GABRIELLA
The jungle continued to swallow them whole, pressing in from every direction with its dense, layered walls of broad leaves and hanging vines, the canopy above them so thick it killed the moonlight before it reached the ground.
The darkness here was absolute—not the soft dark of a bedroom with light bleeding under the door, but the total, disorienting dark of a place that had never needed to accommodate human vision.
And there were bugs.
So many bugs making so much noise—a relentless, layered wall of sound built from the high whine of mosquitoes working close to her ears, the rhythmic sawing of insects she didn’t know, the percussion of beetles and moths colliding with leaves, the whole living orchestra of it pressing in from every direction.
She had only mentioned briefly to Mateo that she was afraid of bugs. She’d hoped he would have remembered. Or cared.
They can’t hurt you. You know they can’t hurt you. They’re more scared of you than you are of them.
Her logic dissolved the moment a winged insect brushed her cheek.
She screamed, the noise competing with the background. Mateo stopped briefly to check in. “What happened?” he asked, his voice thick with concern.
“B-bugs!” she choked out, unable to hide her horror.
He made a tsk noise before continuing their trek.
“You'll have to endure,” he said as hidden branches lashed at Gabriella’s arms. Mateo dragged her through the dense undergrowth, his grip firm but somehow never cruel as he helped navigate them through it all.
Gabriella winced as the branches left thin, stinging lines across her forearms, her wrists, the backs of her hands—the kind of minor wounds that wouldn’t register until tomorrow, until she was somewhere safe enough to take inventory of her body.
This is nothing. You are alive. Just breathe.
Years of another man’s cruelty had taught her how to read the language of a grip—the specific tightening that preceded intention, the way fingers distributed their pressure when they wanted to hurt rather than hold.
And yet Mateo’s grip with her hand was gentle, sweaty, and tight, as if he was afraid to let her go.
Different. She registered it even now, even through the fear. It feels different.
The sounds of chaos on the beach faded as screams, gunfire, and the thundering roar of boat engines were replaced by the pulse of her heartbeat thudding in her ears.
The beach sounds didn’t disappear cleanly—they degraded, losing detail as distance and vegetation absorbed them, the specific crack of individual gunshots blurring into a general percussion, the human voices dissipating before losing their pitch and then losing everything.
What is happening back there? She was afraid for the people she had called her friends and colleagues.
Maria, who kept photographs of her children tucked into the band of her field hat.
Dr. Reyes, who made terrible coffee and brought it to everyone anyway.
The two grad students whose names she could never quite keep straight but whose faces she knew—young and eager faces that had been lit with the particular joy of people doing work they believed in and enjoyed.
Are they running? Have they been caught? Shot? Are they even still—she stopped herself from that line of thought.
“Mateo,” she gasped. “Stop! Please.” She stumbled over a root that caught the toe of her boot and nearly sent her full-length into the undergrowth. “You’re hurting me.”
His hand only tightened around hers as his shoulders tensed. Even in the darkness, Gabriella saw the muscles of his shoulders drawing up hard beneath the fabric of his sweat-soaked shirt, the cotton pulling tight across the breadth of him. “Keep moving.”
A brief respite of the canopy came up. Streaks of moonlight revealed the rest of his shirt was dark with sweat—a wide stain between his midback that had spread outward, the fabric clinging to the defined muscles beneath.
She lowered her gaze down to where his pants seemed to be molded to his very tight ass.
She registered this with the irrelevant clarity of a brain in shock, cataloguing details it had no use for because it couldn’t yet process the ones that mattered. Why am I even noticing this? Is this shock? Am I in shock?
Her pulse stumbled as her feet raced to keep up with his longer stride, her boots finding and losing purchase on the wet, root-crossed ground. “No! My team—”
“They’re gone,” he snapped, his voice cutting through the darkness they stepped into once more with a flatness that was worse than anger. Anger she could argue with. Flatness was a closed door. “And if we don’t move now, you will be too.”
Gone. What did he mean, gone? The word refused to resolve into meaning.
Gone like fled into the jungle. Gone like taken.
