CHAPTER 4 MATEO #2
He had been gifted with her presence, her laughter, her joy these last several months—the specific joy of a woman who loved her work, loved the animals she studied, and loved the world that contained them with a completeness. She possessed an infectious wonder at the natural world around her.
Mateo recalled the first moment he’d seen her with vivid clarity.
The scientists had arrived on a sunny afternoon, the air thick with the wet heat of the coast, the kind that pressed against exposed skin and made simply moving about a chore.
He had just finished a covert check-in with headquarters—a terse, frustrating exchange in which his concerns had been acknowledged and dismissed in the same breath, his handler’s voice carrying a specific flatness of somebody reading from a script of pre-determined responses.
He had been in a black mood. The linen of his trousers bit into the backs of his thighs where they met the hard edge of the dining chair, his coffee going lukewarm in the pressing heat as he watched the scientists filter through the door.
Recently graduated scientists, their faces filled with eager excitement, filed in one after another. He watched them with a professional neutrality, assigning threat levels and relevance ratings with an automated efficiency. It was a practice that had become as natural as breathing for him.
He had almost dismissed the group entirely when she stepped in last.
Dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail—not styled, not arranged, simply pulled back out of the way by a woman who had more important things to attend to.
Her white t-shirt and beige khaki shorts were the clothes of someone who had packed for comfort and function, not trends or fashion.
However, her simple clothes did nothing to conceal the arresting quality of her—the beauty of her curves, yes, but more than that was the way she carried herself, the way her attention moved across the room with a brightness that had nothing performative in it.
She glanced around the room, a wide smile breaking across her delicate pink lips, and her gaze had found his.
Time stopped.
He had never before believed in fate. He was a man who had built his entire professional existence on the premise that outcomes were the product of planning and execution rather than any external arrangement of the universe.
And yet, at that specific moment, with those enchanting eyes finding his across a humid dining room, he felt the absolute, irrational conviction that meeting her was not an accident.
Her eyes were a deep forest green, the saturated green of old growth jungles, of places where the canopy was dense enough to shut out sunlight. And her smile? He would crawl through heaven and hell to see that smile. His breath had hitched and he nearly dropped his cup of coffee.
When the group convened later that same evening, she gave him a timid “Hello.” It was quiet, uncertain, and directed at his feet instead of his face, yet it had locked into place a deep-seated desire to protect and shield this woman.
The protective instinct arrived fully formed, unshakable, and absolute.
The following weeks only cinched that he was hers.
Her passion for wildlife, her humor, her drive to do good with her work—she was everything he hoped to be, and couldn’t be.
She made him wish to be a better version of himself, a version that could only have existed before this assignment, before this alias, before the long commitment to darkness.
There is irony in that, I suppose.
He’d thought back to his training, to the officer who had screamed above the cadets as they jogged through fog-hazed woods in the predawn dark, his voice carrying the absolute conviction of a man who had never once doubted his own beliefs. “The world needs bad men to keep evil out.”
Mateo was a necessary evil. He had accepted that designation, lived within it, and done what it required.
Yet as the weeks continued into months, all he wanted was to live a normal life with her. The simplicity of that desire seemed almost absurd. The life that might be possible if he could get through this one last assignment intact.
I am hers and she is mine. He knew it with the same bone-deep certainty he brought to everything else he did, a degree of assured confidence that didn’t require evidence or analysis.
Whatever else was true about him, he’d known this to be true—he would do this last assignment, ensure she stayed safe, and then whisk her as far away from Nox and Obscura as possible.
At least, that had been his initial plan.
Right now, she was covered in sand and soaked from their trek through the jungle.
Her hair was plastered to her neck and cheeks, the salt of the ocean mixing with the sweat on her skin.
He ran a hand through his own damp hair as if he could smooth the jagged edges of his lies away—a useless gesture, he knew it was, but he did it anyway.
“I didn’t pretend,” he said. The words came out rough, scraped from somewhere below the prepared responses he’d been assembling since she first started asking questions.
“Not entirely. Some things … became real.” He hated the way it sounded even as he said it—the inadequacy of it, the way it admitted the truth and the deception simultaneously without fully honoring either.
“If I hadn’t been there tonight, Gabriella, you’d be dead or in a shipping crate bound for somewhere far worse than here. ”
A hollow silence settled between them. The boat rocked in a slow, patient rhythm on the dark water, and the jungle breathed its indifferent breath from the shore. The space between them was composed entirely of guilt and fear and the wreckage of a trust he had both built and broken.
“So what now?” she whispered, her voice small and sharp, a combination of exhaustion and fury. “You kidnap me? Turn me over to your … whatever they are?”
He met her eyes and, for the first time since he’d taken her through the trees, allowed himself a thin, ragged exhale—a breath he’d been holding since the first shot had been fired. “No.” The syllable was flat and absolute, meant to steady both her and himself. “You stay with me.”
Because I am the lesser of the evils. Because the alternative to me would be the smugglers of Nox or the foot soldiers of Obscura, and I have seen what they do.
His jaw tightened against the rest of it, the part he wouldn’t say aloud. “You stay with me until this last transaction happens, then they won’t have a reason to kill you.”
And in the meantime, hopefully the task force can stop what they’re shipping.
She scoffed, the sound carrying the full weight of her disgust in a single exhale. “And we just sit idly by while those sea turtles get killed?”
Not if I can stop it, he nearly said.
He was trained for this. He had been built, over years and at considerable personal cost, to stay embedded as long as the assignment required.
He’d befriended people he knew he would eventually betray.
Infiltrating the poachers had been professionally unremarkable.
Becoming an official member of the smuggling ring had even been easy.
Climbing the ranks through Nox to be put in charge of the entire smuggling operation, however, had taken a level of tenacity and ruthlessness that Mateo would never be proud of.
But he’d done it. Nox was just a tool. A means to an end.
But he knew that, for her, the turtles meant the world. Which meant they meant the world to him as well.