The pilot announces our descent into Miami, and I realize I haven't said more than ten words since we boarded. Gabriel sits across the aisle, close enough to touch but might as well be in another country. We're traveling together but separately, the space between us full of everything unresolved.
I have the drive. Thirty million dollars, enough leverage to protect myself from anyone, enough money to disappear forever. Everything I came to New York for is in my purse. The mission is complete. So why am I going back to Miami with a man who just confessed to killing a woman the same way he almost touched me?
"You can leave," Gabriel says quietly, like he's been reading my thoughts. "When we land. Logan can arrange protection, money, whatever you need. You don't have to come back to La Sirena."
He's giving me an out. After everything, killing for me, confessing his worst secret, showing me exactly what kind of violence lives in his hands, he's offering me escape from him. I could take it. Every exit is visible from here, every escape route clear. But I'm not moving toward any of them.
"Is that what you want?" I ask.
"I want you safe," he says, still not looking at me. "And I'm not sure I can offer that anymore."
The plane touches down, Miami's lights spreading beneath us like a promise or a threat. The fracture between us hasn't healed. If anything, it's wider now, full of Elena's ghost and Cristian's body and the truth about what we both are when the control breaks.
I could leave. Take the money, take the drive, start over somewhere Gabriel's hands and their history can't reach me. It would be the smart choice. The safe choice.
But I think about his hands shaking as he told me about Elena, steadier killing Cristian than confronting his own history. I think about the distance he's maintaining now, not to punish me but to protect me from himself. I think about going back to that kitchen at La Sirena, the wooden spoon, the family dinners, the home I've started building, and I don't know if any of it survives what happened in that hotel room.
"I don't know if I should stay," I tell him honestly.
"I know," he says, and the acceptance in his voice makes my chest tight.
The plane door opens. Miami's humid air rushes in, carrying the scent of jet fuel and jasmine. Gabriel stands first, moving toward the exit without looking back.
"Where are you going?" I ask.
He pauses at the door. "To tell Logan that Cristian Markovic is dead. And that I killed him."
28 - Seraphina
Igo to La Sirena with Gabriel because I have nowhere else to go. It is the default position, the easy route. We debrief with Logan and Gunner then head to bed in our suite. His suite.
Gabriel sleeps beside me, the first real sleep I've seen him get since we met. His face in the darkness is younger without the weight of consciousness carving lines into it. The jaw that's been clenched for hours has finally released. His hands rest open on the pillow, palms up, fingers slightly curled like they're holding something invisible.
Those hands killed a woman during sex. Those same hands killed Cristian Markovic earlier today. Julian trained me to read danger in men's hands: the tells before violence, the grip that means control, the relaxation that precedes a strike. Gabriel's hands carry death in their history and violence in their capability, and I feel nothing but the absence of fear.
The absence bothers me more than fear would.
I slip from bed, careful not to disturb his finally-peaceful breathing. The suite's living area is dark except for streetlight bleeding through the blinds. I sink onto the couch and open my new laptop. The vault records still fill the screen from earlier, when I couldn't stop reading them. The third time I've returned to these files.
The records read like an instruction manual. Not just for managing money or moving product, but, I realize with dawning horror, that Julian used the same approach on me.
He stopped me from cooking, from connecting with my abuela, and all of it was planned. Orchestrated. The more I read the files, the more I realize the truth—he never left anything to chance. Including me. The systematic isolation of Abuela Rosa from my life was calculated strategy. The dinner reservations that coincidentally conflicted with Sunday visits. The "concern" about my mood after seeing her. The apartment location that made Hialeah inconvenient.
And I learned his ways right down to my bones.
Like last Friday night at Reyes's dinner party, I see it clearly now. Every grateful glance, every moment of performed vulnerability was executed with Julian's precision. I read Reyes's vanity and fed it exactly what it craved. Made myself smaller, needier, more dependent with each interaction. The strategic touches on his arm. The tears that threatened but never quite fell when discussing my "complicated grief."
I used Julian's playbook to extract information from Reyes, deployed the same approach that once caged me. I wasn't resisting Julian's training. I graduated from it.
Then the third wave hits, uglier than recognition: my body's response to Gabriel's violence earlier. When his fingers closed around Cristian's throat, when I heard the wet gurgles of a man who couldn't breathe, my thighs pressed together involuntarily. Wetness gathered despite myself. My body's betrayal was immediate, responding to violence the way Julian taught it to. Not from fear. From something else, something my nervous system recognized before my mind could interfere.
Rosa used to say I run hot, that I need to be careful not to burn everything I touch. But maybe she saw what I'm only now understanding. I'm drawn to men who burn hotter. Julian's control, Gabriel's capability. Different men, different intentions, but my body doesn't distinguish between architecture andprotection. It responds to power. To hands that can hold or harm.
I wasn't afraid of Gabriel's hands because Julian programmed me to tolerate dangerous men. To find violence arousing rather than terrifying. The tolerance for violence wasn't a flaw in the programming. It was a feature.
I need to break the cycle. To reinvent myself and become the woman I want to be, not the woman I was engineered to be.
The realization sends me to my feet, body moving before conscious thought forms. Packing is muscle memory now. Grab the essentials, leave the rest, move fast and light. The bag fills quickly. Clothes, laptop, charger, toiletries. Everything that matters fits in one bag because I've been ready to run since my first year of marriage. This is a skill set, not a decision. My hands know exactly what to take and what to abandon.
