GABRIELLA #2
Mateo turned, his eyes shadowed in the darkness, the stars burning in the open sky behind him in hard, cold points of light.
The sound of crashing waves pushed through the rising numbness spreading throughout her body, each wave a steady, metronomic pulse that her heartbeat failed to match.
He assessed her then, his eyes moving over her in a quick, professional sweep—checking for injury, she realised distantly—before he seemed content with what he found.
He jerked his thumb at the boat. “Get in.”
“What? No!” The word came out with more force than she’d expected given how numb and scared she felt.
Within less than an hour, things had changed so drastically that she barely trusted herself to make the correct decision, barely trusted her own read of the situation, her own instincts, her own judgment.
She always had that issue, her indecisiveness.
It was why she had stayed so long in her abusive marriage with Justin, through the late nights and the other women’s perfume and the terrible, specific knowledge that she was choosing to believe a false version of events just because that hurt less.
And now? The ominous press of pain and death grew and expanded within her chest, seeping outward through her body in rising panic and resistance, her hands beginning to shake with the fine tremor that arrived when adrenaline had been running too long.
Mateo sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Fine. We’ll do this my way then.”
Before she could react—before she could plant her feet or throw her weight or do any of the things her brain had half-formed into a plan—he lifted her.
The ease of it was its own kind of shock, the way her weight seemed to be nothing to him as her feet left the ground.
He hoisted her up and set her inside the boat with an efficient, impersonal competence.
Her scream caught in her throat as he grabbed a coil of rope from the bottom of the boat—dark rope, thick, pre-cut into lengths that told her again this had been planned, this had been prepared—and began binding her wrists.
She twisted, fighting him, her bound arms jerking against his hold, her heels finding the hull of the boat and pushing, her whole body refusing on principle even as it failed in practice. She fought until she saw his eyes.
They were the eyes of a soldier—dark and flat.
She had seen that quality before, in documentaries, in news footage, in the faces of men who had been somewhere that changed them fundamentally.
Yet underneath it all, she saw the truth beneath the practiced lies.
Because it was a look she had often seen reflected in her own bathroom mirror on the worst mornings of her worst years.
Mateo was desperate.
Not performing desperation, not pretending, not using it as a tool. The man was genuinely, savagely desperate for … something. That look in his eyes yanked at her heart despite how much she wanted to hate him.
“Mateo,” she breathed, her voice dropping to a soft whisper in the close night air. “Please. What are you doing?”
His dark eyes bore into hers, the intensity of his focus physical, a pressure she felt against her sternum. The rope continued through his hands, the knot taking shape with an automatic efficiency.
“Gabriella,” he murmured, his voice dropping to match hers, low and serious and stripped of anything performative. “You have to trust me.”
Trust.
She had known trust once, or believed she had—had built an entire life on the architecture of it, had stood in a church in a white dress and recited the language of it with complete conviction. She had trusted Justin.
Her face grew hot at the memory of walking in on him in their bed with that woman—their marital bed, the one she’d chosen the sheets for, the one she’d thought of as a private, shared, sacred space—and had still, still spent three weeks afterwards wondering if there was a version of events that left her marriage intact.
He’s not really serious right now, is he?
Her laugh came out sharp and broken, the sound wrong in the salt air. “Trust you? You dragged me through the jungle, and now you’re tying me up in the back of a boat. And did I mention the group of masked men shooting guns back there? What the hell do they want?”
His eyes flared with something—perhaps anger, or frustration, or fear—but it was gone before she’d fully registered it. He said, “They want you.”
Her stomach dropped as dizziness hit her. If she hadn’t been sitting in the boat, she knew she would have fallen over. “I-I’m sorry … what?”
His mouth tightened. “Those men were there for you.”
There was no way she had heard him correctly. She pressed the heels of her bound hands against her sternum and held them there. She frustratedly wiped at the tears sliding down her face with the back of her shoulder.
No more crying, Gabriella. Figure out what the hell he’s talking about.
Disbelief laced her words as she said, “I don’t understand.”
He paused his tie, moving with a slow lethal precision, and she felt her heart begin to race even more.
His hands bracketed on either side of her head, his palms flat against the hull of the boat, as he leaned close.
The smell of him arrived first—mint beneath the sweat, and the salt that lived in his skin from months on this coastline.
And beneath both of those, the warm, particular scent of him.
The shadows fell across the planes of his face, carving the angles of him into sharper relief, and she registered with the irrelevant, treacherous part of her brain that this man was devastating to look at even now. Especially now.
Why? God, why is she so weak to this man?