Beatle
The village breathed around them, humid and close, the air thick with the smell of frying plantains, diesel exhaust, and something floral—a bloom that grew wild along the crumbling stucco walls, purple and insistent, spilling over the edges of window boxes in complete indifference to the world beneath it.
The midday sun pressed down on the crown of his head like a hand, relentless, baking the packed dirt of the market lane until it was pale and cracked.
Vendors called out in rapid Spanish, their voices layering over the tinny radio music bleeding from a shopfront to his left.
A dog nosed through the gutter. Children darted between adult legs, shrieking with the joy of kids who had no idea what the world was capable of.
Man at the fruit stand. Been there too long. Darting eyes.
Pickup truck. Grey. Cracked left headlight. Second pass in ten minutes.
Conversations dipping—not stopping, just softening—whenever we walk too close.
Tex's intel hadn't been vague. He had picked up another distress call with coordinates and had spent nights searching the dark web for more information on the missing woman.
Eventually, he found a trail. There was going to be an exchange soon, and it had listed a potential asset that needed transporting.
Everyone knew what that meant—some type of trafficking or movement, human cargo wrapped in the language of logistics.
Their assumption had been that it had to do with the missing marine biologist.
Gabriella Valentino. Forty years old. Brown hair, green eyes. Disappeared from Tortuguero National Park. No ransom demand. No body. Yet.
The file had sat in his head ever since then and somehow Casey had picked up on it despite his best intentions.
He could still recall the way her eyes had pleaded with him when the news of the missing biologist went live.
He'd been talking with her about something—dinner, he thought, something mundane and domestic and perfectly ordinary—when he'd caught the headline scrolling across the television screen behind her head.
His hand had gone slack around the glass he was holding.
She'd caught it. She always caught it. That was the thing about Casey—she watched him with the same intensity he watched the world around him.
So he'd fessed up, laid it out in the flat, careful language he used when he needed her to understand something serious, and watched her face move through half a dozen emotions in the span of ten seconds.
Casey had seen the headline and gone still in that distinct way she had—the way that meant she was back there, back in the dark place, the dank hole, the overwhelming stench of rot around her.
When she'd looked at him, eyes wet with unshed tears, and whispered that another biologist might be in trouble just as she had been—possibly the same way—there hadn't been a choice.
There is never a choice. Not when it comes to her.
Even as they boarded the plane together with Tex’s intel providing support, Beatle knew this was potentially a suicide mission. How could he not? He was here without backup, without clearance, and with the one person he would burn the entire world down to protect at his side.
What kind of man brings his wife to a suicide mission?
The kind who couldn't say no to her. The kind who had looked into those eyes—wet and wide and begging him without a single word—and found that every tactical argument he'd assembled dissolved on contact.
His jaw ticked as he adjusted his grip on her hand, subtly shifting her to the inside of the walkway and away from the street, away from the grey pickup truck and the man at the fruit stand and every other variable he hadn't neutralized yet.
His free hand brushed the hem of his shirt, checking the weight of the concealed weapon resting at his back—solid, warm from his body heat, exactly where it should be.
Good.
Unsanctioned ops always came with consequences.
He'd signed enough after-action reports to know exactly what the language looked like when command wanted someone to carry the weight of a bad call.
He'd written a few of those reports himself.
He knew which words they used when they wanted to bury something quietly.
Still, Beatle didn't like variables he couldn't eliminate.
Inside, beneath the easy tourist smile and the loose shoulders and the unhurried pace, he was mapping exits, counting bodies, calculating angles and distances and how fast he could turn this sun-soaked market lane into a battlefield if he had to.
The wooden stall frames would offer minimal cover.
The alley to the north was his best egress point.
The vendor with the machete for cutting coconuts was seven feet to his right and posed a secondary threat only if things deteriorated badly.
Don't let things deteriorate badly, he heard Tex say with a chuckle.
He exhaled through his nose, slow and controlled, forcing his shoulders to stay loose, his expression to stay neutral. To anyone watching, he was a man on vacation with his wife. Sunburned. Unhurried. Somewhere between relaxed and bored.
