My fingers squeeze her jaw. "I love you, Seraphina, and women I love don't get to leave. Okay?"
"I wasn't going to leave," she whispers.
"Good." My forehead drops to hers, and the fierceness cracks just enough to show what's behind it — not possession, not Julian's kind of ownership, but the raw terror of a man who's lost everyone he's ever loved and just found the one he'd burn the world to keep. "I need you to stop thinking about it. I need you to stop keeping one foot out the door and both hands on the exit strategy. I need you here. All the way here."
My mouth finds hers before she can answer, and it's not a careful kiss. This is the kiss I've been holding back, years of denial breaking open against her lips. My hands move to her hips, lifting her onto the counter, and she wraps around me like the answer she hasn't said out loud yet.
"I'm here," she says against my mouth. "I'm staying."
I've spent years listing the things my hands aren't allowed to touch. Women's skin. My own cock on the nights when the discipline cracked. Years of inventory management, of treating desire like contraband, and now Sera is on my kitchen counter with her legs wrapped around my waist and I can't remember a single reason I ever stopped wanting this.
"Say it again."
"I'm staying, Gabriel."
My hands tighten on her thighs. Hers grip my shirt. Dinner can wait.
Everything can wait except this.
She said it twice and I'm going to make her say it again. Not because I don't believe her but because the sound of it rewires something in my chest that's been broken since I was twenty years old.
I pull back just enough to see her face. Her lips are swollen from mine, her eyes dark, her pulse visible in her throat. That throat.
The contrast should horrify me. Yesterday I killed a man with these hands. The steadiness of it, the precision — thatshould make me recoil from touching her. But I'm done making penance out of pleasure. I've spent years treating my desire like a weapon. Tonight I'm finding out what it does when I let it be something else.
"Say it again," I tell her, and my voice comes out low and rough and nothing like a priest's.
Her hands grab the front of my shirt. "Make me, Father."
Christ. This woman.
I kiss her hard, one hand cradling the back of her skull, the other gripping her hip to pull her flush against me. She gasps into my mouth when she feels how hard I am, and the sound does something primal to my brain. Not the careful arousal of the sacristy or the desperate collision on the altar. Something simpler. Something that says: mine, and I'm done pretending otherwise.
Her fingers find the hem of my shirt and pull it over my head. I let her, arms up, and when her hands land on my bare chest her palms are warm and sure and I shudder like she's the one with holy water.
"You're shaking," she says.
"I'm not."
"Gabriel." Her thumb traces the muscle above my hip, moving down. "You're shaking."
I am. Not from shock. Not from what happened in the hotel in New York. From the sheer overwhelming volume of wanting her without any barrier left between us — no collar, no guilt, no ghost of Elena standing in the corner of every room where I touch a woman. The barriers fell today, all of them at once, and underneath there's just this: hunger so sharp it's almost pain.
"You want these hands on you?"
She takes my right hand and puts it on her breast, over the silk of her blouse. Holds it there. "I want them everywhere."
The blouse has buttons. Small ones, pearl-coloured, and my fingers are too big and too impatient for them. I undo three before I give up and pull, and the buttons clatter across the kitchen floor.
"That was silk," Sera says.
"I'll buy you another one."
"With what money? You're about to quit your job."
I laugh against her collarbone, and the laugh surprises me. I can't remember the last time I laughed during sex. Maybe never. The encounters before Elena were urgent, competitive, the Delgado prince performing. Elena was intense and earnest. And after — years of nothing.
But Sera makes me laugh, and the laughter doesn't kill the want. It feeds it.
