful. I hate parties like that. I hate people like that."
Even as I say the words, I wonder how true they are. Gabriel Delgado is like that, and I certainly don’t hate him.
I sink onto the couch beside Gabriel, kicking off my heels and letting them fall where they may. My feet ache from standing, from performing, from the constant awareness of how to position my body for maximum effect.
"He confirmed the vault's in Manhattan," I say, reaching up to remove the diamond earrings. "We're set for Monday."
Gabriel watches me place the earrings on the coffee table, his eyes following my movements. "And Reyes?"
"Everything we suspected. He wants to be my new mentor. My new… keeper." The word tastes bitter on my tongue.
Gabriel shifts beside me, not quite reaching for me but making space that I could occupy if I wanted to. I do want to. I lean against him, my head finding his shoulder, and he wraps an arm around me without speaking. We sit like that for several minutes, the silence comfortable between us.
"You're not what Julian made," Gabriel finally says, his voice low. "You know that, right?"
I close my eyes. "Sometimes I wonder what would be left if I scraped away all the parts of me he shaped."
"Everything that matters." Gabriel's certainty is like bedrock. "The core of you isn't what he taught—it's what you protected from him."
His words settle into me, a counterweight to Reyes's assessment.
I don't close my eyes. I sit in the quiet of his arm around me and think about Monday. The vault. Manhattan. Whatever Julian put there that was worth dying over, worth six months of running, worth all of this.
I'll have it soon.
