CHAPTER 4 MATEO
MATEO
Lying to her was going to be the death of him.
The few months he had spent with Gabriella had been the highlight of this whole fucked up fiasco—the single thread of something real woven through three years of carefully constructed fiction.
He had dreaded this day, knowing he would have to pull that thread and watch everything unravel.
Mateo stared into her impossibly wide green eyes.
The moonlight caught the wet tear-tracks on her cheeks, the salty drops sparkling against her skin.
He felt the weight of every false thing he’d ever said to her press against his ribs like a tumor, three years of deliberate dishonesty metastasizing.
He had been undercover all this time on behalf of a multi-agency task force: DEA, Interpol, and a contact from US Special Operations that refused to reveal its name.
He’d managed to carve out a place for himself within the smuggling ring, Nox, and had even worked his way to the very head of the operation.
However, Nox was just a smaller branch of a far larger—and far more dangerous—criminal syndicate.
Obscura.
Infiltrating Obscura had been the task force’s real goal.
Three years of living as a man who didn’t exist. Three years of telling stories from a fabricated history and living inside the lie so completely that there were mornings he woke and had to spend a deliberate moment remembering which version of himself was real.
I know which one is real. Mateo looked at Gabriella’s face. I am standing right here, wanting to take her pain away … and I’m unable to do so.
Obscura was involved in more than smuggling and contraband—it was a hydra whose heads he’d kept finding in unexpected places, whose reach extended into territories and institutions his handlers had told him were clean.
When he voiced his concerns to the task force and tried to pull out early, citing the scope of what he was actually looking at, he’d been reprimanded and told to stay the course.
He’d been told that if this assignment succeeded, he would be set to retire.
They’d promised he’d be free to build a life that he had put on hold.
The carrot was the same one the task force always dangled. “After this assignment,” he’d been told, “you’re done. Then you’re free to live however you want, wherever you want. But only after this.” And Mateo had been trained well enough, or broken down enough, to keep reaching for that carrot.
“After this,” they’d said. It had been three years’ worth of “After this.”
For months, the intel threads had woven together with a cleanness that felt almost surgical—every intercepted shipment logged, every burner phone tracked to its source, every late-night rendezvous mapped against the growing picture of Obscura’s architecture.
The task force was supposed to move in tonight, to seize his Nox smugglers and poachers, take over their routes, and bring them a decisive step closer to Obscura.
That had been their goal—infiltrate Nox, build their case from the inside, find the thread that connected the smuggling ring to the larger body of Obscura, and follow that thread until they were able to pull down the largest crime syndicate that ran from the top of Maine to the bottom of Chile.
Tonight was supposed to be the end of this operation … the end of my assignment.
Somewhere along the way, Obscura had changed plans.
The syndicate had pushed one last, desperate shipment—the kind of move an organization made when it believed it was being watched and wanted to move its most valuable assets before the door closed.
And somehow the scientists, the conservation group Gabriella worked with, had been folded into the logistics, because it was her data that spooked the shot-callers within Obscura.
Her careful, meticulous, entirely well-intentioned field observations, her nesting site maps and migration route data, had drawn a line directly through the geography of Obscura’s operations, and the syndicate had noticed.
If Mateo had any inkling this was how it would go down, he would have broken protocol sooner to keep her and the other scientists safe.
I should have seen this coming. The self-indictment arrived with a flat precision. I knew they were accelerating their timeline. I should have known this would happen.
But no. Somehow, information had leaked.
Somewhere in the chain between his handler and the task force’s operational command, a name or a date or a location had escaped into the wrong hands, and Obscura had moved before the net closed around Nox.
People who shouldn’t have been involved had been placed in the crosshairs, and now all of those researchers and scientists—thankfully except Gabriella—were dead.
And their deaths will haunt my dreams … as so many others do.
He carried so many deaths already. There was an accumulated weight from every person he hadn’t been able to save, every death this assignment had required him to either allow or cause, all in order to keep his cover.
He’d been forced to make choices no moral man should ever have to make.
He added tonight’s faces to that weight and felt it settle upon him like a millstone about his neck, a reminder he would carry for the remainder of his days … however many he had left.
Gabriella’s breath came fast and shallow, her chest working in an uneven rhythm caught between controlled breathing and the edge of hyperventilation, pulling him back into the moment and out of the dark interior of his own accounting.
He stared into her emerald eyes, wishing things could have been different, could still be different—wishing with a fervent, useless intensity—as her words rang out across the dark water between them.
“So everything … the project, our friendship, how you treated me … just a lie?” Her voice broke on the last word, the fracture audible and precise, and something inside of him cracked.
His jaw tightened and his hands itched for the gun hidden at his back. Not to aim it at her—never her—but to turn around, run back through the trees, back to the other beach, back to the men who’d done this, save whoever he still could, and avenge whoever he couldn’t.
I know I can’t save them. It’s too late. Besides, his assignment was bigger than his own righteous fury at the cards he’d been dealt.
But Mateo needed Gabriella to stay with him, stay functional, stay alive. That required her to trust him and follow his guidance. He took a breath and said, “Don’t make this about—”
“It is about that!” she shot back, the sting of betrayal raw and immediate in her voice, the heat of it cutting through the humid night air.
More tears spilled down her cheeks, and she wiped at them with the back of her bound wrists—an angry, impatient gesture, as if the tears were a further indignity she refused to accept.
A look of exasperation crossed her face, directed inward, and he felt the ache of watching someone try to hold themselves together.
Most people in her position would have withdrawn. Would have gone silent and inward, collapsed into shock, stopped asking questions and started simply enduring. He had seen it before—the particular shutdown of a person whose world had moved too fast for them to track.
But this woman, despite what she felt about herself, was spitfire and hell when she chose to be. She was still here, still demanding answers, still refusing to accept the version of events that required her to stop fighting. He admired it—admired her—with a ferocity.
“You pretended to care, Mateo. I trusted you. We watched turtles for months together! You told me about your family.”
Lies. All of it had been lies—the family, the history, the carefully constructed backstory that the task force had fabricated from fragments of dead files and plausible geography.
He had no kin. He was an orphan who had enlisted late in his life, choosing the structure of service and purpose when given little to no other alternatives.
He served with distinction until the right person noticed the way he moved through difficult situations and how he handled himself …
then he’d been offered a different kind of service entirely.
For the greater good, the task force’s recruiter had told him.
He had been young enough, and purposeless enough, to believe that the greater good was a sufficient reason for the things the task force would ask him to do.
Under the watchful eye of those around him, he had carefully constructed his alias, brick by deliberate brick, and lived inside it until it fit like skin.
But it was breaking him, had been breaking him for months, the cracks showing in subtle ways he was grateful only he could see.
As he stood in front of the one person who had come to matter to him just as much, and possibly more, than this assignment’s successful outcome, he felt those cracks widening, the bricks breaking.
This is the cost of seeing this through, he told himself. I knew there would be a cost.
When Mateo heard he would be helping a group of scientists, he had filed it as an operational detail—cover, context, a reason for his presence on the coastline that wouldn’t require explanation.
He never thought he would meet the woman he wanted to build a future with.
He hadn’t even thought himself capable of wanting that.
Death followed his footsteps with a persistent doggedness, and he had made his peace with that long ago.
Part of him believed that even if he did survive this assignment, he still wouldn’t live long enough for any of the things a normal life contained.
And yet …