We go back out to the floor.
La Sirena resumes around us — the music, the bar, the stage, the crowd. Everything is the same as usual.
But everything is different.
15 - Wren
The floor is the same floor.
Music, crowd, the chandelier light finding everyone's cheekbones. I surface back into it from his office and for a moment the normalcy is almost offensive — the audacity of the world continuing while everything in me has shifted.
My mouth still feels like him. Tastes like him. My lips are slightly swollen and my heartbeat hasn't settled and the noise of the club is suddenlytoo much.
A man approaches from across the club, and Logan's posture does something I haven't seen it do before. A fractional loosening in his shoulders.
I've seen this man before. He's tall, dark-haired, and still. Lean and broad-shouldered, with a jaw that looks like it's been held against pressure for years and set that way permanently. He's not like the others. Not Nico's military economy or Gunner's weaponized silence. There's a gravity to him, the look of a man who has reckoned with himself.
“Wren, this is Gabriel Delgado. Marisol’s brother.”
Oh, this is the ex-priest. I googled the family and he came up first, the prodigal son who left the family to join the seminary, but came back for a woman.
Gabriel Delgado. Jorge’s son.
"I'm so sorry for the loss of your father," I say.
"Thank you." He says it the way priests must say it a thousand times — automatic, kind, a sentence that has done this work before.
Then he stops. The pause is longer than it should be, and he doesn't pretend it isn't. The bass throbs between us. When he looks at me again it's different — as if I've stopped being a question with an obvious answer.
"And you?" he says. "Who are you?"
There’s no hostility in his voice, but even so, Logan steps between us protectively.
“She’s mine.”
Two words. Flat. Factual — the tone he uses for numbers. He doesn't give my name. Doesn't qualify or explain. Doesn't glance at me to check if I'll object. Just:mine.As simple as a closing entry in a ledger.
Gabriel's surprise is brief and genuine — a flash in his eyes, there and then managed. Something goes still in his face before the recovery, smooth and quick. He looks between us once, then settles on me with something that might be reassessment.
"Wren," I offer, because he deserves a name even if Logan didn't give him one.
The corner of Gabriel's mouth moves. "Gabriel."
A small silence. He glances across the floor — something on the far side pulling his attention for a half second, Logan's gaze flickering there and back in the same reflex, two men reading the same space — and then it passes. Gabriel looks at me again.
"How long are you in Miami?"
"I don't know yet," I say.
He nods once. Then something in his eyes settles, some small assessment completing itself. He says something brief to Logan — tomorrow or later, a piece of operational business I don't catch — and moves away, back into the club, the crowd absorbing him.
I stand there.
Mine.
I could have corrected it. I could have given my name and pushed back on being claimed like something in his inventory. He would have let me — Logan Cruz makes a cage and hands you the key, that's what he does, he offers the exit and waits to see if you take it. I didn't take it. I stood beside him and let the word settle over me and said nothing.
What I didn't expect was how it felt.