Beside him, she tugged on his hand and broke through his thoughts like sunlight through storm clouds—sudden, warm, welcome, and undeniably her. “Oh, look at the food over there! I am starving!”
A slow smile curved his mouth, easy and genuine and exactly the kind of expression that disarmed suspicion, because it was real. She always made it real.
“Oh, yeah?” He let his tone go light as she led him towards a cluster of food stalls, their colorful canvas awnings snapping in the faint breeze that rolled in off the water. “Thought you said you wanted to try that place back there?”
“I changed my mind,” she shot back, already dragging him forward, her sandals slapping cheerfully against the packed dirt. “This smells better, and it has one huge advantage.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s right here, right now.” She looked at him with her dazzling smile. “Feed me?”
He huffed a quiet laugh, letting himself be pulled, letting her anchor him to the performance of being a normal couple even as his gaze continued its steady, methodical sweep of everything around them.
God, I love her.
He also loved that she could play the part so well.
Loved that even now, walking into something that could go sideways fast, she still reached for the ordinary—for food and laughter and the simple, stubborn insistence on being alive rather than merely surviving.
It was the thing about her that had broken him open the first time and never quite let him close back up.
The food stalls, also known as fondas, clustered together in a loose horseshoe, the smell of them hitting him in a warm, complicated wave—grilled meat and char and cumin and something sweet, sugarcane maybe, caramelising somewhere nearby.
The heat radiating off the grills added another layer to the already punishing afternoon, shimmering visibly in the air above the coals.
A woman behind the nearest stall, small and round-faced with silver threaded through her dark braid, called out to them in cheerful Spanish and gestured at the skewers lined up along the grill like soldiers.
But as they approached, Beatle's focus sharpened to a point.
Two men stood just beyond the vendor, shoulders angled inward, voices pitched below the ambient noise of the market.
He took in their ordinary clothes—too clean and deliberate, too layered for the heat—and the bulge of the concealed weapons on their hips.
They stood with the stillness that men held when they were waiting for something. They weren't here for the food.
Threat level: moderate. Monitoring.
His grip on her hand tightened, just a fraction, with two quick pulses—a private language, a signal she knew without translation.
“Stay close,” he murmured under his breath, the smile never leaving his face, his eyes never leaving the two men beyond the stall.
Her fingers squeezed back. “I always do.”
I know, he thought. Perhaps too close. That's what scares me. He wondered again, why he had thought this was a good idea.
They ordered—Casey with animated enthusiasm, pointing at things and asking questions in halting Spanish that made the silver-haired vendor laugh—and carried their food to a nearby table, a rough-hewn wooden thing with a bench on each side. The food was good. He barely tasted it.
He was watching the approach before most men would have registered movement at all.
A tall, broad-shouldered, smiling blonde man cut through the market crowd.
He strolled with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life needed to wonder if he was the most dangerous person in a given place.
Dressed in khakis and a dri-fit polo the color of dried blood, he moved with the economy of a man whose body was a tool he kept in excellent condition—not showy, not aggressive, just profoundly, quietly capable.
Approaching six-foot-three, well over two hundred pounds of lean, functional muscle that had been put to use in ways that had nothing to do with a gym.
The man’s piercing blue eyes met Beatle's gaze across the crowded market lane. His smile widened, and he nodded.
Then he strode towards Beatle and Casey.
Unknown. Unvetted. Armed—left hip, compact frame, print visible under the polo. Trained—look at the way he moves through a crowd. Threat level: unknown.
“Casey,” Beatle’s voice dropped to the register she knew to take seriously. “I don't recognize this man. Don't run unless I give the signal.”
He heard her breath quicken beside him and felt the slight shift in her weight.
He knew she would be watching his hands.
A simple nod and wave of his fingers and she would bolt.
That had been the one thing he had forced her to agree on before they had boarded that flight.
“Okay. Want me to throw the food at his face?”