Gabriella #3
“My point is you've got two options.” Gil crossed his arms, biceps pressing against the fabric of his shirt. “Surrender her now, walk away clean. Or keep running and get caught in the bloodbath when they catch up.”
Mateo didn’t falter from his position. His arm and aim steady. “Not happening.”
“Didn't think so.” Gil's smile widened, genuine and cold in equal measure, as if he found predictability professionally satisfying. “You always were stubborn. That's going to get you killed.”
That raised Mateo’s guard up instantly. He took on a protective stance with Gabriella, cocking his gun ready. “How do you know me?”
“I know everyone worth knowing in this business. I read your file. I know your dirty secrets Mateo.” He glanced at Gabriella again, and this time—just for a fraction of a second—what moved through those winter-blue eyes was something that looked almost like pity.
“Word of advice, sweetheart. Your boyfriend here?
He's good. Maybe even great. But he's not good enough to outrun what's coming.”
Sweetheart. The word landed with a pat-on-the-head condescension that made her back teeth press together.
She was not going to respond to that. She was going to stand here and breathe and not say a single word about what she thought of being called sweetheart by a man who had described half the American intelligence apparatus closing in on her location.
“Thanks for the warning,” Mateo said flatly. His voice held no inflection. The words fell, dull and heavy, carrying nothing. But Gabriella saw the shift in his body. She had watched him intimately the last few days and was starting to read him better than she wanted to admit.
“Almost.” Gil stepped closer—a single, deliberate stride that closed the gap between them with a casual authority.
Mateo's hand tightened on his gun, the knuckles whitening, but the massive man didn't attack.
He leaned in, dropping his voice to gravel.
“Whatever you're planning with José—exposing the Obscura or whatever noble bullshit you're selling yourself—it won't work.
You're outmatched. Outgunned. And your luck expires real soon.”
Obscura. Gabriella caught the phrase and held it.
He straightened to his full, considerable height, looked at each of them in turn—a final assessment, comprehensive and unhurried—then nodded once.
And turned. And melted back into the jungle with a silence so complete, so absolute, so wrong for a man of his size, that it raised every hair on her arms.
The market carried on around the space where he had been, indifferent and unchanged, as if a six-foot-three wall of deliberate menace had not just stepped out of the vegetation, rearranged her understanding of her situation, and disappeared again.
Gabriella stared at the gap in the tree line, her pulse hammering against her sternum in hard, irregular blows. “What the hell was that?”
“A complication,” Mateo said, the word clipped. He grabbed her arm, his grip firm and purposeful, and pulled her towards the car where he shoved her in it—away from the market, away from the tree line, away from open ground. “We need to move. Now.”
“Mateo—”
“Later. We talk later.”
They navigated the town's edge in tense silence, driving through back streets where the buildings pressed close on either side and the shadows between them were thick, avoiding the main roads and their open sightlines.
Gabriella's mind moved with the particular velocity of a brain that had been given too many variables and not enough constants.
Italian Mafia. Someone important wants you alive.
None of it assembled into coherence. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time—that was the version of events she had been operating from, the one that made the most sense of her situation, the one that let her maintain the belief this was fundamentally a rescue situation she was enduring rather than a targeting situation she had been selected for.
Unless this was bigger than she'd realized.
The thought arrived and made her stomach contract. She pressed her palm flat against it and breathed through it.
They reached a cluster of buildings deeper into town—still on the outskirts, still close enough to the jungle's edge that the smell of it reached them, that particular damp green exhalation of the rainforest asserting itself even here, even over the dust and diesel of the town.
As they exited the vehicle, she saw Mateo scanning the horizon.
“He’s not there,” she said gently, not sure why she felt like it was true.
He glanced back at her. “That man Gil may not be, but there could be others.” Mateo pushed open a door to one of the buildings—wooden, warped, the paint long since surrendered to the climate—and ushered her inside.
The interior announced itself immediately and without apology.
The smell hit her first—mildew blooming in the walls, deep and organic; beneath it, acrid smoke from some previous occupation layering over damp decay; beneath that, the sweetish rot of something that had been left too long in the heat.
