His mouth moves to my neck, biting rather than kissing, and his hands, those hands that just ended a life, slide up my body to my throat.
His thumbs find my pulse points, pressing lightly at first, then with more pressure. My heart hammers under his touch, and I arch into it, my body remembering this exact pressure, this exact pleasure, conditioned by years of Julian doing exactly this before making me come harder than I knew was possible.
Then Gabriel freezes.
Complete shutdown, hands pulling away from my neck as if burned. His whole body goes rigid. The color drains from his face so fast I think he might pass out, and when he takes three steps back, the distance feels infinite.
"No," he whispers, staring at his hands like they belong to someone else. "No, no, no."
"Gabriel?" I reach for him, confused by the sudden shift, but he backs away further.
"Don't." His voice cracks. "I can't, my hands were just on your throat."
"I know. I wanted them there."
He looks at me with such horror that my stomach drops. "You don't understand. Elena." He stops, jaw working like he's choking on glass. "The woman who died. When I was twenty."
I know about the accident. He told me days ago in his empty kitchen, how someone died and he ran to the seminary to cage himself. But the way he's looking at his hands now, the way his whole body is shaking for the first time all night, tells me there's something he didn't say, something worse than just an accident.
"We were together," he says, the words coming in broken pieces. "In Miami, at La Sirena. The Calypso room. We were…" He has to stop, pressing his palms against his thighs. "She liked, she asked me to control her breathing. During sex. Breath play."
The revelation lands hard. This isn't just more detail about an accident, this is a completely different story. My mind races to recalibrate everything I thought I understood about his guilt, his priesthood, his fear of his own hands.
"I thought I was careful. Safe words. Signals." His voice breaks on the last word. "But she didn't come back. She went still and she didn't come back."
My pulse is still elevated from where his hands just pressed, the irony of the timing making me dizzy.
"I tried CPR." The words are barely audible now. "On a woman I'd just been inside. Her body still warm from—" He can't finish, but he doesn't need to. The image is clear enough.
The revelation rewrites everything, not just who Gabriel is, but who I am for still wanting him after hearing it. My body hasn't stopped responding to him even as my mind tries to reconcile this new information with the man standing in front of me.
He continues, voice hollow.
"Eight years of cold showers and self-denial and playing priest because I thought if I could just control myself enough, cage myself enough, I'd never hurt another woman. But I just killed a man with these same hands and then put them on your throat and I wanted, God help me, I wanted to squeeze. Not to hurt you. To make you—"
He can't finish.
"To make me come," I say quietly.
He flinches like I've slapped him. "My desire to control kills people. First Elena, now Cristian, and I had my hands on your throat and all I could think about was how wet you'd get if I squeezed harder."
The suite smells like expensive cologne and death. My heels catch on the thick carpet as we gather our things, stepping carefully around the spreading darkness under Cristian's head.Gabriel picks up the drive from the coffee table and places it in my hand without ceremony, his fingers careful not to touch mine. The weight of it, thirty million dollars, leverage, freedom, feels heavier now than it did an hour ago. Cristian's body lies between us like a question neither of us wants to answer. The adjoining room door stays closed, the guards either unaware of what happened or choosing not to intervene. Professional muscle doesn't abandon their post, but they also know when a situation is above their pay grade.
Gabriel opens the suite door. We step into the hallway, leaving Cristian's body behind like a secret the room will keep. Men in expensive suits appear from nowhere, folding around us without words. Rosetti men. They'll handle the body, the hotel cameras, the guards in the adjoining room, the entire scene we're leaving behind. That's what money and connections buy, the ability to make a dead nephew of the Markovic family disappear from a Manhattan hotel.
The car is waiting at the curb, engine running. Gabriel and I sit on opposite sides of the backseat, the middle space between us feeling like an ocean. The silence has weight now, heavy with everything that just happened: he killed a man with his bare hands, I watched and got wet, he touched my throat and remembered killing a woman the same way, then told me everything while both our bodies were still humming with unspent energy.
"Thank you," I finally say as Manhattan slides past the windows. "For telling me the truth."
He looks out his window. "You deserved to know what kind of man you're traveling with."
The silence returns, but it's not hostile. Just fractured. We can't look at each other. Can't speak. What am I supposed to say to a man who just told me his worst secret while his victim's body cools behind us? The distance between us on the seat isdeliberate, we both need it, need space to process what we've learned about each other and ourselves.
"The drive," Gabriel says as we merge onto the highway. "It's yours. You earned it. The leverage, the money, everything you worked six months to get."
"I know."
More silence. The weight of the space between us grows heavier with each mile. We're leaving together but feel more apart than ever, the fault line running between us like the white lines on the highway.
