Mateo
The room was close and dark, the single window a grey rectangle against the wall where the first suggestion of dawn pressed through the warped wooden shutter.
He smelled the jungle through the gaps in the walls, beyond the thin barrier of wood and plaster.
The camp had quieted hours ago, the celebration dissolving into the heavy, snoring silence of men who drank until they collapsed.
Somewhere outside, a fire had burned down to coals.
He could smell the ghost of it, woodsmoke threading through the humid air to serve as a reminder of what the night had almost become.
I would have burnt this place and these people to the ground had they harmed her. He forced a deep and steadying breath into his lungs as he reminded himself, for the hundredth time, that she was safe. She was here. With him.
Safe. The word sat wrong in his chest, a stone in a place that had no business holding stones.
He was not safe. He was the furthest thing from it.
He was a man built of lies stacked on top of lies, and she was sleeping on top of all of them, her cheek pressed flat against his chest with a trust so complete it made his throat close.
You lied to her from the first day. You knew what this was. You knew what she was walking into, and you let her walk into it anyway.
“Fucking Sally,” he cursed aloud. He had been accustomed to her tantrums throughout the years but this crossed a line. It had endangered Gabriella. It was as vile as something her father would have done.
Should I kill her? He asked himself. No, she has her uses still. But if she endangers Gabriella again …
The woman he cared for slumbered on him with a peace he wasn’t sure he would ever see in this lifetime. He didn't deserve this. He didn't deserve her trust or her warmth. The way she instinctively curled closer even in sleep, seeking him out as if he were her port in a storm.
A howler monkey's guttural roar ripped through the early morning air, deep and primal, shaking his thoughts apart.
The sound rolled through the canopy in long, terrible waves, echoing off the trees until it dissolved into the lower registers of pre-dawn—frogs answering each other, insects adjusting their pitch, the whole breathing machine of the rainforest recalibrating around the interruption.
The patrol men's voices carried faintly from the camp—low, casual, the particular unhurried murmur of men on watch who believed the night had been unremarkable—unaware of how close they had come to death.
His gaze dropped to her face, softened in sleep, lashes resting against her cheeks in dark, feathered crescents.
The lantern had burned out hours ago, but the grey dawn light was enough.
There was still dried salt from tears near her temple, a thin pale track against her skin that he had not touched, had not wiped away.
You did that. Not with his hands, not directly, but with every choice he'd made that led her here. She cried herself to sleep in your arms, and you still haven't told her the full truth of it all.
That sharp thought twisted within his chest—a hook set deep, the kind that tore worse when you tried to pull it out.
He wanted to tell her but knew he couldn’t.
Certainly not now, not when he was so close to the entire reason he had dedicated himself to this operation.
His purpose for sacrificing so much of himself.
Obscura.
Mateo had been undercover for years, building this identity from the ground up, earning trust through acts he would carry on his body and in his conscience long after this was over.
Especially early on, when he’d been little more than hired muscle, he’d been forced to watch horrific things happen that he couldn’t stop without blowing his cover.
It had taken years of moving through this organization like a slow poison, working his way upward through the ranks, making himself indispensable, making himself dangerous, until he had finally gotten close enough to meet the real power at the center of it all.
Obscura held it all—the trafficking routes, the poaching operations, the money that moved through a dozen legitimate businesses like blood through veins.
The organization was a ghost. A shadow Mateo had been chasing through years of darkness, and now—now—he was closer than anyone in his organization had ever been.
And then she walks into my life with her thirst for research, her sincere compassion, her love of nature, and her complete inability to look away from anyone or anything that needs protecting.
He looked down at her sleeping face.
Can I walk away from this op? The question assaulted him with a quiet brutality. After everything—after years of your life, after what it’s cost you, after the people you couldn't save along the way—can you really walk away from the Snake's Head to save one woman?
He knew what his handlers would say. He knew what the mission parameters said.
