And Diel was breaking.
The night they saved Maria from the Brethren had set off a chain reaction in Diel that Gabriel had no way of stopping. All that they had built at Eden Manor since their breakout from Purgatory as teens was crumbling to ruins, and Gabriel could feel his soul breaking too, his tight hold on his brothers’ salvation slipping away like sand through his fingers.
Gabriel had seen his brothers the night they’d confronted the Brethren. He’d seen the elation on their faces as they’d torn down their tormentors in cold blood, as they’d looked the men straight in the eyes as they ripped them apart, as they’d attacked their abusers, living and breathing their reckoning as they simultaneously sated their darkest desires.
And Gabriel had been guilty of that too. The flames before him taunted him, swaying as they climbed from the hearth. They danced seductively, mocking him for his own sin. His moment of wickedness when faced with his old guardians.
Gabriel closed his eyes and saw Father Quinn on the floor of Purgatory, looking up at him as if Gabriel was nothing but filth. And in that second, Gabriel had been weak. In that moment, with gasoline poured all around the underground building that was riddled with abuse, Gabriel had met the old priest’s eyes and lit the match that let that underground prison burn.
Along with Father Quinn.
Gabriel shifted, feeling the cilice around his thigh bite into his flesh, just as the door to his office opened. He looked up, and Maria walked through. She crossed the room and switched on the two tall lamps, bathing the office in light. She moved silently to the liquor table and poured out two glasses of brandy, then came to the fire and handed Gabriel a glass.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said as Maria sat in the chair opposite him. She was dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt. Her hair was down, falling to the backs of her thighs. Gabriel knew she would never cut that hair. It was hair that Raphael obsessed over, had broken all of the Fallen’s strict rules to own.
“Has he told you?” Gabriel took a soothing sip of the brandy, praying it would bring him some reprieve from the headache that was pounding at the back of his skull.
Maria sat back in the armchair, and Gabriel finally met her eyes. She nodded. Raphael had told her what happened in the gym. And he had no doubt told her what his brothers had asked of Gabriel.
Maria leaned forward. “How is your neck?”
Instinctively, Gabriel raised his hand to his dog collar and the bruise that was burgeoning underneath. He recalled Diel’s face as he’d slammed Gabriel against the gym wall. As he’d wrapped his hands around Gabriel’s neck and started to squeeze. In that moment, Gabriel had witnessed the evil in Diel’s eyes. He had come face to face with the monster that Diel said lived inside of him, the one that his victims would see as they fought for their final breaths. The blue in Diel’s eyes had been eradicated, blackened by his dilated pupils. His teeth had been gritted, and Gabriel didn’t know if Diel knew it, but he had chanted a name over and over again.
Brady … Brady … Brady …
In his head, Diel had been in Purgatory. He wasn’t killing Gabriel; he was killing one of the Brethren priests.
“Gabriel?” Maria’s voice tore him from the haunting memory. “Are you okay?”
Gabriel stared at her. He thought about how Raphael was with her now. He always held her hand at dinner, always stared at her whenever they were together, as though he couldn’t believe that she was with him, as though she was the prize for enduring all those years of hell.
Gabriel recalled when she had been smuggled into Eden Manor. As soon as she’d been discovered, Gabriel had known she would die. And Maria had. Just not in the way he’d believed. Her life as a nun had come to an end; her life of seclusion and prayer had been replaced with one as Raphael’s soulmate and only love. Raphael, Gabriel’s brother and a born killer, had found someone who loved him for exactly who he was. Maria’s old purpose was discarded, and she had been resurrected as Gabriel’s right-hand woman, someone to share the burden of being the Fallen’s leader.
“They want the Brethren.” Gabriel downed the rest of the brandy.
Maria sighed, then moved to the wall where they planned who would be the next target for the brothers. But then she went to the smaller section of the wall, where Gabriel had compiled a small list of Brethren he knew were still alive—names, parishes and where they lived. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had been able to gather. Gabriel had made sure he and his brothers were wiped from the map for the sake of their safety; the Brethren had clearly done the same. There were thousands of priests in Boston alone. He had no idea how many of them subscribed to the Brethren’s teachings.