GABRIELLA #3
Yet, somehow, she was being led by him towards the dark and foreboding jungle ahead. As they neared the trees, the thunderous buzzing of insects pushed against her, bringing up an old fear she had kept locked away despite being in Costa Rica’s jungles.
Bugs. Thousands upon thousands of bugs surrounded her.
Her palms became sweatier as she trembled even harder.
She disliked bugs, all bugs, immensely. One of the major benefits of her chosen profession of marine biology was that she could avoid bugs while on or in the ocean.
Sadly, it was not until she’d started working out in the field that she’d realized how often the sea’s shores ran against dense forests or jungles.
Swallowing, she tried to speak again. “Mateo, wait. Please. You know I don’t handle the jungle well.”
His only response was to grip her hand tighter. The canopy above the jungle was so dense it swallowed the moonlight entirely, creating an impenetrable curtain of inky blackness between the trees.
That was when Gabriella realized—with a slow, nauseating certainty that started in the pit of her stomach and radiated outward—that she was being herded away.
Not guided. Not protected.
Herded.
She tried again. “Mateo, look at me!”
He said nothing, but when he looked down at her, she gasped.
The man she thought she knew was simply gone.
The softness, the patience, the gentle humor?
All of it was stripped away to leave whoever this was behind.
His eyes that had once been warm and kind had turned to steel.
“I am sorry, Gabriella,” he said, voice low, heavy with regret. “You’ll need to wait right here.”
Sorry? He was sorry? Should she try to run?
Fight back? Her indecisive nature was battling the shock in her system.
Her pulse hammered so loudly she was sure he could hear it over the insects she loathed, over the shouts carrying from the beach.
She pressed her free hand flat against her sternum as if she could hold her heart in place by sheer force of will.
“What do you mean, wait?” she asked. “What are you talking about being sorry?” The word landed somewhere between a laugh and a sob, neither of which she let escape.
But the answer was already written in the set of his jaw, in the careful blankness behind his eyes, and in the way he held her arm as if he expected her to bolt.
Then a few other members of her team stumbled out of the jungle with their hands over their heads, their faces pale and wide-eyed in the fractured dark, all of them with masked men armed with rifles holding them at gunpoint.
They were being marched towards her and Mateo.
The sight of her team—people whom she’d shared meals with, laughed with, argued methodology with, and celebrated with after they’d discovered an undocumented nesting site—tightened her throat.
Mateo finally released her when several masked men encircled them with rifles ready, their stances loose and practiced in a way that told her this was not their first time doing something like this.
Gabriella looked over her shoulder, back the way they’d come from the beach. What she saw made her stomach drop.
Even from a distance, she saw what she’d feared. Masked men were digging through the sand, tearing into the nests. Protected nests. The ones she had mapped and catalogued and lost sleep over. The ones that held life, not yet ready to meet the world.
“Mateo! The eggs! I have to stop them!” The words tore out of her as she lunged forward, but she was met with strong arms that threw her back towards her colleagues.
Adam, a young man of only twenty five, tried to catch her but was bunted on the back of his head to stay still.
Gabriella and him both fell together, the impact rattled through her shoulders as she fell to the ground.
Angry words circled amongst the group of military men. One of them kicked a tear-streaked researcher, Charles, to place him on his knees.
I can’t help them right now. I can’t help anyone right now.
The realization was one of the worst things she’d ever felt.
Tears drenched her face as a deep racking sob escaped her lips, agitating one of the poachers.
He reached down to pull her up when Mateo stepped in, batting away the soldier's hand.
“Silence,” Mateo hissed at her before throwing out another command in Spanish that sounded like “Just her.” The men responded immediately, their attention swinging towards her with a focus that made her skin crawl.
Mateo pulled her up, his touch no longer welcome and familiar, and he pushed her away from the group.
Am I being kidnapped? The word felt absurd in her mind, cinematic and unreal, the kind of thing that happened in thriller novels left dog-eared on airport bookshelves.
Not to marine biologists standing ankle-deep in Caribbean surf, counting sea turtle heads.
And yet …
She looked closely at Mateo, at the man standing beside her, who had always seemed to belong to the sea and the sand and the whisper of the palm trees, and saw him at last for what he truly was.
Dangerous.