He knew what the cold arithmetic of intelligence work said about acceptable losses and operational priorities and the greater good, that obscene phrase, the one that had been used to justify more darkness than he could stomach thinking about.
One woman, the mission said. Weigh it.
He looked at the salt track on her temple and felt something in him refuse the calculation entirely.
But Obscura was real, just as the threat his organization posed was real.
The hundreds of caches of illegal weapons they smuggled were real.
The people this organization had already swallowed, the ones he'd seen moved through these camps like cargo, they were real, too.
Walking away now didn't just mean losing the mission.
It meant every one of those years of suffering and sacrifice had purchased nothing.
It meant the next woman on the next beach would have no one coming.
And Obscura stays a shadow if I give up now. The thought was its own kind of torment. I have never been this close to it before. Nobody has.
He pressed his lips briefly to the top of her head—the lightest possible pressure, more breath than contact—and stared at the grey rectangle of the window while the jungle made its noise and the camp stirred in its sleep. The question turned over and over in his mind.
Figure it out, he told himself. I have to find a way to do both. There is no version of this where I choose between her and the op.
He heard José's approach before the knock sounded—the weight of the man's hefty footfall, his unhurried, deliberate tread. Mateo's body went rigid instantly, every muscle snapping to attention, his teeth clenching against the response that wanted to come out of his throat.
The knock wasn't polite. It slammed against the door like a sledgehammer. A demand dressed as a courtesy. Get up and get out.
Gabriella stirred slightly against him, her brow furrowing, a small, soft sound leaving her lips as sleep threatened to break. The sound of it tightened something in his chest.
“No,” he murmured under his breath, his hand moving through her hair in a slow, deliberate pass, fingers light against the dark strands still tangled from the night. “Go back to sleep.”
She settled again, a soft exhale, her body trusting his voice in a way that made him both grateful and wrecked.
He eased himself out from beneath her with the careful, practiced stillness of a man who had learned patience in environments far less forgiving than this, replacing his warmth with the rough blanket and watching until she stilled completely before he moved.
He grabbed his clothes from the floor, dragging it on as he crossed the small space—four steps, the floorboards barely sighing beneath his weight—and yanked the door open enough to step outside, pulling it shut behind him as if to keep two worlds from colliding.
The morning air hit him like a wall—thick and wet and green, the jungle exhaling its night breath in great humid waves.
The sky above the canopy was the color of a bruise healing, deep purple bleeding into grey bleeding into the first reluctant gold at the eastern edge of the tree line.
The camp smelled of cold fire ash and damp canvas and the stale residue of last night's drinking, empty bottles lined up along a low wall like a small, pathetic monument.
A rooster called somewhere beyond the nearest building, its voice cracked and uncertain in the pre-dawn.
José stood outside, arms crossed over his chest, his posture the studied ease of a man who wanted you to know he wasn't threatened. He was dressed already—dark trousers, a loose shirt, the collar open—and his dark eyes moved over Mateo with an assessment lacking all warmth.
He spoke in Spanish, his voice pitched low, clipped at the edges, the way it always got when he was containing his anger. “What the fuck happened?”
Here we go.
Tired and still pent up with everything the night had deposited in him—the rage, the relief, the images he couldn't stop replaying, her face when he had found her—Mateo lashed out.
“Your fucking daughter happened,” he snapped, stepping closer, closing the distance between them. “She sent men to rape the woman.”
A slow, dismissive roll of José's shoulders—that particular gesture, the one Mateo had watched him use on men whose suffering he considered beneath his attention.
“As if that's ever been an issue?” His tone was flat, almost bored.
“The men who are left behind get bored. Was that a reason to break their bones?”
There it is. The thing Mateo had always known was there, beneath the civilized surface of the man, the part that had always made his skin feel too tight when they occupied the same space.
Hearing those words said out loud—as if that's ever been an issue—reminded him of everything he was trying so hard to forget.
Every name. Every face. Everything he had witnessed and catalogued and carried without being able to stop.