Water stains bloomed across the peeling walls in great pale maps of past damage, their edges ringed and re-ringed by seasons of wet and dry, blossoming outward in patterns that looked, in her present state of mind, disturbingly like something spreading.
Floorboards creaked beneath their feet, gritty with years of accumulated dust and tracked-in dirt, the boards warped and soft in the corners.
Minimal furniture—a cot pushed against the far wall, its rough blanket crumpled to imply someone had slept in too many places like this to bother pretending it was otherwise; a table scarred and ancient, its surface a biography of previous use written in knife cuts and cigarette burns and ring stains; two chairs that looked as though they were engaged in a slow, private competition to see which would collapse first. A single window overlooked the street, its curtain a rectangle of faded fabric that filtered the afternoon light to something thin and jaundiced.
The air inside was stale. Suffocating. The air of a room that had been holding its breath until they stepped inside.
“Where are we?” She rubbed her arms as if cold, but it was so much more than that.
“Safe house,” Mateo said, moving to the window. “José's network maintains them across Central America.”
Safe house. She looked around the mildew-bloomed walls, the collapsing chairs, the cot with its rough blanket.
“Safe for who? We are more likely to catch aspergillosis.”
He didn't answer. Moved to the window, peered through a gap in the curtain at the street beyond, his body angled to keep his profile away from the glass.
The non-answer landed in her chest alongside everything else she'd been accumulating since the market.
She felt the anger arrive before she reached for it—the clean, clarifying heat of it cutting through the fear and the confusion and the residue of last night's intimacy, which had been sitting in her chest all morning like an open question.
“Mateo?” she pressed. Still silence. “Are you going to tell me what's happening? Who that was? Why the US military is hunting me?”
“I don't know unless we believe in what the man, Gil said …” Mateo's voice remained flat, and controlled. “Could be misinformation. Could be someone trying to spook us.”
Gabriella's anger erupted. “Could be you're lying,” she snapped.
He turned.
The look on his face stopped her breath in her chest, arresting it mid-inhale.
He was frayed—the composure he wore with such complete ease showing its seams at last, the lack of sleep and the weight of everything he was carrying finally surfacing in the lines of his face, in the rawness around his eyes.
He looked wounded in a way that had nothing to do with the split lip that was still healing, and she hated herself for the fraction of a second she wanted to reach for him.
“You think I'd lie about this?”
“I don't know! Would you?” Her voice cracked down the middle, the fracture audible, and she didn't try to hide it. “You dragged me through hell. And now someone shows up talking about bloodbaths and the government, and you won't give me a straight answer about anything!”
“I'm trying to keep you alive—”
“Are you?” She stepped closer, closing the distance between them to where she felt his heat despite the pressing humidity outside. Her fists clenching at her sides, the anger a clean, necessary thing. “Or are you keeping me for something else? As leverage? Bait?”
His face went hard. Closed off, like a shutter coming down. “That's what you think of me? And what about you? You told me about your family, specifically your Italian cousins. You failed to mention they were part of the mafia.”
“But they aren’t!” she shot back at him then faltered, looking down at the floor. “At least, I don’t think so.” Her head spun with all of the conspiracy theories, and she tried to even her breathing.
He scoffed at that, which pulled her attention up to him. She lifted her lashes up to him, finding him watching her with a hard look. “I know you think they aren’t but it does seem a little suspicious, don’t you?”
I don't know what I think. That was the honest answer.
She didn't know what she thought because every time she assembled a picture of this situation, it had Mateo in a different position—protector, captor, operative, lover—and she couldn't reconcile the versions into a single coherent man.
She was a scientist. She needed coherent data to form a coherent theory.
She sighed and verbalized her thoughts. “I honestly don't know what to think anymore.”
Silence between them was brittle and sharp as broken glass. Outside, the voices of locals drifted past the curtained window—a woman calling a name, the close domestic sound of it, the normalcy of it landing in the cramped room like something from another planet.