Mateo #2
José didn't flinch. Didn't react the way a father should, or the way any man with something still human in him would.
Hot white heat coiled within Mateo, rising from somewhere below his sternum, the fury of a man who had disciplined himself into stillness for so long that when something finally breaks through the control, it arrives with the force of everything that was held back before it.
“Yes. It was. It was more than enough of a reason to have them disciplined,” he said, his voice dropping to something low and lethal, the register he used when he needed a man to understand that the next words he heard from Mateo might be the last. “Or do you not enforce discipline within our camp any longer?”
“You forget who you're speaking to,” José warned, his tone dropping to match the easy surface of him hardening underneath.
“No.” The word came out immediately, a blade rather than a refusal. “I remember exactly who you are.” Mateo held his ground, his posture loose and still and radiating a certainty that he was not afraid of what happened next. “But I am the one in charge of Nox, remember?”
The morning pressed in around them—the rooster calling again, a bird beginning its first tentative notes somewhere in the canopy, the faint metallic clink of someone in the camp moving equipment—and none of it touched the space between the two men, which had its own climate entirely.
José's gaze shifted briefly towards the hut behind Mateo, towards the closed door, towards Gabriella.
Don't. Mateo's body angled subtly, a small, precise shift of his weight that placed him more fully between José and the line of sight to the door. Don't look at her. Don't think about her. She is not part of this conversation.
“She's causing problems,” José said, his eyes returning to Mateo's face with a slow deliberateness. “Distracting you. Making the men restless.”
“She's under my protection,” Mateo countered. “And your daughter needs to learn her place.”
José's brow lifted slightly, a fraction of movement that carried a great deal of weight. “Protection?” He repeated the word as if it tasted strange. “Since when do you protect anything that isn't part of Nox?”
Since her. Since a woman in khaki trousers stood ankle-deep in Caribbean surf, counting sea turtle heads with the kind of child-like joy that made him remember what it felt like to actually care about something. Since she'd looked at him with complete, unguarded trust, and he'd let her.
Mateo didn't answer. There was no answer that didn't reveal too much—too much of what was happening inside him, too much of the fracture lines running through the wall he'd spent years building.
That was the issue with their mashup group.
Everyone was in Nox for their own reasons and ensuring they worked well together had always been a calculated dance to ensure animosity did not build.
It was why Mateo agreed to Sally’s affections, to the men taking breaks to go into town and enjoy brief respites of liquor and women.
But doing so meant risks. People slipping secrets when drunk or wanting more to support the child they had back home.
José studied him for a long moment, the calculation behind his eyes visible only to someone who had spent enough time watching them work. Something darker settled into his expression as realization gathered itself—piece by piece, unhurried, the way a man disassembles a gun he’s cleaning.
“You're getting attached,” José said quietly.
The words landed with the precision of a sniper. It was an accusation that would bury him if he admitted it, and a lie he couldn't sell if he denied it, so instead he stayed silent. It was damnation either way—the silence confirming what the denial couldn't convincingly contradict.
He let the spoken words hit the air between them, and Mateo let them sit there, letting them exist without reacting to them, because reacting was what José wanted—a crack in the surface, something to get purchase on.
You already know, Mateo thought, watching José's face. You've known for a while. You're just deciding what to do about it.
José exhaled slowly through his nose, shaking his head with the measured disappointment of a man who expected more from his tools. “That makes you weak,” he said. “My daughter would make you strong, and you trade her for a slut?”
Mateo leaned in slightly, a small, controlled movement, and let his voice drop to something that lived below anger, in the place where things were simply decided. “Don’t you ever call her that again.” The unspoken threat remained steady between them.
“Why? Because you love her? She’s going to be your wife?” He mocked.
If she’ll let me, he thought and it must have shown on his face when José gave him a pitied look.
“No.” Mateo recovered, pulling the conversation back to the men.
“What happened last night? That's weakness from broken men. Ever since I took over, I made sure my team does not rape or pillage.” He held José's gaze for one flat, silent beat, then turned his head and spat on the ground between them—a deliberate gesture, an old language both men spoke fluently.
“But I know what you do when I'm not around, José.”
The morning light was coming in properly now, pale gold filtering through the canopy in long diagonal shafts, catching the ash from the dead fire and the slow drift of mist rising off the wet ground.
A flicker of irritation crossed José's face—brief, quickly contained, but real.
The first real thing the man had shown since the conversation began.
“Control our camp,” Mateo continued, his voice level, the words carrying their own weight without needing to be raised. “Or I will make an example out of you José, for failing in your Second in Command duties.”
For the first time, José's posture changed—in the small, structural way of a load-bearing wall registering stress. Enough to signal that this was no longer casual territory, that they had moved from the rehearsed map of their dynamic into somewhere neither of them had explicit coordinates for.
Good. Let him recalibrate. Let him wonder.
“You forget,” José said softly, and the softness of it was the most dangerous thing about it. “Everything you have here … comes from me.”
Mateo held his gaze without blinking. “Then maybe it's time that changes and I stand on my own two feet … alone.”
He wondered if José was going to be a problem. If that were true, then the solution was evident. José would have to go, and Mateo would simply absorb his group.
“Be careful, Mateo,” José said, his voice going smooth again—that polished, unhurried surface returning like water sliding over a stone.
“Men who forget their place don't last long.” He held eye contact for one final, deliberate beat, then turned and walked away, his footsteps heavy on the packed earth, disappearing into the gold-and-shadow morning without looking back.
Mateo stood at the door and watched him go.
The jungle breathed around him, indifferent and enormous, the canopy dripping last night's rain in slow, irregular percussion against the broad leaves below.
Somewhere in the camp, men were beginning to move—the scrape of a boot, the low exchange of morning voices, the metallic complaint of equipment being shifted.
I am so close, he thought again, the words settling back into their orbit around everything else. He turned and looked at the closed door behind him, at the thin line of warm light showing beneath it where the new day was getting in.
And so is she.
He pressed his palm flat against the door—one moment, just one—then pushed it open and went back inside.