Gone like—Gabriella stumbled again, her boot catching on a root she hadn’t seen, her body shaking as bile rose in her throat, hot and acidic, threatening to crest and paint both their shoes. “What do you mea—”
“Dead,” he said quietly. His tone was final, with no room for denial or interpretation or the comfortable middle ground of not-knowing.
The gunshots she heard. The screams. Oh, god.
The reality of it thundered through her body before her brain had finished processing the word—a cold fist punched through the center of her chest, followed by the weight of understanding settling into her stomach.
Her legs nearly gave way beneath her—her knees refusing to hold her weight—and Mateo’s arms caught her before she’d fully begun to fall.
It seemed he was still aware of her despite keeping his eyes ahead and striding forwards.
Without even glancing at her, he held her up from falling and kept pulling her forward.
Her arm ached where his grip had been continuous and unyielding for what felt like miles.
Her eyes stung from the whip of leaves and the salt of sweat trickling into them.
Despite this, she was still blindly following a man who had been involved or complicit in the death of her friends, her legs carrying her forward on pure animal instinct while the rest of her simply tried to keep breathing.
You really know how to pick them.
Mateo—the man who had laughed with her over cold coffee on the beach at two in the morning, who had crouched beside her in the surf and shown her how to identify turtle tracks in wet sand with the patient, genuine enthusiasm of someone who actually cared—was dragging her deeper into the jungle like she was his prisoner.
Maybe you are. Is this how you want to go? Being a disappointment not only to yourself, but everyone around you?
She began to resist, pulling against his grip despite the way her arm screamed at the sustained strain of it, the shoulder joint protesting, the muscles of her forearm burning.
“Let. Me. Go.” She tried to lurch away, planting her feet, throwing her weight backward.
His steel grip kept her anchored to him, his forward momentum barely interrupted by her resistance.
“Why kill me away from everyone?” she cried out, the unrelenting storm of her emotions finally cresting the shores of her resolve—the fear and the grief and the betrayal and the sheer physical exhaustion of being pulled blind through the dark jungle all arriving at once, her voice breaking on the last word in a way she couldn’t prevent.
Mateo stopped.
He turned to look at her, and even in the near-total dark she saw his expression. Stripped of the easy warmth she’d come to read as his default. What was underneath was harder, colder, and complicated. “I need you, Dr. Valentino. And by needing you, I have to keep you away from them.”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, her breath coming fast and shallow, her chest working against the accumulated debt of running and fear and the cost of trying not to cry.
Mild paranoia crept in at the edges of her awareness, the dark pressing against her—every sound and shadow was a potential threat.
Her hair whipped behind her in the faint movement of air, loose strands plastering themselves against her cheeks and the back of her neck, sticking to her sweat-slicked skin with a tenacious, miserable intimacy.
It was unbearably hot and humid—the jungle at night held the day’s heat in the vegetation the way a wool blanket held warmth, radiating it back from every surface.
The adrenaline being dumped into her bloodstream added its own fire to the furnace.
Who knew adrenaline would make you feel hotter?
“Mateo, who are those men? What have you done?”
They broke through a wall of vines—a curtain of hanging green that Mateo shoved aside with his forearm and hauled her through—to a small clearing where the canopy opened and the ocean presented itself.
The salt hit her first, clean and sharp after the layered organic density of the jungle’s interior.
Then the sound—the steady, rhythmic collapse of waves against the shore, indifferent and continuous, the ocean going about its business while her world fell apart.
A battered black boat waited for them, pulled up onto the narrow strip of dark sand at the clearing’s edge, its hull salt-stained and dull, the kind of vessel that had been chosen for function and invisibility rather than anything else.
Are you serious? How long has he been planning this?
Her mouth was dry despite the humidity pressing against her slick skin.
She needed more oxygen—more than what she was pulling into her burning lungs with her shallow, insufficient breaths.
Her brain couldn’t process what she was looking at or the implications of it.
A boat. A pre-positioned, deliberately chosen boat.
This was not improvisation, this was planned.